SOCIAL NETWORKING OF YOUTUBE – ANALYSIS OF TWO FINNISH USER COMMUNITIES
Niemi Markus Polso Hannu Department of Mathematical Sciences University of Jyväskylä 2006
ABSTRACT
This article is about Web 2.0 service, YouTube video sharing website. Article tries to display Social Network Analysis of YouTube service by studying and observing the behaviour of Finnish user groups. The survey examines two Finnish groups named "Finland", 48 members and “Lordi”, 43 members. Groups’ members are investigated to get information how they are connected to each other. Member relations are investigated for how members are subscribed or commented by each other. The results of the study shows that occurrence of social network can’t be discovered inside examined groups. GENERAL TERMS: Web 2.0, YouTube, SNA, network, node, link ADDITIONAL KEYWORDS: user, member, group, tag, relation
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INTRODUCTION TO WEB 2.0
Web 2.0 is not a new technology; rather it could be described as a second phase or generation of Internet-based service that emphasizes online collaboration and sharing among users. According to Tim O’Reillyi the following characteristics can be found on the concept of Web 2.0: • • • "Network as platform" —entirely browser based applications for users. Users creating, owning and controlling the data on the site. Architecture of participation, co-operation and collective intelligence. Thus encouraging users to add value to the application as they use it. • A rich, interactive, user-friendly interface, based on Ajax or similar frameworks. • • Contains social networking aspects. The foundation of device free software basis.
1.1 User generated content
User-Generated Content is a term that has come into the mainstream during 2005 in web publishing and new media content production circles. It refers to on-line content that is produced by users of websites as opposed to traditional media producers (i.e. broadcasters or production companies). Reflecting the democratization of media production through new technologies, those are accessible and affordable. These include digital video, blogging, pod casting, mobile phone photography and wikis.
1.2 Internet’s Second gold rush services
The shorthand term for what is happening now is Web 2.0 based services offering new kind of content. An attitude rather than a technology, as O’Reilly describes it. So what are these phenomenal new services? Prominent examples of websites based on UserGenerated Content include Flickr, MySpace, Pandora, Wikipedia and YouTube. The advent of User-Generated Content marks a turning point among media organizations from creating on-line content to creating the facilities and framework for non-media professionals (users, ordinary people) to create and publish their own content in those sites. Some results about the success of these Web 2.0 services: Wikipedia’s internet references were 3% at 2005 and after year the numbers had increased to 20%. The real growth can be seen when compared to rival service, MSN Encarta 2005: 2% and 2006: 0.7%. Another one is Google’s trust and vision to YouTube success, the purchasing prize of the service was tremendous 1, 3 billion euros.
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YOUTUBE
YouTubeii is a free video sharing Web site which lets users upload, view, and share video clips. The service was founded in February 2005. The wide variety of site content includes movie and TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content. Users can register and create an account into YouTube's service. Registration allows them to upload files into service and watch restricted content. When users register they give some personal information to YouTube. Finally YouTube has a feature that allows registered users to form groups. YouTube is the most popular video distributing service on internet, displaying more than 100 million video clips daily. It is speculated that the YouTube, and other similar services, will become the main distributor for TV-series, movies and other video material in the future.
2.1 Moral, ethical and legal aspects
YouTube service was based on giving users a channel to upload self created amateur content. However the success of the service became from illegal material, great deal of the uploaded material is copy righted. Users uploaded clips from TV-series, movies and music videos. So how to control the terms of copy right and watch over moral and ethical content of the video clips in the site? And moreover is it even possible? After Google bought the service, it has started negotiations with several major media corporations to persuade the organizations to allow content to be displayed at the YouTube website. There has also been rumours that Google is preparing for the out coming law suits and have reserved 200 million dollars for the expenses. Instead of the copy right issues the authors of the materials should consider the YouTube service as a free advertising channel. The low quality and fragmentary of video clips supports the advertisement aspect, thus urging users to buy the real complete product.
2.2 About users
According to Jakob Nielseniii, “In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.”. Regular user of YouTube service, if followed Nielsen’s 90-9-1 guide, only watches video clips, when the other 10 percent produce the content. This can also be seen when analyzing the comments posted on the web site. Usually users only post comments regarding the video clip, not the user(s) itself. Certain exceptions still can be found; YouTube has created many “celebrities” among users, most notably the LonelyGirl15 and Brooke Brodack. These certain famous users receive subscribes concerning the video clips, but also comments about the user.
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MOBILE YOUTUBE
YouTube already have a mobile service at some level. YouTube To Go launched in May 2006 and lets users (only) upload video clips from cell phones. Downloading isn’t possible, yet. That’s a pretty standard feature on video-sharing sites. Many sites lets you upload material, however currently Google Video also allows downloads to mobile devices. TinyTubeiv service provided downloading service for YouTube video clips but after Google-YouTube transaction, the contents were drawn away. This is only natural since Google is about release mobile based service on YouTube next year. Mobile service would indeed offer much but does it out weight risks and challenges it creates? The hardest requirements consist of devices and cost of the mobile service. 3G mobile devices are quite fast but only after wlan-phones become more common, can the transfer issues be answered. The economical problem for the user is as tough, only after reasonable monthly payments become everyday concept, instead of transfer based billing.
3.1 Future
YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley has said that YouTube will launch a service for mobile phones in 2007v. What would be key benefits of the mobile service? Ability to browse, rate and comment on YouTube content from your phone or mobile device. More freedom from time and place restrictions. It also creates problems as mentioned in previous chapter, as well more issues concerning morality and ethics. Still the mobile is the way of the future. This can be seen already as users have demonstrated: last month Finnish person witnessed and recorded an episode (via camera phone) where two guards used excessive force as they were calming down the subject. After uploading the incident on YouTube it soon became so popular that it exceeded the threshold of national media. This lead to suspension of the guards and an police investigation of the incident.
For example the known Finnish Web 2.0 service, IRC Gallery (counterpart of MySpace), could be seen evolving to a whole new level. As the service is already extremely popular among youngsters; 60 percent of people with age between 13-19 use the service daily, but picture what would happen if its use wouldn’t require computer anymore, only your mobile device?
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SOCIAL NETWORKS IN YOUTUBE
Social networks contain entities which can be viewed as nodes connected with links or edges. Nodes and edges form a sociogram which is same as social network. One link or edge can be weighted. Weighting may represent for example frequency of interaction or traffic flowvi. YouTube contains registered users. Users are thought as nodes. Users can give comments to each other and subscribe content from other users. Commentary and subscriptions can be thought as links between nodes. Weights are given when many comments are received from same source. We used Agnavii software to analyze gathered data. Agna is freeware software used to analyze and visualize sociogram. Agna has possibility to give weights and directions to links between nodes.
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FINNISH GROUPS - ANALYSIS AND RESULTS
YouTube users may form groups. Groups have one owner and it can have many members. One user can belong to many groups and apparently also be owner of many. Two groups, Finlandviii and Lordiix, and their members were examined separately. Groups were selected to easily receive a subset of users for analysis. These groups were chosen because we assumed that their users might form a social network. This
assumption was made because selected groups were ought to consist mainly Finnish users. Members of the studied groups – Finland: 48, Lordi: 43. We gathered data manually from YouTube web site and analyzed data with Agna. When user A had commented or subscribed user B link from A to B was set into Agna. This formed directed link between users. Weight is given for link when user A had commented B many times. If one comment links user, weight is one. If two, comments weight is two and so on. Subscription is made only once so there is no possible weighting in subscription networks. User names were collected first from Finland group. After complete account listing comments from users in same group were mapped and a network diagram was established. Finland didn't form any commentary network. It didn’t have any comments from users within the group to users in the same group. Comments existed though but they were not within group members. Group Lordi's accounts were collected similarly and users were mapped to each other using commentary as link. Network was established and can be seen in Figure 1 Group Lordi – Members’ commentary. Lordi members also had received many comments from outside the group. Users can subscribe videos from each other. When user A uploads a video and user B is subscribed user A's videos YouTube informs user B that new content has been published. User B can subscribe to user A only once. We investigated if these subscriptions form social networks in members of the two groups. Both groups were investigated separately. Subscribers were mapped to users. Subscriptions can be seen in Figure 2 - Group Lordi - Members' subscriptions and Figure 3 - Group Finland - Members' subscriptions. Finland group didn't form any commentary network and links in other networks are also rare. It might be that social grouping is not made in YouTube service except in few rare occasions or our data wasn't large enough. YouTube web site is organized in such a way that network
analysis for bigger masses should be done using software or significant amount of time should be reserved.
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CONCLUSIONS
The main goal was to study and analyze Finnish communities on YouTube service, to see if social networks could be found. However the results of the study reveal that the concept social network didn’t appear among the studied groups. There is no commenting (links) within group members; instead the users mainly commented the video clips. Comments and subscriptions few users received came mainly outside of the group. Maybe aspects of social network could be found when the study focuses on used tags, analysing them as links, rather than the users and the groups, and their relations. Social networks could also be found if the material of the study was more extensive. The categorized structure of the YouTube service can also hinder the appearance of social networks in groups. The real question is about the content of the YouTube service in the future. Is the service becoming a portal of illegal material and less of user generated content? This can be seen (at least in the Finnish groups) by looking at the existing statistics, posted comments and subscriptions, which mainly focus on the (copy righted) video clips uploaded by the users, not the users themselves.
FIGURES, ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES
Figure 1 - Group Lordi – Members’ commentary
Figure 2 - Group Lordi - Members' subscriptions
Figure 3 - Group Finland - Members' subscriptions
REFERENCE LIST
i O’Reilly, Tim. (2005) What is Web 2.0. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
ii
YouTube service. http://www.youtube.com
iii Nielsen, Jakob. (2006) Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html iv Om, Malik. (2006) YouTube Drops Hammer on TinyTube. http://gigaom.com/2006/12/02/youtube-tinytube/ v Kirkpatrick, Marshall. (2006) YouTube Going Mobile… in 14 Months? http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/02/youtube-going-mobile-in-14-months/
vi
Lugano, Giuseppe. TJTSK63 - INTRODUCTION TO MOBILE SOCIAL SOFTWARE APPLICATIONS. Lecture II - The Science of Networks. http://users.jyu.fi/~gilugano/MoSoSo/lectures.html
vii
Agna software. http://www.geocities.com/imbenta/agna/ Finland. YouTube group. http://youtube.com/group/finland
viii
ix
Lordi. YouTube group. http://youtube.com/group/lordisuomi