– The purpose of this paper is to seek reasons for some videos going viral over YouTube (a type of social media platform).
– Using YouTube APIs (Application Programming Interface) and Webometrics analyst tool, the authors collected data on about 100 all-time-most-viewed YouTube videos and information about the users associated with the videos. The authors constructed and tested an empirical model to understand the relationship among users’ social and non-social capital (e.g. User Age, Gender, View Count, Subscriber, Join Date, Total Videos Posted), video characteristics (Post Date, Duration, and Video Category), external network capital (in-links and hit counts), and Virality (Likes, Dislikes, Favorite Count, View Count, and Comment Count). Partial least square and Webometric analysis was used to explore the association among the constructs.
– Among other findings, the results showed that popularity of the videos was not only the function of YouTube system per se, but that network dynamics (e.g. in-links and hits counts) and offline social capital (e.g. fan base and fame) play crucial roles in the viral phenomenon, particularly view count.
– The authors for the first time constructed and tested an empirical model to find out the determinants of viral phenomenon over YouTube.
