Web Video in Numbers - An Analysis of Web-Video Metadata

Web video is often used as a source of data in various fields of study. While specialized subsets of web video, mainly earmarked for dedicated purposes, are often analyzed in detail, there is little information available about the properties of web video as a whole. In this paper we present insights gained from the analysis of the metadata associated with more than 120 million videos harvested from two popular web video platforms, vimeo and YouTube, in 2016 and compare their properties with the ones found in commonly used video collections. This comparison has revealed that existing collections do not (or no longer) properly reflect the properties of web video "in the wild".Comment: Dataset available from http://download-dbis.dmi.unibas.ch/WWIN

The Long Tail of Web Video

Web Video continues to gain importance not only in many areas of computer science but in society in general. With the growth in numbers, both of videos, viewers, and views, there arise several technical challenges. In order to address them effectively, the properties of Web Video in general need to be known. There is however comparatively little analysis of these properties. In this paper, we present insights gained from the analysis of a data set containing the meta data of over 100 million videos from YouTube. We were able to confirm common wisdom about the relationship between video duration and user engagement and show the extreme long tail of the distribution of video views overall. Such data can be beneficial in making informed decisions regarding strategies for large scale video storage, delivery, processing and retrieval