Building a Viral Video Detection Algorithm in PHP

Introduction How do you programmatically detect when a video is going viral? This is the core problem I faced when building ViralVidVault — a platform that surfaces trending and viral videos from 7 European regions. In this article, I'll walk through the virality scoring algorithm that powers the platform. The Concept: Virality as a Composite Score A video doesn't go viral because of a single metric. It's the combination of velocity (how fast views are growing), engagement (likes, comments relative to views), and share momentum (how quickly sharing is accelerating). Our algorithm combines these into a single score between 0 and 100. The Data Model First, we need a structure to hold our metrics: <?php class VideoMetrics { public function __construct ( public readonly string $videoId , public readonly int $viewsNow , public readonly int $viewsPrevious , public readonly int $likes , public readonly int $comments , public readonly int $shares , public readonly int $timeDeltaSeconds , publi