Youtube wants us to spend more time there
Youtube is on a quest to get the users of their site to watch more videos, and to stay longer there. In order to make that happen, they will soon be giving us more and better video suggestions to click on.
Those additional clicks are the goal and the primary tool is a team of about a dozen engineers, designers, and project managers who are massaging the design and algorithms of YouTube. Their goal is to give its YouTube users exactly what they want, even when those users are not quite sure what they want themselves. All of this is to get them to spend a few more minutes on the Youtube site every day, according to a CNET story, something which would make Youtube owner Google very happy.
Hunter Walk, the director of product management at YouTube, is leading this effort at site user-time management. He says, “Our average user spends 15 minutes a day on the site. They spend about five hours in front of the television. People say, ‘YouTube is so big,” but I really see that we have a ways to go.” How big? No one is telling, but they do say that about 20 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute of every day, on average. That is the equivalent of 100,000 full-length movies every week. There must be hundreds of millions of videos to choose from, and the job that Walk’s team is tackling is to show every individual user the dozen or so that they would enjoy the most.
The plan, of course, is to have more people stay longer so that the site can sell more advertising and thus perhaps begin to make a profit, something which it has not done yet, even though they are on the road to profitability, according to company sources. Thus is Google once again planning to improve the art of suggesting things that you may like based on what you have liked before. It can be argued whether or not this is a good thing, but is certainly the way the world of marketing are going.
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January 2nd, 2010
I’d spend more time on youtube if it weren’t littered with distracting advertising in every possible corner.
January 3rd, 2010
@mitch
Your totally on target there. The advertising pisses me off too. As if ads on the page weren’t bad enough we have to deal with them in the videos too.
As for the avg amount of time a person spends at the tv a day… 5 hours? I really doubt that. I rarely even watch tv but I spend at least 6 hours a day online.
I’m going to use this video here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsGYh8AacgY&feature=SeriesPlayList&p=FB4D116D74C7B1B8
as an example. It’s called Charlie the unicorn. A hiliarious short with a ton of views. The vid is 3:46 and its had over 4.5 mil views. That’s not even including how many alternate copies there are of this vid online.
I don’t think very many tv shows get those kinds of numbers.
January 7th, 2010
Viacom and Youtube case moving forward delete your comments if you don’t want your information to be compromised to Viacom. Conspiracy is brewing here, this is somehow connected to the New World Order I’m pretty sure. Illuminati Elite run the Earth.
May 1st, 2011
Walking in the precesne of giants here. Cool thinking all around!
May 3rd, 2011
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