What makes content go viral? Which videos become popular and why others don’t? A range of models have been recently proposed to explain and predict popularity; however, there is a short supply of practical tools, accessible for regular users, that leverage these theoretical results. This paper discusses the use of a tool employing Hawkes Intensity Process, a state-of-the-art online popularity model for explaining and predicting video popularity, to help both content consumers and content producers in a range of data-driven inquiries, such as to comparatively analyze videos and channels, to explain and predict future popularity, to identify viral videos, and to estimate response to online promotion.
