A Peep on the Interplays between Online Video Websites and Online Social Networks

Many online video websites provide the shortcut links to facilitate the video sharing to other websites especially to the online social networks (OSNs). Such video sharing behavior greatly changes the interplays between the two types of websites. For example, users in OSNs may watch and re-share videos shared by their friends from online video websites, and this can also boost the popularity of videos in online video websites and attract more people to watch and share them. Characterizing these interplays can provide great insights for understanding the relationships among online video websites, OSNs, ISPs and so on. In this paper we conduct empirical experiments to study the interplays between video sharing websites and OSNs using three totally different data sources: online video websites, OSNs, and campus network traffic. We find that, a) there are many factors that can affect the external sharing probability of videos in online video websites. b) The popularity of a video itself in online video websites can greatly impact on its popularity in OSNs. Videos in Renren, Qzone (the top two most popular Chinese OSNs) usually attract more viewers than in Sina and Tencent Weibo (the top two most popular Chinese microblogs), which indicates the different natures of the two kinds of OSNs. c) The analysis based on real traffic data illustrates that 10% of video flows are related to OSNs, and they account for 25% of traffic generated by all videos.