Characteristics and potentials of YouTube: A measurement study

Abstract

Established in 2005, YouTube is one of the fastest-growing websites, and has become one of the most accessed sites in the Internet. It has a significant impact on the Internet traffic distribution, but itself is suffering from severe scalability constraints. Understanding the features of YouTube and In this paper, we present an in-depth and systematic measurement study on the characteristics of YouTube videos. We crawled the YouTube site for a 3-month period in early 2007, and obtained more than 2 million distinct videos. This constitutes a significant portion of the entire YouTube video repository. Using this collection of datasets, we find that YouTube videos have noticeably different statistics from traditional streaming videos, such as video length. We also look closely at the social networking aspect of YouTube, as this is a key driving force toward the success of YouTube and similar sites. In particular, we find that the links to related videos generated by uploaders choices form a small-world network. This suggests that the videos have strong correlations with each other, and creates opportunities for developing novel Peer-to-Peer distribution schemes to efficiently deliver videos to end users. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Next is a section presenting some background information and other related work. Following is a section which first describes our method of gathering information about YouTube videos, which is then analyzed generally, while the social networking aspects are analyzed separately in the subsequent section. The last section discusses the implications of the results, and suggests ways that the YouTube service could be improved. Finally, we draw our conclusions. © 2008 Springer-Verlag New York.