The YouTube Social Network
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
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
