Informational cascade in viewership of online videos Running head: INFORMATIONAL CASCADE IN VIEWERSHIP OF ONLINE VIDEOS Riding the “Hits ” Wave: Informational Cascades in Viewership of Online Videos

Informational cascade in viewership of online videos 2 The exploding spread of online peer-posted videos such as YouTube is phenomenal. The sharing and viewing of such web content are hypothesized to be influenced by the process of informational cascades, which commonly characterizes the choices of consumption by sequential patrons among (content) products of quality uncertainty. We scheme an empirical model to test the informational cascade effect on the accumulation of “views ” or “hits ” by videos. An entire set of 1,304 videos, uploaded to Internet Archive’s moving images section, during a 4-week period, are tracked for their individual daily hit captures over 33 days since launch. The views distribution is vastly skewed across the videos observed. The estimation reveals that the larger cumulative viewership a video has gained at a given time, the more views it will attract next. Further, this cascading effect for videos with thumbnails (i.e., a series of pictorial snapshots of the video) available aside is significantly lessened vis-à-vis that for those without. This finding espouses the postulation that the rise of information about quality and thus informational cascades responds to the role of qualit