The role of twitter in YouTube videos diffusion

Abstract

Understanding the effects of social cascading on streaming media is of great importance to Web information system engineering. Given the large amount of available videos, it is often difficult for users to discover interesting content. Relying on the suggestions coming from friends seems to be a popular way to choose what to watch. Taking into account the increasing popularity of Online Social Networks and the growing popularity of streaming media, in this paper we present a detailed analysis of social cascading exchange of YouTube videos among Twitter users. Using a real data set we have recently collected, our analysis highlights several important aspects of social cascading, including its impact on YouTube videos popularity, dependence on users with a large number of followers, the effect of multiple sharing follows and the distribution of cascade duration. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.