Number of YouTube views per day for my 2016 Royal Institution talk
Data: Royal InstitutionPerhaps people had started sharing it online, making it go viral?
Looking at the data, the real explanation was much simpler: the video
had been featured on the YouTube homepage. As the views spiked,
the YouTube algorithm added it to the ‘suggested video’ lists that
appear alongside popular videos. Almost 90 per cent of people who
viewed the talk found it on the homepage or one of these lists. It was
a classic broadcast event, with one source generating almost all of
the views. And once the video was popular, its popularity created a
feedback effect, attracting even more interest. It shows how much the
video benefitted from online amplification, first by the Royal Institution
to get those initial few thousand views, then by the YouTube
algorithm to deliver a much bigger audience.
There are three main types of popularity on YouTube. The first is
where videos get a consistent, low-level number of views. This
number randomly fluctuates from day-to-day, without noticeably
increasing or decreasing. Around 90 per cent of YouTube videos
follow this pattern. The second type of popularity is when a video
suddenly gets featured on the website, perhaps in response to a