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Like at First Sight: Understanding User Engagement with the World of Microvideos

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Social Informatics (SocInfo 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10539))

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Abstract

Several content-driven platforms have adopted the ‘micro video’ format, a new form of short video that is constrained in duration, typically at most 5–10 s long. Micro videos are typically viewed through mobile apps, and are presented to viewers as a long list of videos that can be scrolled through. How should micro video creators capture viewers’ attention in the short attention span? Does quality of content matter? Or do social effects predominate, giving content from users with large numbers of followers a greater chance of becoming popular? To the extent that quality matters, what aspect of the video – aesthetics or affect – is critical to ensuring user engagement?

We examine these questions using a snapshot of nearly all (\({>}120,000\)) videos uploaded to globally accessible channels on the micro video platform Vine over an 8 week period. We find that although social factors do affect engagement, content quality becomes equally important at the top end of the engagement scale. Furthermore, using the temporal aspects of video, we verify that decisions are made quickly, and that first impressions matter more, with the first seconds of the video typically being of higher quality and having a large effect on overall user engagement. We verify these data-driven insights with a user study from 115 respondents, confirming that users tend to engage with micro videos based on “first sight”, and that users see this format as a more immediate and less professional medium than traditional user-generated video (e.g., YouTube) or user-generated images (e.g., Flickr).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/09/youtube-time-limit-2/.

  2. 2.

    http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13456208/why-vine-died-twitter-shutdown.

  3. 3.

    http://www.theverge.com/tech/2016/3/29/11325294/instagram-video-60-seconds.

  4. 4.

    http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/5/14175670/vine-shutting-down-rebrand-download-archive.

  5. 5.

    On acceptance, our newly crawled data will also be shared for non commercial research.

  6. 6.

    http://vine.co.

  7. 7.

    https://vine.co/popular-now.

  8. 8.

    We obtained similar trends using number of reposts, but only report results with loops. Note that the loop counts of videos are highly correlated with reposts and likes. For example for videos in POP12K, \( corr(Loops,Likes) = 0.80\), \(corr(Likes,Reposts) = 0.91\), \(corr(Reposts,Loops) = 0.74\).

  9. 9.

    https://developers.google.com/youtube/analytics/v1/dimsmets/mets.

  10. 10.

    http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/20/4448906/video-on-instagram-hands-on-photos-and-video.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kings College, London, UK

    Sagar Joglekar & Nishanth Sastry

  2. Bell Labs, Cambridge, UK

    Miriam Redi

Authors
  1. Sagar Joglekar
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  2. Nishanth Sastry
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  3. Miriam Redi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sagar Joglekar .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

    Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia

  2. University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

    Afra Mashhadi

  3. University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Taha Yasseri

A Appendix: Feature Table

A Appendix: Feature Table

Table 3. Dimensionality and description of features used to describe Vine videos
Full size table

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Joglekar, S., Sastry, N., Redi, M. (2017). Like at First Sight: Understanding User Engagement with the World of Microvideos. In: Ciampaglia, G., Mashhadi, A., Yasseri, T. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10539. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67217-5_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67217-5_15

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-67217-5

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