What We Watch: a new tool for watching how popular videos spread online

More than a billion people a month visit YouTube to watch videos.

Sometimes, those billion people watch the same video. More often, they don’t.

YouTube shares information about what videos are popular in different cities and different countries, and for the US, offers a tool to see what videos are popular with different age groups and genders.

We were interested in seeing what videos were popular in different countries, and especially, what videos were popular in more than one country. For the past six months, we’ve gathered data from YouTube to understand What We Watch. The videos we feature are videos that appear on YouTube’s Trends dashboard. These are the videos trending in any of 61 countries – they are not necessarily the most popular of all time, or even most popular that month, but they are receiving a lot of attention in a short period of time. (Gilad Lotan’s explanation of trending topics on Twitter is useful for understanding that distinction.)

What We Watch is a browser for popular YouTube videos, built by Ed Platt, Rahul Bhargava and Ethan Zuckerman at MIT’s Center for Civic Media. (Rahul did data acquisition, Ed did visualization and Ethan waved his hands and requested features inappropriately late in the design process.)

Click on a country, and you’ll get a list of videos that have trended in that country, and a map that shows other countries that watch the same videos. Click a tab, and you can see videos popular just in that country, and not in other countries. Click on a second country, and you’ll see what top videos the countries have in common. Click a video itself, and you’ll get the video itself and a map of the countries where it was popular.

The results are often surprising. The US has more trending videos in common with Germany and the Netherlands than with near neighbors Canada and Mexico. One of the US’s top videos is a Punjabi music video that’s also got an audience in India and Germany. And a 90 second ad for Google Hangouts is surprisingly popular around the world… though hasn’t trended in the US, it’s apparent target market.

While What We Watch is a fun way to navigate the wealth of content available on YouTube, there are serious research questions behind the project as well. In Rewire, I argue that a network that connects computers throughout the globe doesn’t guarantee that content – like videos – will spread across borders of language, culture and nation. Some of what we’re finding on What We Watch supports that contention, and some challenges it.

The music video for “Roar” by Katy Perry offers evidence that some videos find truly global audiences – the video is has trended from Peru to the Philippines, and one of the top videos in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Other videos find regional, but not global audiences – take P-Square’s “Personally”, which was in the top 10 in Nigeria for 17% of dates we tracked, and is popular in Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, and Senegal… but no where outside of sub-Saharan Africa. And some videos never leave home: Brazil’s top trending video, a humorous ad for a phone company that requires no translation, doesn’t show up on the top charts for any other country.

I’ve been deeply influenced by Pippa Norris’s work on the spread of culture and values across national borders, specifically her book “Cosmopolitan Communications” with Ronald Inglehart. They argue that people tend to overestimate the Katy Perry effect in which US culture sweeps the globe, leveling everything in its path. In some cases, people encounter another culture and reject it violently (the Taliban model), shape it and incorporate it into a new hybrid (the curry model) or simply decide it’s not for them (the firewall theory.) We see evidence for three of the four in our data – it’s hard to see the Taliban model because violent rejection would likely mean banning YouTube, which gives us no data to measure.

We also get some hints on what countries have videos in common. Language matters: countries in Latin America tend to have videos in common with other Spanish-speaking countries. But Brazil and Portugal don’t share much content (and Brazil’s viewing habits have little overlap with anyone, offering another theory: if you have a big enough domestic internet, you may develop your own, insular internet culture, as in Japan as well.)

We got very interested in countries that share content with lots of other countries. To identify these countries, we used a metric called “betweenness centrality“. Imagine the countries as nodes on a graph, connected by links that represent videos in common. If you calculate paths from each node of the graph to each other, nodes that many paths move through have high betweenness centrality – they are bridges through the network.

The countries with highest betweenness centrality are United Arab Emirates and Singapore. Both have lots of weak ties to other countries, which means they may act as cultural bridges between unconnected countries – we can imagine a video popular in India making its way to Yemen through the United Arab Emirates. It’s interesting to note that Singapore and UAE both have massive populations of expatriates and “guest workers” (over 90% of the population in UAE and over 40% in Singapore). Culture travels with people, and it’s no surprise that Indians in the UAE would want to watch videos from home, or that Poles living in the UK mean there are Polish-language videos in the UK’s top ten.

What we don’t know yet is whether videos spread through the networks: i.e., does a video made in India spread to Yemen through UAE, for example? To test that, we’ll need to watch how a popular video spreads over time, and, ideally, we’d want to know where a video originates. That’s harder than you might think. We’ve looked at the possibility of hand-coding the videos as to their nation of origin, so we can see whether a UK video might appear on the charts first in Australia or Poland. But we’re flummoxed by the fact that many of the popular videos aren’t easily pinned down to one nation or another – take this ad, popular in both Russia and Ukraine. It’s a Nike ad about street soccer, which suggests we should attribute it to the US, where the company is based… but the ad’s in Russian, clearly aimed at urban audiences in Eastern Europe and not for a US market. Do we code it as US, Russian or global?

And then, of course, there’s this ad for Google Hangouts. It’s a sweet and sappy 90 second story about a girl who moves to the big city and stays in touch with her dad via Hangouts. The accents are American and it appears to be an ad designed for the US market, but it has trended around the world, including in many countries with high rates of emigration for work or education. Google may have wanted to encourage American twenty-somethings to connect with their parents, but the message seems to resonate for people around the world.

Please experiment with What We Watch and let us know what you think – you can post comments here about anything interesting you discover, or research questions you think we should ask. The code and data behind the system is available on GitHub should you wish to build your own, or to see what we did. One caution for researchers – we are not showing videos that have been taken down by Google, for copyright or other reasons. In some cases, this means we’re removing many videos from top lists. We hope, in the long run, to show the metadata of those videos, but for now, they’re just not in the set, which means the data is not entirely representative of what we’ve collected.