How do you find a video you don't know about?
Imagine this very common scenario. You are at your computer and want to watch videos
to kill some time. You do not have any specific video in mind, but you want
something that’s fresh, popular, and in this case funny. Without the knowledge
of which channels provide that, you go straight to YouTube search and enter the
word ‘funny.’ The results? You mostly see compilation videos of pranks,
bloopers, and fails. Sure these types of
videos can be entertaining, but they hardly reflect the top videos online at
that given moment that are funny. This
way of discovering trending videos is broken.
It is hard to believe how ineffective YouTube can be at
helping users find what they are looking for when you consider just how massive
it has become. YouTube is the second
largest search engine in the world after Google, with 3 billion unique searches
monthly. Just because it is popular does
not mean users are receiving the best results possible. YouTube search consistently pulls up videos that do not meet the criteria of users. Consider that YouTube videos have a bounce rate of roughly 43%.That means 43% of the time a user opens a
video, they close it almost immediately, realizing it was not what they were
searching for. At the scale YouTube
operates, that is an outstanding amount of disappointed users.
It is not to say YouTube always fails its users. It is no
coincidence the site has become what it is. If you have some idea of what you are looking
for; a specific event, a Youtuber series, or a scene, its search works
flawlessly. Their ranking system, which
relies mostly on watch-time (the total amount of time viewers have spent
watching a video) insures that the results you get are the most engaging videos
with your keywords. The issue is that on
a site that gets 300 hours of new video content every minute, it is difficult
to know what is out there to search for.
Why does video discovery have to suck?
Is there a solution?
There is a simple solution to ensure that search results
reflect the content of the video, and in part, better fulfill what the user is
searching for. That solution is
commentary. Relying purely on tittles and descriptions makes for ineffective
results. Rather, going into the comments people have made about a video and
indexing them allows for a far more powerful search. The manner with which people talk about a
video in Comments reflects the same language and connotations used in
searches. Dissecting what people have
said about the video, and identifying what part of the videos they are
referencing, allows for a deeper understanding of exactly what the video is
about and what level of engagement it is receiving. Comments are much more likely to match the way
a person would search for a type of video.
Unreel has pioneered this approach and incorporated comments
about specific moments within videos into its search algorithm. This means that when you enter a keyword into
search on Unreel the results are comments at time-stamped moments in the videos
that have elicited a response that uses your keyword. If you search ‘funny,’ the videos’ results
are the moments in videos that people actually called funny, not videos with
the word funny in the tittle. This
ensures you are seeing what you wanted to see, even if you were not sure exactly
what that was.
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