Understanding the Characteristics of Category-Specific YouTube Videos

As the world largest video content sharing website, YouTube constantly attracts more and more attention from networking research community. Different aspects of YouTube, such as video characteristics, user behaviors, and its back-end infrastructure have been well studied. Most of these studies consider YouTube as a whole without taking the YouTube category into the consideration. However, it is believed that different categories of YouTube may attract different users and thus have different characteristics. In this paper, we study and compare the YouTube video characteristics from different categories. We found that the videos from different categories have noticeably different statistics on video duration, popularity, user engagement and so on. By directly using the view statistics information provided by YouTube, we have also analyzed the dominant view source from each category, and its growth trend patterns.