9 ms·
Youtube retires video responses
- MartinMond 13y agoI wonder what the reverse click-through rate was. When you watched a video that was a response to another video, YouTube showed "This is a video response to ______" I personally used that a few times, unlike video responses which I don't remember ever using.
- javindo 13y agoI had a small video on my channel a while ago which originally procured a few thousand hits but when someone made a much more popular video response (made popular due to virality through reddit/digg) my viewings for that video shot up due to, as you described, "reverse click-through".
- smackfu 13y agoYeah, is it any surprise that the click-through rate would be abysmal? People want to watch the video, not responses to the video. But as you say, when you are on the response, you may actually want to watch the original video and so the reverse click-through rate should be much higher.
- CaptchaReader 13y agoI stopped clicking on video responses when I realised that almost all of them were spam videos trying to get some views after the original video went viral.
- denzil_correa 13y agoYoutube Video Response spam was pretty nasty. It did attract some attention for unique spam detection algorithms for video responses as well [0,1]. [0] Fabricio Benevenuto, Tiago Rodrigues, Virgilio Almeida, Jussara Almeida, Chao Zhang, and Keith Ross. 2008. Identifying video spammers in online social networks. In Proceedings of the 4th international workshop on Adversarial information retrieval on the web (AIRWeb '08), Carlos Castillo, Kumar Chellapilla, and Dennis Fetterly (Eds.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 45-52. DOI=10.1145/1451983.1451996 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1451983.1451996 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1451983.1451996 [1] http://www.iiitd.edu.in/~ashish/PST-2013.pdf http://www.iiitd.edu.in/~ashish/PST-2013.pdf
- Houshalter 13y agoThey were abused by spammers, but it was a nice feature, and had a lot of legitimate users as well. Maybe it wasn't used a lot on mainstream youtube, but there were places where people commonly made videos to respond to the arguments made in another video, for example. I don't see the point in getting rid of it. They suggest people should search for responses to the video instead. Few will and even if you do, you don't have a good chance of finding them necessarily.
- ajanuary 13y agoVideo responses are often used by content creators that want people to submit content for mashups. Wonder how they'll do it now.
- morsch 13y agoIdeally, an existing or a new competitor will fill the void. I really like YouTube and I realize there are viable alternatives, but web video often feels like more of a monoculture than it should be.
- saurik 13y agoYou can't effectively compete against YouTube for this particular space (which is why even though there are alternatives it still feels like a monoculture): the reason that website exists is because Google has a sufficient monopoly in search advertising that they can afford to dominate any other market they want by operating well below cost. Supposedly they finally got YouTube profitable (at which point you can just view YouTube as a legitimate investment), but this was after years of running the website at a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
- Grue3 13y agoYoutube has been doing nothing but fuck content creators lately.
- anxiousest 13y agoVideos of interest would be tagged accordingly.
- arc_of_descent 13y agoThere are lots of guitar competitions hosted on YouTube. The way to enter this competition is by replying to the original video. Maybe by using the title, description, etc. the competition creator can aggregate them and create a playlist but that's more work for them. Just browsing through the video responses is a much quicker way currently for both the competition creator and participant.
- eterm 13y agoPerhaps a hashtag would be in order? ;)
- arc_of_descent 13y agoSure. But what I don't understand about the spam video responses meme in this thread is that the video owner can currently choose to automatically accept video responses or not.
- epaga 13y agoAt first I thought this meant video comments had been retired. For a split second there I thought the world had been suddenly healed of a great evil and had great joy. Alas, it passed.
- rossjudson 13y agoExactly. Video is so bloody inefficient for anything other than how-to. Video is lazy journalism for those unwilling to subject themselves to the rigors of concision or clarity demanded by the written word. When the video/text ratio of a site rises, I stop visiting.
- orblivion 13y ago.0004% of the respondees or .0004% of visitors?
- pliny 13y agoA lot of vitriol in the comments of that post. I wonder how many people will stop using Google products as a result of this design decision.
- lukio 13y agoNO! I'm afraid of change!
- buro9 13y agoThe thing that bugs me about the way Google retires something is that they do this: 1) Retire a feature 2) Offer a half-arsed work-around 3) Wait an indeterminable period of time 4) Release a new feature that covers the original use-case That's crap, as users are stuck at #2 for ages and some of them migrate away to use other tools that cover this use-case. All this method achieves is to annoy every user that used the feature (even if they seldom used it). Surely it would be better to: 1) Release a new feature that covers the original use-case 2) Wait a declared period of time (short or long) 3) Retire a feature Which means people can immediately start using the new way. And if the new feature fully covers the use-case of the old one, then #2 could be skipped altogether.
- raverbashing 13y agoBut sometimes they don't care for the original use case, so there's no point in replacing it, just retiring
- buro9 13y agoThe original use-case was an engagement mechanism. Their statement is: > So, on September 12 we’re going to retire this little-used feature as we work to develop more effective fan engagement tools for creators. They are going to replace it with a new thing to cover the engagement mechanism. It is true that with things like Google Reader it was not being replaced. But in this case their statement declares an intention to replace the retired feature with something else that helps solve the engagement scenario.
- RivieraKid 13y agoNobody used that feature.
- buro9 13y ago4 out of every 1 million. Which isn't many, but it might have been critical to those 4. And given the numbers involved when we talk about YouTube, it's not like it's really as low as 4 people, it's 4 out of 1 million views on a site that generates 1 billion unique visits each month ( https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/en-GB/statistics.html https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/en-GB/statistics.html ). It's actually a large number of users then.
- RivieraKid 13y agoWhy are people upvoting this submission? What's interesting about the fact that YT removed some insignificant and unused feature?
- lrem 13y agoBecause Google. Similar thing happened to me when I could not publish a paper for a long time due to no interest in a subject... Until somebody published a similar thing with a Google affiliation. Then I couldn't publish it cause it was not original any more.
- simias 13y agoI find it notable that something that seemed so prominent on a very popular website like youtube only had .0004% click-through rate.
- VLM 13y agoI find it interesting that basically 100% of videos were from spammers (spare me the rounding error anecdote) so the CTR for video spam is "about" two orders of magnitude lower than the supposed (although highly gamed and faked) CTR for banner ads which are also by definition 100% unwanted spam. So are there really two orders of mag of fraud in the bigger industry of banner ads, or despite popular belief is video two orders of mag less compelling than static banner ads or email spam... Something doesn't add up.
- unreal37 13y agoI support removing video responses. They were useless. Upvote!
- Grue3 13y agoBecause it wasn't insignificant, and is actually used?
- RivieraKid 13y agoIt was actually used, but by a fraction of users.
- JoshTriplett 13y agoI've only ever seen one useful thing done with video responses: a kind of pseudo-playlist, where the next video is a response to the previous one, making it easy to click from one to the next. With YouTube's new playlist interface, even that's no longer useful. (And with the ten-minute length limitations lifted, the need for multi-part videos has gone down significantly, so only long-running series need them anymore, and those can easily create playlists.) Now if only they'd bring back the ability to subscribe to a playlist rather than a channel. I still have some playlist subscriptions, but you no longer have the option of following a playlist without seeing all the other videos from that channel.
- badman_ting 13y agoIt is right and good to kill things nobody uses. Come on with the bellyaching, on this one. Google Reader this wasn't.
- lucb1e 13y agoI used it
- darkxanthos 13y agoThere can be features with VERY poor CTR overall that are still valuable for very specific and valuable segments of your population of users. I wonder how much they dug into this and explored the potential systemic impact? I assume they did... but I can't help but have some doubt.
- dylangs1030 13y agoNot surprising. There's really not much justification for getting worked up over this. They're not sunsetting a critical component of Youtube. This isn't a Google Reader...come on. 4 people in a million? You'd get rid of the feature too. That's what you should do - it might alienate four people, but honestly, your business has to pick and choose which customers to piss off. You really can't please everyone in the world with your decisions, and this frankly wasn't useful to Youtube from a mathematical perspective. The math pretty much proves it - this was a smart decision. People will adapt and get over it. This is barely news.
- wpietri 13y agoFour clicks in a million is not 4 people in a million. Unless all of your users show up exactly once per month, click one thing, and leave. Which is probably not the YouTube model. Further, who these people are matters. The number of active editors on Wikipedia is about 0.0004% of total users. But if you kill something even a small percentage of them use, god help you. Most importantly, people aren't mathematical entities. You may sometimes have to piss some customers off. But most of the time you don't have to piss anybody off. And that's a good choice, because unlike, say, your average integer, people have memories, and they talk with one another. Product decisions aren't mathematical decisions; they're human decisions. Ones often helped by good math.
- codeulike 13y agoTheorem: Features need to be trimmed now and then for a piece of software to survive in the long term - otherwise it evolves towards infinite complexity and feature bloat, and subsequently ossifies. If you're one of the 1 in 100,000 youtube users that enjoyed this feature, you're upset that it got removed. But for the greater good you should just accept you were unlucky. The alternative is a system (and UI) that gets more and more complex over time to the detriment of everyone Discuss.