Understanding the Characteristics of Internet Short Video Sharing: YouTube as a Case Study

Established in 2005, YouTube has become the most successful Internet site providing a new generation of short video sharing service. Today, YouTube alone comprises approximately 20% of all HTTP traffic, or nearly 10% of all traffic on the Internet. Understanding the features of YouTube and similar video sharing sites is thus crucial to their sustainable development and to network traffic engineering. In this paper, using traces crawled in a 3-month period, we present an in-depth and systematic measurement study on the characteristics of YouTube videos. We find that YouTube videos have noticeably different statistics compared to traditional streaming videos, ranging from length and access pattern, to their active lifespan, ratings, and comments. 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.