The Pareto principle on YouTube

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) states that about 80% of the consequences are created by 20% of the causes. In this paper we describe the distribution of several aspects of YouTube, a website used for online video sharing, to see if the Pareto principle applies to these aspects. These aspects include the views and comments of videos, and the videos uploaded and comments posted by users. After obtaining data from more than 2.500 videos, 1.700 users and 900.000 comments, we conclude that 20% of the videos causes 89% of the traffic (i.e. views) and contain 91% of the comments. In both cases these values have a relatively close resemblance to the Pareto principle. We also conclude that 20% of the users is responsible for 42% of the comments and 45% of the uploaded videos, indicating there is no distribution similar to the Pareto principle in these cases. After comparing the results with previous research we conclude that the distribution of traffic and comments over videos has changed, while the age of YouTube has doubled. These result can benefit YouTube (and presumably similar websites), because research has shown that caching popular videos can reduce server traffic by 50% and server load by 75%.