| The popularity of social media has grown dramatically over the World Wide Web. In this thesis, we provide an overview of the types of social media. We then analyze the video popularity distribution of well-known social video websites (YouTube, Google Video, and the AOL Truveo Video Search engine) and characterize their workload up to an eight month period. We identify trends in the categories, lengths, and formats of those videos, as well as characterize the evolution of those videos over time. We further provide an extensive analysis and comparison of video content categories amongst the main regions of the world, uncovering region and country-specific trends. Music dominates social video popularity when viewing world data, while music, comedy and entertainment are categories which are consistently popular at the region level. |
