UGC Video Sharing: Measurement and Analysis

User-generated content (UGC) site has become a new killer Internet application in the recent four years. Among those popular sites, YouTube is the most representative and successful one providing a new generation of short video sharing service. Today, YouTube is a dominant provider of online video in the Internet, and is still growing fast. Understanding the features of YouTube and similar video sharing sites is thus crucial to their sustainable development and to network traffic engineering. We investigate the YouTube site from two perspectives, internal and external. Using traces crawled in a 1.5-year span, we systematic measure the characteristics of YouTube videos. We find that YouTube videos have noticeably different statistics compared to traditional streaming videos, ranging from length, access pattern, to their active life span. The series of datasets also allows us to identify the growth trend of this fast evolving Internet site in various aspects, which has seldom been explored before. We also look closely at the social networking aspect of YouTube, as this is a key driving force toward its success. In particular, we find that the links to related videos generated by uploaders’ choices form a small-world network. This suggests that the videos have strong correlations with each other, and creates opportunities for developing novel caching or peer-to-peer distribution schemes to efficiently deliver videos to end users. We also provide an in-depth study into the effects of the external links of YouTube. We collected nearly one million videos’ external link information, and traced different types of videos for more than two months. Our study shows interesting characteristics of external links of YouTube. In particular, we find that views from external links are independent from total views in each category. Also, videos benefit more from external links in the early stage. Our work can serve as a initial step for the study of the external environment.