Exploring the Geography of Tags in Youtube Views
Stéphane Delbruel, Davide Frey, François Taı̈ani · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2015
Although tags play a critical role in many social media,their link to the geographic distribution of user generatedvideos has been little investigated. In this paper, we ana-lyze the correlation between the geographic distribution ofa video’s views and the tags attached to this video in aYoutube dataset. We show that tags can be interpreted asmarkers of a video’s geographic diffusion, with some tagsstrongly linked to well identified geographic areas. Basedon our findings, we explore whether the distribution of avideo’s views can be predicted from its tags. We demon-strate how this predictive power could help improve on-linevideo services by preferentially storing videos close to wherethey are likely to be viewed. Our results show that even witha simplistic approach we are able to predict a minimum of65.9% of a video’s views for a majority of videos, and thata tag-based placement strategy can improve the hit rate ofa distributed on-line video service by up to 6.8% globally,with an improvement of up to 34% in the USA.