What Should I Watch Next?
What have TiVo, Tioti and TVGuide got in common with the video meme trackers just launched by Megite and Tailrank? Sure, they all add, reveal or exploit social connectivity around video content, but they do it for the same reason. They're all trying to help you answer this question: What should I watch next?
This, I think, is the really hard, valuable-to-solve problem in video right now. Note, first, what this isn't. It's not a search problem. For sure, plenty of people are asking Google where to find the Timberlake SNL skit. But you're looking for this clip because someone - a friend, blogger or journalist - has already excited your interest. So you watch it. What do you watch next? One of the reasons that YouTube grew so fast is that it was much better at answering this question than anyone else. Even though Google Video belatedly added social features like rating, tagging and embedding, it failed to understand that none of these features actually touched the question of what you ought to be watching next. Google Video is still incredibly bad at answering this question. Go look. it's still acting like it's a search problem, when it isn't.
As Pete Cashmore notes, however, YouTube's ranking system is pretty broken right now. None of the ranking metrics - views, ratings, comments - are particularly good at helping you discover new content that you'll like. And, as YouTube's star has risen, it's become increasing susceptible to gaming, ranging from cheap and cheerful spambots inflating view figures to sophisticated, paid-for marketing tactics like those used to elevate the Rocky Balboa trailer to attention. I've spoken to plenty of people whose trust has been lost as a result and who think, rightly or wrongly, that these days, you just buy your way into YouTube's feature lists.
A rash of alternative video voting communities have sprung up over the last twelve months, of which, Digg Video, VideoSift, Flurl and StumbleUpon Video are perhaps the biggest and / or best known. This type of site provides two advantages over YouTube's own ranking systems. First, it can aggregate videos across several sites. (An increasingly notional benefit, as the same video footage turns up on multiple sites). Second, it can potentially coalesce a more cohesive or homogenous community, at least at small scales. As long as you choose a community of like-minded individuals, it's quite likely they'll crowd-surface stuff that you'll like too. This is key and does at least get at the root of the problem here, which is that in order to answer your question 'What should I watch next?' at all well, the system has got to have some understanding of your taste, or at least an understanding of things that can be predictors for it. As the size of the voting community grows, of course, the likelihood that you'll agree with a simple majority decreases and as the importance of the site rises, so too does the risk of potentially distorting voting fraud.
This is one of the point's that Arrington makes about the new video memetrackers, which base their results on blog buzz; that they should be less susceptible to voting fraud. To some extent, this is right. It's harder to set up a fake blog than a fake user account, though only just. And the meme trackers mitigate the risk of fake blogs to the extent that they upweight more authoritative blogs, though at the cost of increased methodological opacity.
It's interesting to see some of the different approaches here and the results that they yield. Both Megite and Tailrank upweight for authority. Neither Technorati, nor our own site, Viral Video Chart, do. There's a lot of James Brown on all four sites today, but the distribution is quite different. Here's the number of James Brown videos in the top twenty on each of the four sites for 27 December 2006, three days after the big man died.
- Technorati - 10 videos / 20
- Viral Video Chart - 8 videos / 20
- Tailrank - 5 videos / 20
- Megite - 3 videos / 20
My hunch is that James Brown is being linked to a lot and that the democratic, one link / one vote nature of the top two sites here captures this demotic buzz quite well. In fact, on 26/12/2006, 12 of the top 20 videos (and, as Jeff Jarvis notes, 7 of the top 10) on Viral Video Chart were James Brown numbers. (Note also that we compile our chart over the previous 24 hours, so that's hundreds of bloggers posting James Brown videos on Christmas Day).
It's also interesting to compare the number of links that these sites are finding for the top James Brown clip. Here are the results.
- Technorati - 143 links / 48 hours
- Viral Video Chart - 82 links / 24 hours
- Tailrank - 4 links / unknown time period
- Megite - 3 links / unknown time period
This makes me suspect that Tailrank and Megite are covering significantly fewer blogs than Technorati and Viral Video Chart. Perhaps precisely because they are trying to cover the more authoritative ones. But then this does lead to the result that a link from just a handful of influential blogs is all that's needed to make their front page. Which of course feels much more like the good old days of editorial selection and much less like buzz-tracking.
More coverage on the launch of video verticals by Megite and Tailrank here, here, and here. Rex Dixon looks like he got the scoop on the Megite launch.
I haven't had much chance to think how the new services from Megite and Tailrank impact on what we're trying to do with the Viral Video Chart, but they do raise some obvious questions.
- Should we put embedded videos on our chart pages? The reader would have to navigate less but it's harder to get an overview of what the top videos are.
- Should we give more prominence to the conversation around the videos - e.g. should we publish excerpts from the linking blog posts next to the videos?
- Should we downweight the less authoritative blogs? This would have an immediate impact on our chart, downgrading many of the MySpace videos.
- What would be the best way to measure authority and weight blogs when ranking videos? Should we use inward links to measure influence like Technorati? Should we consider the reach of those blogs (which would, for instance, be closer to the way in which radio airplay is calculated and weighted when compiling the Billboard Hot 100)? Should we consider the amount of videos that bloggers link to, or how successful those bloggers are at picking 'winners'?
- Most importantly of all, what can we do to help people who want to know what to watch next? Viral Video Chart can help a little at the moment, but really only a little. It will show you what the rest of the world, for better or worse is talking about right now / today / this week. But we don't make any attempt to find out what videos you've already seen. Nor to ascertain your taste.
The question of what I should watch next is primarily a question of taste. But none of the video memetrackers, us included, are tackling the taste issue head-on. It's implicit, perhaps, but only to the extent that there's a lazy, snooty and possibly incorrect assumption that the people who blog (or blog 'authoritatitavely') share my taste (in videos) more than the people who don't.
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