Are YOU the next YouTube Celebrity?
YouTube, which started as a simple video sharing website, has become one of the major sources of entertainment for people all around the world today. There are over 4 billion views on the website each day. Videos are constantly becoming viral, and ordinary people are transforming into celebrities overnight. With the huge networks of videos and people that the YouTube community sustains, the site is becoming much more a social website than the simple video sharing website that it once used to be.
The YouTube community is a social network itself. The nodes of this network are the users and their respective channels, and the directed edges are subscriptions of users to other users. This network largely relies on famous YouTubers, some of whom have millions of subscribers. There are many categories of celebrities on Youtube: musicians, dancers, comedians, makeup gurus, news reporters, teachers, and much more. Users interested in certain things are likely to subscribe to more channels in the same category. Therefore, the YouTube network will likely have somewhat distinct components, split into different genres of content.
So what does it take for a video to go viral? First assume that it is a quality video, maybe funny, interesting, or perhaps controversial. In most cases, videos posted on the website are meant for a small group of people: family, friends, a club in a university. This small network of people watches it, share it among themselves, discuss it. A couple of them may serve as local bridges and share it with their other networks. However, the key to YouTube is that all videos (unless you change its settings) are open to the public. Say someone is surfing through the site one day and discovers this video, probably through searching for a similar topic. He shares this video with his friends, and now another, disjoint, network of people have seen this video. Because YouTube is viewable in most countries in the world, there is no geographical limit to where the video can be spread. This causes a graph of many disjoint networks of people who have watched this video. This snowball effect can quickly increase the views of a video, and after it reaches a certain amount of views, it comes up on the home page of YouTube. At this point, the video has gone viral.
Because the YouTube network is extremely large, it is much easier for a video to be lost in the millions of posts each day than for it to become viral. Although we can analyze the process of a video becoming viral, we must keep in mind that there are many other factors in the process.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/magazine/on-youtube-amateur-is-the-new-pro.html?pagewanted=all
-firtrees