Beyond Views: Measuring and Predicting Engagement in Online Videos
This addresses the need for better resource allocation in attention and promotion for online video platforms, though it is incremental by focusing on measurement and prediction rather than a new paradigm.
The paper tackled the problem of measuring video engagement beyond view counts by analyzing 5.3 million YouTube videos, finding that engagement metrics like time watched are stable over time and predictable with an R2 of 0.77 from video context and channel information.
The share of videos in the internet traffic has been growing, therefore understanding how videos capture attention on a global scale is also of growing importance. Most current research focus on modeling the number of views, but we argue that video engagement, or time spent watching is a more appropriate measure for resource allocation problems in attention, networking, and promotion activities. In this paper, we present a first large-scale measurement of video-level aggregate engagement from publicly available data streams, on a collection of 5.3 million YouTube videos published over two months in 2016. We study a set of metrics including time and the average percentage of a video watched. We define a new metric, relative engagement, that is calibrated against video properties and strongly correlate with recognized notions of quality. Moreover, we find that engagement measures of a video are stable over time, thus separating the concerns for modeling engagement and those for popularity -- the latter is known to be unstable over time and driven by external promotions. We also find engagement metrics predictable from a cold-start setup, having most of its variance explained by video context, topics and channel information -- R2=0.77. Our observations imply several prospective uses of engagement metrics -- choosing engaging topics for video production, or promoting engaging videos in recommender systems.