On the relationship between novelty and popularity of user-generated content

Abstract

This work deals with the task of predicting the popularity of user-generated content. We demonstrate how the novelty of newly published content plays an important role in affecting its popularity. We study three dimensions of novelty: contemporaneous novelty, self novelty, and discussion novelty. We demonstrate the contribution of the new novelty measures to estimating blog-post popularity by predicting the number of comments expected for a fresh post. We further demonstrate how novelty based measures can be utilized for predicting the citation volume of academic papers. © 2010 ACM.