Understanding the Characteristics of Internet Short Video Sharing: YouTube as a Case Study
Xu Cheng, Cameron Dale, Jiangchuan Liu

TL;DR
This study provides a comprehensive analysis of YouTube's video characteristics, usage patterns, and social network structure, offering insights crucial for network management and content distribution strategies.
Contribution
It offers the first systematic measurement of YouTube's video features, growth trends, and social network structure based on a 3-month dataset.
Findings
YouTube videos differ significantly from traditional streaming videos in length and access patterns.
The social network of related videos forms a small-world network, indicating strong correlations.
The dataset reveals rapid growth trends and evolving user engagement on YouTube.
Abstract
Established in 2005, YouTube has become the most successful Internet site providing a new generation of short video sharing service. Today, YouTube alone comprises approximately 20% of all HTTP traffic, or nearly 10% of all traffic on the Internet. Understanding the features of YouTube and similar video sharing sites is thus crucial to their sustainable development and to network traffic engineering. In this paper, using traces crawled in a 3-month period, we present an in-depth and systematic measurement study on the characteristics of YouTube videos. We find that YouTube videos have noticeably different statistics compared to traditional streaming videos, ranging from length and access pattern, to their active life span, ratings, and comments. The series of datasets also allows us to identify the growth trend of this fast evolving Internet site in various aspects, which has seldom…
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Taxonomy
TopicsCaching and Content Delivery · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Digital Marketing and Social Media
