A Geographical Characterization of YouTube: a Latin American View Fernando Duarte, Fabrício Benevenuto, Virgílio Almeida, Jussara Almeida Federal University of Minas Gerais – Brazil

Outline Motivation and Goals YouTube Features Crawler and Sampling Geographical Characterization Conclusions and Future Work

Motivation and Goals YouTube is a popular online social video sharing service which generates high-volumes of Internet traffic YouTube Popularity in Latin American (from –6 th in Argentina and Paraguay, –5 th in Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Peru, –4 th in Ecuador and Venezuela. Goal: characterize influence of geographical localization of users on traffic and social relationship. –Focus on Latin American

YouTube Features Users – users interactions add users as friends subscribe to another user Users – videos watch videos upload videos (unlimited) add videos as favorite post a comment to a video respond a video with another video rating a video Videos Have a list of 20 related videos are distributed in 14 categories

Sampling Mechanism Sampling Strategy: –collect information of popular videos and analyze the user interactions around these videos. First crawler: Collect metadata information of Videos –Start from top all time viewed video and collect the related videos recursively in snowball fashion Snowball uses a Breadth first scheme Second Crawler: Collect metadata information of Users from the first crawler –User who uploaded videos, posted comments or video responses.

Server Client 1 Crawler Architecture Client 2 … Client 7 Collected information of over 2 million videos, exhausting 6 tiers in 11 days (from Apr 3 rd to 14 th ) 96 of the 100 most all-time popular videos are part of the sample Parallel crawler –Server coordinates the snowball sampling and –Server avoids redundant data collection –7 Linux boxes

Statistics of videos and users collected USA is responsible for 28% of videos and 38% of users 7% of users are LA, responsible for 7% of uploads and 6% of views 13% of users without country information (empty) # views > # comments > # video responses

Latin American Users Table is sorted by number of users Users from Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina have contributed with more videos, but in terms of uploads/user Peru leads the rank In terms of traffic (wached videos) Brazil, Mexico, and Virgin Islands lead the rank LA users have an average 22 favorite videos and average of 2 friends –Orkut and Myspace have an average of 30 and 137 friends respectively We guess that most part of the users interact with friends in other online social network and use YouTube essentially to watch videos

Video Popularity Curve of number of views does not descend linearly 10% of the top popular LA videos concentrate 76% of the views: caching LA videos are less visualized and discussed, generating less traffic than other videos

Video Duration About 80% of the videos are smaller than 5 minutes There is no difference for different regions

Use of Social Features LA users interact less at YouTube than other users.

Use of Social Features Besides less interactive, there are LA users with 2400 friends, users who uploaded 1400 videos and sent more than 1200 comments.

User Interactions Observe the percentage of comments for videos from LA, USA and others. Plot the distribution of this percentage Latin American videos

Textual Interactions Latin American videosUSA videos The probability of LA videos have more than 60% of comments from LA users is 0.32 (from USA is only 0.08) Videos have higher probability to receive comments from same region Potential use of CDNs (assuming that number of views is also influenced by geographical factors) Few LA users interact with videos from USA/others, but USA/others interact with LA users

Conclusions and Future Work We present a geographical characterization of YouTube, highlighting a number of differences between Latin American users and other countries Main Findings –Videos uploaded by LA users present different characteristics than videos uploads by users from other regions: less visualized and discussed. –Top popular videos concentrate most part of the views, suggesting the use of caching –Interactions present strong influence of geographical localization, suggesting the use of CDNs to improve performance Future Work –Analyzing impact of language on traffic and user behavior –Explore social networks characteristics of interactions between users and videos across different regions

Questions?