Understanding Video Sharing Propagation in Social Networks

Abstract

Modern online social networking has drastically changed the information distribution landscape. Recently, video has become one of the most important types of objects spreading among social networking service users. The sheer and ever-increasing data volume, the broader coverage, and the longer access durations of video objects, however, present significantly more challenges than other types of objects. This article takes an initial step toward understanding the unique characteristics of video sharing propagation in social networks. Based on realworld data traces from a large-scale online social network, we examine the user behavior from diverse aspects and identify different types of users involved in video propagation. We closely investigate the temporal distribution during propagation as well as the typical propagation structures, revealing more details beyond stationary coverage. We further extend the conventional epidemic models to accommodate diverse types of users and their probabilistic viewing and sharing behaviors. The model, effectively capturing the essentials of the propagation process, serves as a valuable basis for such applications as workload synthesis, traffic prediction, and resource provision of video servers.