Characterizing the Click and Share Dynamics of Micro-Videos in Social Media

Abstract

Micro-video has recently become an important form of user generated contents in the social media of microblogging. It is propagated by sharing and reaches the targeted audience through being clicked and watched. Since click data is usually not public available, it is still an open problem that what is the difference between sharing and clicking behaviours in the information propagation. In this work, thanks to a massive set of anonymized data from a major operator covering the whole China, we jointly study both temporal dynamics of click and share of over 10,000 micro-videos in Sina Weibo, the largest microblogging service and micro-video platform in China. We observe a significant difference between lifespans of the micro-videos in terms of both click and share. Comparatively, the clicking dynamics of micro-videos evolve more quickly than the sharing dynamics, and a delay of several hours exists between sharing and clicking dynamics, which indicates a causal effect. These observations benefit understanding the information propagation of micro-videos in terms of both click and share.