Abstract:
Online social media applications have exploded in popularity in the Web. In most of these applications, users interact with other users and create content that becomes available on the Web, such as textual information, photos, and videos. YouTube is the largest online social video sharing service, that generates a huge amount of Web traffic. This paper presents a geographical characterization of YouTube usage. It analyzes video and user characteristics for different geographical regions, concentrating mainly on Latin America. We develop efficient crawlers for collecting data about videos and users. Because the number of videos and users is very large, we sample from the object spaces, sampling over 2 million videos and 5 million users. Based on the collected data, we show that there exists relationships between geography and the social network features available in YouTube. We present evidences that indicate that geography creates a locality space in YouTube, which could be used to explore infrastructure improvements, such as caching, content distribution networks and broadband pricing mechanisms.
Conclusions and Future Work:
In this paper we have presented what we believe to be the first geographical characterization of YouTube. Our characterization has highlighted a number of interesting differences between YouTube users from Latin America and other countries. Our main findings are summarized as follows.
• There are Latin American users that have contributed a considerable number of videos to YouTube community and are actively using all YouTube features; however, a great number of users has uploaded few videos, does not have a large number of friends, does not have a sizable list of favorite videos and sends few responses and comments.
• Videos uploaded by Latin American users present different characteristics than videos uploaded by users from other countries, being less visualized and discussed through comments or even video responses.
• Latin American users interact more with videos of different regions than other users. Almost none of the users from United States and other regions send comments or responses to videos of Latin American users.
• We conjecture the YouTube behavior of Latin American users may be constrained by the existing broadband infrastructure in Latin America. For example, the small number of uploaded videos could be limited by the asymmetric capacity of the broadband networks, that have greater download capacity compared to their upload capacity.
• Textual (through comments) and video-based (through responses) interactions on YouTube present strong influence of geographical localization. We conjecture that views of videos and other user interactions are also influenced by geographical localization. These conclusions suggest that caching and content distribution networks (CDNs) should be used to improve the performance and scalability of online social video sharing services, and also reduce Internet traffic.
Duarte, Fernando, Fabricio Benevenuto, Virgilio Almeida, and Jussara Almeida.
Geographical Characterization of YouTube: a Latin American View.
In Proceedings of the 2007 Latin American Web Conference, Washington, DC, 31 October – 2 November 2007.
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