A Characterization of User Navigation Patterns in a Social Streaming Video Application
Abstract
In this work, a characterization of the behavior of users in social media applications of online video streaming is presented. The characterization is done with the objective of answering three motivating questions: (1) Which external sources (websites) most often take users to videos? (2) How is the browsing behavior of users within the video streaming application? (3) How exposed are users to different types of advertising in such applications? Using a navigation database of users of a large Brazilian university campus, studied the behavior of users on YouTube, the largest video streaming application currently. Different from past studies, this work describes the individual behavior of users in the application. In addition, access to data made it possible to analyze the behavior of users when exposed to a new type of online advertisement, advertisements in video format. The main results show that: (1) links that most often lead users to YouTube videos vary depending on the category of the video, (2) after viewing a video, users tend to use search engines and lists of related videos to continue browsing in the application, and (3) advertisements in the video format tend to attract more attention from users than traditional advertisements on links.
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