A Study on Characterizing the Ecosystem of Monetizing Video Spams on YouTube Platform

Abstract

In this work, we specifically study YouTube videos promoting easy money gaining tricks. We observe a noticeable presence of such videos on YouTube that are being used to - 1) mislead users into sharing their personal identifiable information, i.e., phone numbers publically or 2) direct users away from YouTube on sites causing negative user experience. For our study, we call them - phone spam and link spam based videos respectively. We provide a detailed analysis of the behavioral characteristics of these two categories of videos based on metadata content and graph based features. For our study, a total of 80 phone spam videos and 2000 link spam videos were collected and analyzed. Our analysis shows that such videos are highly related to each other, and specific motifs discriminating such videos exist. To our knowledge this is the first attempt towards characterizing such types of videos on YouTube.