Youtube Research: How people Interact with videos

There is a large amount of user research which goes into building a quality website and this keeps throwing up some interesting user insigh...

There is a large amount of user research which goes into building a quality website and this keeps throwing up some interesting user insights. Youtube has been sharing it for a while and in the past month has revealed two very interesting research on usability and user behavior.
  1. First is this graph which shows the number of videos that receive specific star ratings amazingly there are some 1-stars and a huge amount of 5-stars, and then basically no 2, 3, or 4 stars. The chart above doesn't means that 5 star rating systems are bad it only means that the rating system is really dependent on the how engaging is the content being consumed an also the use of the rating in relation to the user.For a youtube which have a shorter more hit or miss kind of content rating doesn't gives the user something while on sites like IMDB, netflix, Amazon and others which have long form more engaging content the star system puts more weight on the person rating it ( since they would not like to get crappy recommendations themselves ) rather than the person who posted it making it more responsible.
  2. The second insight is shown in the image below which highlights the difference between the kinds of users youtube has

According to youtube:
One of the most important findings has to do with the difference between the large group of users who are on YouTube simply to watch videos and a smaller, but very important, group of more engaged users -- often uploaders. The latter group will, unsurprisingly, care about details like how to make communication with their audience easier and more effective, how to grow their audience, and even how to make money on YouTube. The former, on the other hand, want as simple of an interface as possible: "Just let me watch the video, please!" -- note how differently each kind of user arranged features on the page and the sheer number of elements in the scenario on the right:
This however doesn't mean that youtube can adopt either of two interfaces as a standard since everyone cannot fit nicely into one of the two aforementioned categories -- for instance, there are users who like to watch videos, but they might also occasionally comment or favorite. Their ideal experience likely looks like something in-between the two examples pictured above.

Related

youtube research 6011531465336222502

Post a Comment

2 comments

Phani Raj said...

Hi Abhishek,
Is it possible for you to share the source data interms or links/pdfs etc...

Abhishek said...

The source is youtube blog itself
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/10/inside-user-research-at-youtube.html
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-dominate-ratings.html

item