A case study of online competitive video dynamics

In the few years YouTube has been around, it has grown into a powerful new medium which has affected fame, politics, marketing and activism. Yet in spite of its powerful cultural impact, there seems to be very little information that talks about how exactly YouTube works and how it has the effect it does.

This is not a big surprise: like other web giants, YouTube is a closed, monolithic web service. To help its users sift through the massive video database, sophisticated algorithms produce real time charts, generate content suggestions and map video relations. And just like Google PageRank, the algorithms behind all this have become a valuable trade secret.

This raises a bunch of questions. Is there such a thing as a 'PageRank' on YouTube? Just how does a video get popular? Does everyone have an equal chance at fame?

These questions become even more important when you consider the phenomenon of online contests powered by user-generated media. And of course, that's something that we're very interested in here at Strutta...