Unveiling the Patterns of Video Tweeting: A Sina Weibo-Based Measurement Study

Sina Weibo is the most popular Twitter-like microblog service in China. Contents, such as texts, pictures, music, videos, are propagated rapidly by tweeting and retweeting among users. In this paper, we conduct a measurement study on the patterns of video tweeting over the Sina Weibo system. We build a customized measurement platform to collect a huge amount of data (e.g., video tweets, user/video information, etc) from 1 million Weibo users on the Sina Weibo system. Our measurements enable us to understand the sources and characteristics of tweeted videos, geographical distribution of viewers, distribution of viewing devices, popularity dynamics of tweeted videos, etc. We observe frequent flash crowds occur for popular tweeted videos due to social tweeting. We also analyze how social links among Weibo users impact video tweeting and it is found that the majority of viewers are within 3 hops from the original tweet publisher. Finally, we discuss potential implications of our measurement results on the design of future social video distribution infrastructures.