I tube, you tube, everybody tubes: analyzing the world’s largest user generated content video system

User Generated Content (UGC) is re-shaping the way peo-ple watch video and TV, with millions of video producers and consumers. In particular, UGC sites are creating new viewing patterns, social interactions, empowering users to be more creative, and developing new business opportunities. To better understand the impact of such UGC systems, we have analyzed YouTube, the world-largest UGC VoD sys-tem. Based on a large amount of data collected, we pro-vide an in-depth study of YouTube and other similar UCG systems. In particular, we study the popularity life-cycle of videos, the intrinsic statistical properties of requests and their relationship with video age, and the level of content aliasing or of illegal content in the system. We also pro-vide insights on the potential for more efficient UCG VoD systems (e.g., utilizing P2P systems or making better use of caching). Finally, we discuss the opportunities to leverage the latent demand for niche videos that are not reached today due to information filtering effects or other system scarcity distortions. Overall, we believe that the results presented in this paper are crucial in understanding UGC systems and their inefficiencies, which can have tremendous commercial and technical consequences