Exploring the Venue Popularity in Foursquare
01 January 2013
We in this paper provide detailed analysis on the venue popularity in Foursquare, a leading location based social network. By collecting 2.4 million venues from 14 geographic regions all over the world, we statistically study what are the characteristics that popular venues possess, and make the following observations. First of all, the venues with more complete information are more popular. Secondly, by performing comprehensive categorical analysis, we observe that venues in Food category attract the most (49%) public tips (comments) by users, and Travel & Transport category is the most popular category with the highest per venue check-ins. Moreover, Outdoors & Recreation and Travel & Transport categories are visited (checked in) by mostly recurrent visitors. We also analyzed how venue ages and Geographic locations affect the venue popularity distributions. Our results shed light on understanding the factors driving the venues being popular with applications in venue recommendations and advertisement in location based social networks.