Half-life of Youtube News Videos: Diffusion Dynamics and Predictive Factors

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Sargsyan, Anahit, Dutta, Hridoy Sankar, Pfeffer, Juergen
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Sargsyan, Anahit
Dutta, Hridoy Sankar
Pfeffer, Juergen
author_facet Sargsyan, Anahit
Dutta, Hridoy Sankar
Pfeffer, Juergen
contents Consumption of YouTube news videos significantly shapes public opinion and political narratives. While prior works have studied the longitudinal dissemination dynamics of YouTube News videos across extended periods, limited attention has been paid to the short-term trends. In this paper, we investigate the early-stage diffusion patterns and dispersion rate of news videos on YouTube, focusing on the first 24 hours. To this end, we introduce and analyze a rich dataset of over 50,000 videos across 75 countries and six continents. We provide the first quantitative evaluation of the 24-hour half-life of YouTube news videos as well as identify their distinct diffusion patterns. According to the findings, the average 24-hour half-life is approximately 7 hours, with substantial variance both within and across countries, ranging from as short as 2 hours to as long as 15 hours. Additionally, we explore the problem of predicting the latency of news videos' 24-hour half-lives. Leveraging the presented datasets, we train and contrast the performance of 6 different models based on statistical as well as Deep Learning techniques. The difference in prediction results across the models is traced and analyzed. Lastly, we investigate the importance of video- and channel-related predictors through Explainable AI (XAI) techniques. The dataset, analysis codebase and the trained models are released at http://bit.ly/3ILvTLU to facilitate further research in this area.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_21187
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publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle Half-life of Youtube News Videos: Diffusion Dynamics and Predictive Factors
Sargsyan, Anahit
Dutta, Hridoy Sankar
Pfeffer, Juergen
Social and Information Networks
Consumption of YouTube news videos significantly shapes public opinion and political narratives. While prior works have studied the longitudinal dissemination dynamics of YouTube News videos across extended periods, limited attention has been paid to the short-term trends. In this paper, we investigate the early-stage diffusion patterns and dispersion rate of news videos on YouTube, focusing on the first 24 hours. To this end, we introduce and analyze a rich dataset of over 50,000 videos across 75 countries and six continents. We provide the first quantitative evaluation of the 24-hour half-life of YouTube news videos as well as identify their distinct diffusion patterns. According to the findings, the average 24-hour half-life is approximately 7 hours, with substantial variance both within and across countries, ranging from as short as 2 hours to as long as 15 hours. Additionally, we explore the problem of predicting the latency of news videos' 24-hour half-lives. Leveraging the presented datasets, we train and contrast the performance of 6 different models based on statistical as well as Deep Learning techniques. The difference in prediction results across the models is traced and analyzed. Lastly, we investigate the importance of video- and channel-related predictors through Explainable AI (XAI) techniques. The dataset, analysis codebase and the trained models are released at http://bit.ly/3ILvTLU to facilitate further research in this area.
title Half-life of Youtube News Videos: Diffusion Dynamics and Predictive Factors
topic Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21187