Conference for Information Systems Applied Research 2011 CONISAR Proceedings Wilmington North Carolina, USA v4 n1834 _________________________________________________ _________________________________________________ ©2011 EDSIG (Education Special Interest Group of the AITP) Page 1 www.aitp-edsig.org Measuring Propagation in Online Social Networks: The Case of YouTube Amir Afrasiabi Rad a.afrasiabi@uOttawa.ca EECS Morad Benyoucef Benyoucef@Telfer.uOttawa.ca Telfer School of Management University of Ottawa Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5, Canada Abstract We conducted a propagation analysis on an open social network, i.e., YouTube, by crawling one of its friendship networks and one of its subscribers (followers) networks. Our study is unique because it investigates the two main types of connections (i.e., friends and followers) within the same environment and interaction features. We observed that the effect on propagation of people who are not either in a friendship network or a subscription network is higher than that of friends or subscribers. Meanwhile, we found that even though the network of subscribers was denser than the network of friends, the magnitude of propagation in the subscription network was less than in the friendship network. We also noticed a low correlation between the popularity of content and its propagation in general, with a greater correlation in subscription networks than that in friendship networks. Keywords: Social Network, Social Link Type, Information Propagation, Viral Marketing, YouTube 1. INTRODUCTION Social networking websites, such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Orkut, YouTube, etc. are becoming more and more popular. To illustrate this popularity, it is enough to refer to social networks’ usage statistics. In the US alone, social networks attracted more than 90% of all teenagers and young adults (Trusov, Bodapati, & Bucklin, 2010). More than 35 hours of videos are uploaded on YouTube every minute (YouTube LLC., 2010); and over 750 million active Facebook users share more than 30 billion pieces of content, and spend over 23 billion minutes on Facebook every month (Facebook Inc., 2011). The increase in the user population of social networks leads to a rise in user interaction, and ultimately higher volumes of generated and distributed content. This massive popularity of social networks, and their high user-base and user participation rates, along with the enormity and variety of user generated content turned social networking sites into hubs of social activity, and shaped them into a new generation of information mediums. Moreover, the interconnectivity of users in online social networks allows user generated content to be easily propagated through the whole social network. The above mentioned facts attracted the attention of the marketing community. These