Characterizing Videos and Users in YouTube: A Survey

Web 2.0 has reshaped the way people interact with Web sites. People are now able to view content created by other users as well as publish their own content on Web 2.0 sites, instead of downloading content created by a small number of publishing professionals. Understanding the characteristics of these sites has become a subject of immense interest to the Internet service providers, content makers and on-line advertisers. This understanding is also important for the sustainable development of the content distribution systems themselves. As an approach to comprehend the characteristics of media content delivery systems in Web 2.0, a significant amount of research has been done in investigating the characteristics of YouTube. In this paper, a survey of findings of the characteristics of YouTube and related sites is presented from both video and user perspectives along with some open research issues. This kind of study is instrumental to understand the usage of YouTube and other similar user generated content (UGC) sites.