Exploring venue popularity in Foursquare

In this paper, we provide a 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 study the common characteristics of popular venues, and make the following observations. First, venues with more complete profile information are more likely to be popular. Second, venues in the Food category attract the most (43%) public tips (comments) by users, and the Travel & Transport category is the most popular category with the highest per venue check-ins, i.e., each venue in this category attracts on average 376 check-ins. Moreover, the stickiness of users checking in venues in the residence, office, and school categories is higher than in other categories. Last but not least, in general, old venues created at the early stage of Foursquare are more popular than new venues. Our results help to understand the factors that cause venues to become popular, and have applications in venue recommendations and advertisement in location based social networks.