Social Networks and the Diffusion of User-Generated Content: Evidence from YouTube

This paper is motivated by the success of YouTube, which is attractive to content creators as well as corporations for its potential to rapidly disseminate digital content. The networked structure of interactions on YouTube and the tremendous variation in the success of videos posted online lends itself to an inquiry of the role of social influence. Using a unique data set of video information and user information collected from YouTube, we find that social interactions are influential not only in determining which videos become successful but also on the magnitude of that impact. We also find evidence for a number of mechanisms by which social influence is transmitted, such as (i) a preference for conformity…