According to a paper published by the HP Social Computing Lab, it seems that there is.
The paper points to the possibility that the popularity of user contributed content can be predicted very soon after the submission has been made, by measuring the popularity at an early time. Three models for predicting popularity were shared in the report.
Disclaimer: The Labs' data sources were Youtube and Digg. Also, the paper didn't touch on the semantics of why user-generated content becomes popular.
The paper is available here. This is very math-heavy, so be warned :)
