  We here focus on the problem of predicting the popularity trend of user
generated content (UGC) as early as possible. Taking YouTube videos as case
study, we propose a novel two-step learning approach that: (1) extracts
popularity trends from previously uploaded objects, and (2) predicts trends for
new content. Unlike previous work, our solution explicitly addresses the
inherent tradeoff between prediction accuracy and remaining interest in the
content after prediction, solving it on a per-object basis. Our experimental
results show great improvements of our solution over alternatives, and its
applicability to improve the accuracy of state-of-the-art popularity prediction
methods.
