An Analysis of the Subscription in User-Generated Content Video Systems

The subscription in UGC (user-generated content) video systems provides shortcuts for users to be aware of emerging videos from their subscribings. While the subscription is deemed to have great impacts on video views, its patterns and impacts on the user popularity are not well understood. By measuring YouKu, the largest UGC video system in China, we have found stretched exponential distributions for subscribers, subscribings, rather than power-law distributions. We further examine to whom users would like to subscribe and the correlation between the friendship and subscription. Finally, we analyze the impacts of subscription on user popularity. Our findings can be leveraged for the design of subscription/video recommendation systems and the prediction schemes in UGC video systems.