The New York Times
had an interesting article, YouTube’s Quest to Suggest More, that covered their
goal to have people stay longer on the site which would increase ad revenue.
Compared to other Web sites with similar content (or really almost any Web
site) they are way ahead. But compared to that other channel for viewing
content, televsion, they are way behind. Users spend an average of 15 minutes a
day on the site and they spend about five hours in front of the television.
To increase time
spent on YouTube Hunter Walk leads a team of about a dozen engineers, designers
and project managers who are fine-tuning YouTube to users what they want, even
when users aren’t quite sure what they really want. This is where discovery
comes in. One way is to select the 10-15 most appealing videos for a specific
user from their library of over 100 million.
The process starts
with search. The NYT reported that in November, Americans typed some 3.8
billion search queries on YouTube, more than on any search engine other than
Google, according to comScore, a market researcher. But there is a
difference. While Google queries tend to be very specific, users often come to
YouTube with requests as vague as “funny videos.” This is where discovery can
help by providing a range of results that are not simply literal matches.
One challenge is when
to anticipate the user might be getting tried of their original topic and
proactively offer related content to keep them on site. One way to provide good options
suggesting videos that users may want to watch based on prior viewing before, or
on what others with similar tastes have enjoyed. The effort requires
data-mining techniques similar to those used by and Amazon to make music or book recommendations.
Darwin Ecosystems is
also in the discovery business. Instead of offering content in a list format
based on your prior behavior or others similar to you, it offers a set of
topics arranged in a Scan Cloud™
that correlate with the original search term or, as we say attractor. Then you
can hop around to explore the related topics based on your interests. It is an
alternative model to trying to read your mind as YouTube and Amazon do. Instead, it gives you a range of
choices in an easy interface to allow you to better make up your own mind.
Comments