Dresden 2017 – scientific programme
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 21: Social Systems II
SOE 21.3: Talk
Thursday, March 23, 2017, 17:30–17:45, GÖR 226
Lévy deviations from proportional effect in online attention — •Jose M. Miotto1 and Eduardo G. Altmann2 — 1Max-Planck-Institut für Physik komplexer Systeme, Dresden, Germany — 2School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
The competition for the attention of users is a central element of the Internet. Crucial issues are the origin and predictability of big hits, the few items that capture a big portion of the total attention. We address these issues analysing 10 million time series of videos' views from YouTube. We find that the average gain of views is linearly proportional to the number of views a video already has, in agreement with usual rich-get-richer mechanisms and Gibrat's law, but this fails to explain the prevalence of big hits. The reason is that the fluctuations around the average views are themselves heavy tailed. Based on these empirical observations, we propose a stochastic differential equation with Lévy noise as a model of the dynamics of videos. We show how this model is substantially better in estimating the probability of an ordinary item becoming a big hit, which is considerably underestimated in the traditional proportional-growth models.