The you tube social network

Abstract

Today, You Tube is the largest user-driven video content provider in the world; it has become a major platform for disseminating multimedia information. A major contribution to its success comes from the user-to-user social experience that differentiates it from traditional content broadcasters. This work examines the social network aspect of You Tube by measuring the fullscale You Tube subscription graph, comment graph, and video content corpus. We find You Tube to deviate significantly from network characteristics that mark traditional online social networks, such as homophily, reciprocative linking, and assortativity. However, comparing to reported characteristics of another content-driven online social network, Twitter, You Tube is remarkably similar. Examining the social and content facets of user popularity, we find a stronger correlation between a user's social popularity and his/her most popular content as opposed to typical content popularity. Finally, we demonstrate an application of our measurements for classifying You Tube Partners, who are selected users that share You Tube's advertisement revenue. Results are motivating despite the highly imbalanced nature of the classification problem. Copyright © 2012, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.