  Video dissemination through sites such as YouTube can have widespread impacts
on opinions, thoughts, and cultures. Not all videos will reach the same
popularity and have the same impact. Popularity differences arise not only
because of differences in video content, but also because of other
"content-agnostic" factors. The latter factors are of considerable interest but
it has been difficult to accurately study them. For example, videos uploaded by
users with large social networks may tend to be more popular because they tend
to have more interesting content, not because social network size has a
substantial direct impact on popularity. In this paper, we develop and apply a
methodology that is able to accurately assess, both qualitatively and
quantitatively, the impacts of various content-agnostic factors on video
popularity. When controlling for video content, we observe a strong linear
"rich-get-richer" behavior, with the total number of previous views as the most
important factor except for very young videos. The second most important factor
is found to be video age. We analyze a number of phenomena that may contribute
to rich-get-richer, including the first-mover advantage, and search bias
towards popular videos. For young videos we find that factors other than the
total number of previous views, such as uploader characteristics and number of
keywords, become relatively more important. Our findings also confirm that
inaccurate conclusions can be reached when not controlling for content.
