How Content, Community, and Engagement Affect the Life Cycles of Online Photo Sharing Groups

Abstract

We investigate the life cycles of groups on online photo sharing sites to determine the factors that contribute to their growth. We propose features to capture the social, engagement, and content characteristics of groups and conduct a large-scale retrospective analysis of more than 170k groups on Flickr to discover the relative importance of each of the factors on the long-term growth of groups. This yields models that can predict the success/death of groups with upwards of 82% accuracy.