YouTube SFU Crawls 2007-2008 (Collection)
Repeated crawls of YouTube made in 2007 and 2008 by Xu Cheng, Cameron Dale and Jiangchuan Liu of Simon Fraser University, as published on the data page of the university's Network Systems Group. There are 94 breadth-first crawls of YouTube's lists of related videos, 35 started between 22 February and 18 May 2007 and 59 between 27 March and 28 July 2008. Each starts from a set of seed videos and follows each video's list of related videos down to depth 3 (to depth 4 in the first crawl, to depth 2 in 2007-0302). The package holds one record for each video a crawl visited (8,490,464 records; uploader, age, category, length, number of views, average rating, number of ratings and number of comments) and one directed link for each entry in a visited video's list of related videos (129,437,347 links, with the position in the list as rank), all marked with the crawl they come from. It also holds 28 update crawls (4,623,189 records with the views, rating, number of ratings and number of comments of videos already seen; 7 in 2007 and 21 in 2008), the video file sizes and bitrates measured in three further crawls (552,647 records), and a table that describes each of the 126 crawls from its log.
Cite this dataset at
youtube-sfu-collection.echo.directory
Analytics
The full graph has 23,910,652 nodes; this view shows the 1,000-node sample the pipeline drew for display. Node size is centrality, colour is community.
Record
- Catalog key
youtube-sfu-collection- Authors
- Cheng, Xu; Dale, Cameron; Liu, Jiangchuan
- Year
- 2008
- Source paper
- Statistics and Social Network of YouTube Videos
- DOI / arXiv
- 10.1109/iwqos.2008.32
- License
- Academic use only (LicenseRef-Research-Only)
- Records
- 8,490,464
- Nodes
- 23,910,652
- Edges
- 125,616,681
- Collected
- 2007-02 to 2008-09 (2000s)
- Tasks
- From the graph: link prediction, community detection
- Region
- Global (inferred: the platform is used worldwide)
Provenance
- Originally published at
- https://netsg.cs.sfu.ca/youtubedata/ link checked
- Original files as received
- The source files, unconverted, kept for reference: mirrored on echo.directory on 2026-10-09, 5.1 GB across 1155 files. Checksums in MANIFEST.json. For use, start with the data package below.
- Data package
- Version 1.0.0 of this dataset as an ECHO Data Package: items (8,490,464 rows), edges (129,437,347 rows), snapshots (126 rows), x_video_updates (4,623,189 rows), x_video_sizes (552,647 rows).
- Structure
- Directed network, Multigraph (repeated links), Repeated crawls / snapshots
How to cite
BibTeX
@misc{echo2026,
title = {ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online},
author = {Switzer, Braden and Zafarani, Reza},
year = {2026},
url = {https://echo.directory},
note = {Syracuse University}
}
@inproceedings{cheng2008statistics,
title = {Statistics and social network of youtube videos},
author = {Cheng, Xu and Dale, Cameron and Liu, Jiangchuan},
booktitle = {2008 16th International Workshop on Quality of Service},
pages = {229-238},
year = {2008},
organization = {IEEE}
} APA
Switzer, B., & Zafarani, R. (2026). ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online [Data repository]. Syracuse University. https://echo.directory
Cheng, X., Dale, C., & Liu, J. (2008). YouTube SFU Crawls 2007-2008 (Collection) [Data set]. https://doi.org/10.1109/iwqos.2008.32
MLA
Switzer, Braden, and Reza Zafarani. ECHO: Exploratory Compendium of Humanity Online. Syracuse University, 2026, echo.directory.
Cheng, Xu, et al. YouTube SFU Crawls 2007-2008 (Collection). 2008, doi.org/10.1109/iwqos.2008.32.