User and group networks on YouTube: A comparative analysis

YouTube is the largest video-sharing social network where users (aka channels) can create links to any other users. Moreover, initially, users were allowed to create and join special groups of interest. Therefore, two types of online social networks can be defined. First, a user network where the nodes represent the users and the edges represent the social ties (friendship) between users. Second, a group network where the nodes represent the groups and the edges represent the social ties between groups, due to shared users. As the group network can be apprehended as the ground-truth overlapping community graph (where the nodes are the discovered communities and the links represent the overlap between the communities) of the user network, it is of prime interest to analyze and compare their topological structure. In this paper, we report the results of an extensive comparative evaluation of various macroscopic topological properties of both networks based on data from over one million users. Additionally, the community structure of the networks are uncovered using an overlapping community detection algorithm and the relationship between their community structure is investigated. The results of this study allow a better understanding of the relations between the mesoscopic and the macroscopic properties of online social networks, both from a topological and a functional point of view.