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YouTube has become the most successful Internet website providing a new generation of short video sharing service since its establishment in early 2005. YouTube has a great impact on Internet traffic nowadays, yet itself is suffering from a severe problem of scalability. Therefore, understanding the characteristics of YouTube and similar sites is essential to network traffic engineering and to their sustainable development. To this end, we have crawled the YouTube site for four months, collecting more than 3 million YouTube videos' data. In this paper, we present a systematic and in-depth measurement study on the statistics of YouTube videos. We have found that YouTube videos have noticeably different statistics compared to traditional streaming videos, ranging from length and access pattern, to their growth trend and active life span. We investigate the social networking in YouTube videos, as this is a key driving force toward its success. In particular, we find that the links to related videos generated by uploaders' choices have clear small-world characteristics. This indicates that the videos have strong correlations with each other, and creates opportunities for developing novel techniques to enhance the service quality.
Cheng et al. (Sun,) studied this question.