The YouTube Social Network
Venue
Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2012)
Publication Year
2012
Authors
Mirjam Wattenhofer, Roger Wattenhofer, Zack Zhu
BibTeX
Abstract
Today, YouTube 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 YouTube by measuring the fullscale YouTube subscription
graph, comment graph, and video content corpus. We find YouTube 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, YouTube 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 YouTube Partners, who are selected users that share YouTube’s
advertisement revenue. Results are motivating despite the highly imbalanced nature
of the classification proble
