Towards understanding the external links of video sharing sites: measurement and analysis

Abstract

Recently, many video sharing sites provide external links so that their video or audio contents can be embedded into external web sites. For example, users can copy the embedded URLs of the videos of YouTube and post on their own blogs. Clearly, the purpose of such functionality is to increase the distribution of the videos and the associated advertisement. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive measurement study and analysis on these external links. With the traces collected from two major VOD sites, YouTube and Youku of China, we show that the external links have various impact on the popularity of the VOD sites. More specifically, for videos that have been uploaded for eight months in Youku, around 15% of views can come from external links. Some contents are densely linked, for example, the comedy videos can attract more than 800 external links on average. We also study the relationship between the external links and the internal links. We show that there are correlations; for example, if a video is popular itself, it will likely have a larger number of external links. Another observation is that we always find that the external links of Youku usually have a higher impact than that of YouTube. We conjecture that a more regional site may enjoy a relatively higher impact from the external links.