I'm shocked that such a big-data company has missed the mark on ratings by this much. Especially given that they have Flash running in the browser. If I were Y

I'm shocked that such a big-data company has missed the mark on ratings by this much. Especially given that they have Flash running in the browser. If I were YouTube, I would start by automatically ranking the videos by the percentage of times it was completely played but discounting times it was played completely and the page was just left open with no activity (to counteract the people who opened the page and ignored it afterwards, or left their machines idle). Discard the 5% outliers on either end of the spectrum and you should have a pretty decent idea of which videos are popular and which ones are boring. After all, don't they care mostly about whether the videos are engaging? It seems like there should be a ton of techniques that they should have already been using to supplement the star ratings in order to fine tune any algorithms they wanted to play with.