The other day...I was at a friend of mine, place, and his connection(defualt?) was controlled by google(s) search of you-tube, he is only over 40 years of age, but runs a business and not too savory[savant]...anyhow...it seems that they pick "popular"..."promoted" is key...(K)eep (I)t(S)imple (S)avant...thanks for the Intelligenstia-phenomena!*!
HotForWords Forums » HotForWords General
YouTube's Most Popular Category
(182 posts)-
leonard
MemberPosted 8 months ago # -
pedanticKarl
MemberAs Marina Twittered the other day; "Go to youtube.com new look!"
Can you tell what else has changed?
YT dropped two items below each video.
One was how long ago the video was published; (e.g. "2 days ago")
The other item that is missing is the star ratings. They are no longer there.
As Marina said, looks like more space for Ads.Thinking outloud; is the removal of the ratings and publish date only to free up web page real estate or will YT also remove those items from their calculations in theor algorithm. Not sure, and my guess is that it is a little bit of both.
Posted 8 months ago # -
pedanticKarl
MemberAnother new feature of the new YT pages is the animated video thumbnails.
Hold your cursor over the video thumbnail and it animates scenes from the video.Posted 8 months ago # -
pedanticKarl
MemberYouTube Popular Video pages overview:
In the next series of posts, I will demonstrate with the use of graphs how the YT Popular pages work (up to a point) and what it takes to get on the board and on to the first page. That's a huge undertaking.I'm going to drill down from the top vista into the workings of the Popular pages.
First, a very boring graph of the average daily view of any given video on the Popular pages. Nothing special. Take special note of Feb. 19 and Mar. 4 and note there is nothing special there, except when I present another graph.
The next graph shows where the YT Popular data is taken every 30 minutes. Yes, it is a lot of data; 118,992 records (x10 columns) to be exact. Notice the two dates, Feb 19 and Mar 4; this is where YT decided to do some testing and remove the normal videos in specific locations and add 2 months old videos. One of them included the HotForWords video, "Meh!" which was located in position #72 each time.
Reference my prior comment here.
Click to see a larger version of this graph.
Note:
The huge number of views in this graph is meaningless to the YouTuber as these are aggregate numbers used for computational reasons only. What is meaningful is the trend which is even, and the jagged drops and rises which indicate a change of videos. It might be presumed, that if a video or group of videos rise quickly, then they may get pulled off of the board. Look at Feb 10.Posted 8 months ago # -
pedanticKarl
MemberQuizz:
How many unique videos are there on the YT Popular pages each day?If one were to ask how many unique videos there are on the YT Most Viewed pages, the answer might be, no more than 200 unique videos. Videos on the Most Viewed pages change every 48 hours and since not all of the videos are synchronized when they get on the board, in practice, there will be a lot less that 200 unique videos on the Most Viewed board.
How about the Popular board? Can one guess? If one knew how often a video is added and removed, then one could guess. Take a look at the graph and you will see that In February, approximately 400 unique videos are shown on the Popular pages each day.
The left side of the graph that is "grayed out" is data that was taken manually. The rest of the data is auto-captured every 30 minutes.
Take Away:
What is of importance here is that on the Most Viewed board, one's competition is time (i.e 48 hours in which to rise to the first page) and other new videos that rise faster than your own. Worst case scenario is that 99 new videos get on the board ahead of you and push you to the last position. In practice, this doesn't happen, and only occasionally will one type video dominate and control positions, such as the airline disaster videos and Awards shows videos like the Grammy, etc.For the Popular board, there are at least 400 other videos that one is competing against, even though only 100 videos are shown at one time. It is possible that there are more than 400 unique videos, presuming that they change more often than 30 minutes.
The identifying signature that causes one video to be placed in one location over another has not been identified yet. However, as a video gathers more views in a given time frame, then that video will move towards a higher position (i.e. page 1)
Posted 8 months ago # -
pedanticKarl
MemberQuiz: With one 'z' this time.
If you were given the following two choices, but could only pick one, which one would you take?
1. Place my video on the Popular board in position #1 for only one minute per day.
2. Place my video on the Popular board in position #100 for 24 hours per day.This may seem like an unfair question, but the next set of graphs will demonstrate a similar concept in how videos are treated. For example, on the Most Viewed board, the shelf life of a video is fixed at two days. If a video takes almost two days to get on to the Most Viewed board, there is not much opportunity days left to have that video reach page 1.
On the Popular board, there is a similar time restriction, but it is much more complex. Take a look at the following graph. Videos can appear on the Popular board in as little as 8 hours or as much as a week or more.
Notice that there has only been one video that appeared on the board within 8 hours. Can you guess which video that was? It was Fred with the title "Fred on iCarly" with 245,257 views and landed on #63 (Pg4 #3). That video was published on Feb 10 and today, Mar 8, it now has 5,069,840 views.
Click here to view the larger version of this graph.
Note: The horizontal scale is meaningless except in relative terms. Those numbers are the number of snapshots per indicated time frame.
Takeaway:
As can be seen from the two long bars, most of the videos have a shelf life of 1-2 two day. How early a video appears on the board after it is published is critical to both the Most Viewed board and the Popular board. However, there is much greater opportunity for a video to appear on the Popular board since videos as old as a week or more can appear on the board at any time.For example, the video "010 Worst PickUp Lines EVER" by fiveandahalfgirls was placed on the board at position #51 (Pg3 #11), 6 days after the video was published and the video had 4,580 views.
The HotForWords video "FTW" first appeared on Mar 1 with 68,384 views at position #64 (Pg4 #4) and the video was published one day prior. That video had a run all the way to Mar 5 with 197,149 views at #94 (Pg5 #14). The highest position achieved was #33 (Pg2 #13). From the chart above, it is possible that the video may re-appear.
The new YT make over does not show the elapsed time from when a video was published. I don't know if it is for visual display reasons or if that measurement will no longer be used.
Posted 8 months ago # -
HotForWords
Key MasterThey've removed two indicators, elapsed time and the rating. I think they removed time because people were fed up with seeing videos from a week ago all over the boards. The ratings were remove because when a video is a paid advertisement, it ALWAYS gets 2 stars. This way people have to click before they see if a video is crap or not.
Posted 8 months ago # -
leonard
Membertime is key -x- key is time= Habits...I think (they)want to exploit and that is, 'communicated habits'(clicks)...formed by the bosses of youtube???POP for popular...be good! Most recommended..My Best Weekend Ever...youtube is a brain
Posted 8 months ago # -
leonard
MemberPosted 8 months ago # -
pedanticKarl
MemberYouTube Popular board Operation
To the casual YouTube visitor, or even the more technical curious, most people have no idea in the characteristics of how the Popular board operates, which of course is natural and understandable. However, it is imperative for the YouTuber, like HotForWords to understand the characteristics of the Popular board.Look at the following image. One could visualize the YouTube Most Viewed board as two dimensional. There is the dimension of time (48 hrs) and video position (1-100) which is a function of the number of views. Pretty simple, and hackable, but, then mitigated by YT via all kinds of restrictions (e.g. Auto-play is not counted as a view)
Now look at the Popular board. Visualize it as a a multi-dimensional "Most Viewed board". One could also visualize it like a Rubik's cube. Remember my post above regarding the approximate 400 videos that a YouTuber is competing against. On the Most Viewed board, a video remains on the board for 48 hours, albeit having needed a certain high number of views to get on the board.
On the Popular board, one can get on the board with as little as 1,000 views, but the position of those views are "modulated" (On-Off-On). Remember my previous post with the quiz of what is preferable in terms of time spent on the board. More about "modulation" (my language, not YouTube's) in the next post.
Keep in mind, I am not saying that this is actually how YouTube operates the Popular board. I am using the above as a visual aid to allow the reader of this post to get a better idea in how the Popular operates.
There is a ton to talk about the Popular board, but in this venue, I will keep it short. Keep in mind, the Popular board position is complex with greater amount of competition. More about this later when I talk about specific HotForWords videos.
Footnote About Language:
You may have noticed, I have refrained from calling it "Most Popular" as the title of this forum is called "Most Popular Category". Instead, I have used the word "Popular", which is what it is called on YouTube. This begs the question; is the usage of the word "Popular" instead of "Most Popular" an indication of practical conservation of physical web space, or is it intentional to indicate that there is no such thing as "Most" popular, and any thing that YouTube says, must be just plain old popular.Posted 8 months ago # -
pedanticKarl
MemberHow videos are managed on the YouTube Popular board. (Hours are PT)
Videos on the Popular board are managed after the video lands on the board for a small amount of time, then the video is pulled off of the board for a small period of time, and then re-appears. I call this process, "modulation", in other words, "On-Off-On". That is my language and not YouTube's.Take a look at the image below. The HotForWord's video entitled, "Is Terrell Owens handsome?", made it's debut on to the Popular board on Mar 7 at 9:27 AM. Each of the vertical bars represents the number of views and each bar is 30 minutes in duration, which means that the video was on the Popular board for 4 hours, at which time it was pulled off of the board. The position of that video for those 4 hours was #69 (Pg4 #9).
The video disappeared for 3-1/2 hours, and then re-appeared. This time, when the video re-appeared, it moved up to position #66 (lower number means higher value) and stayed on the board for only 2-1/2 hours. Notice the larger jump in views at 6:59 PM.
This behavior as seen in this image is normal and all videos go through this type of modulation. There is nothing extraordinary about that video. The HotForWords video "FTW" had some extraordinary run on the Popular board, which I have alluded to in prior comments.
As of this writing (Mar 10, 8 AM), the HFW video "Is Terrell Owens handsome?" was published on Mar 5 and has only been seen on the Popular board as shown in the image below. It has not re-appeared in the last 3 days, but has the time opportunity to re-appear as indicated by the time duration graph up above.
Click here for a larger image.
Takeaway:
My presumption is that the "modulation" of Popular videos serves two purposes.
One, is a kind of time-sharing, which means that YouTube can offer more videos per day. Instead of only showing 100 videos per day, YT can now show 400 videos per day at the expense of cutting short the exposure to visitors. Remember my quiz question above?Second, by modulating the video's appearance, it mitigates the chance for rigged "views abuse", and since there is a secret algorithm involved, I would not be surprised to see a video get pulled off of the board for having too many views within a short span, which is not accompanied by increasing comments and or ratings.
I have not verified this, and my task ahead is to determine what causes a video to get on to the board, what determines a position on the board, and what causes a video to stay on the board longer than other videos. Lots of challenges ahead.
Summary
This concludes my overview of the YouTube Popular board in terms of general operation. There is sooooo much more to say about this subject, but will have to keep it short.My next few posts will look at specific HotForWords videos and how they performed on the Popular board in relation to those videos which landed on Page #1.
Posted 8 months ago # -
pedanticKarl
MemberThe other day, VenetianPrincess (vprincess) Twittered to Marina:
"@hotforwords They might as well not even show the view count,
since that's pretty much irrelevant now :\"All of my data and research into the Popular board says that video views are as critical as they ever were. Essentially, that is the lifeblood, if you will. It's not that videos views are irrelevant, indeed they are very relevant. What has changed is in the way that those views are measured.
There are countless ways that I can measure video views. For example, I can measure the number of views against the clock; i.e. "number of views per hour". I could also measure video views against another user's videos per given time frame. A sort of grading on the curve if you will or weighted average. A lot more can be said about this topic and I am refining what I have discovered.
Posted 8 months ago # -
HotForWords
Key MasterVenetianPrincess said that YourTubeAdvocate stated that:
Most Popular includes videos that have significantly more views THAN OTHER VIDEOS ON YOUR OWN CHANNEL. This way they can prevent popular channels from always appearing on the list.
Seems kind of counter productive as that will only promote one-off viral videos and make content producers like ourselves never appear.
Plus it would really punish content producers like me. Plus, it could possibly explain why people who upload 20 videos a day often appear?
Here is the video where they talk about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhWkfsllv6Q
Posted 8 months ago # -
HotForWords
Key MasterActually I figured out that it was not the YourTubeAdvocate that came up with the "relative to your other videos on your own channel" theory, but rather some guy commenting on the channel.
I really hate that idea and really don't think it makes sense. Relative to other videos on YouTube perhaps.. but relative to your own channel I don't think would make one bit of sense as it would only promote one-off, viral, flash in the pan videos.
Posted 8 months ago # -
leonard
MemberI love how my brain gets tickled. Guns and you-tube and about ads?...yours as always,thanks for sharing the future...little leonard...mafia of prop.pa.ganders...lol
Posted 8 months ago # -
leonard
Member"come guy"...Now that is funny, Marina.
Posted 8 months ago # -
pedanticKarl
MemberMarina, thank you for your awesome comments above and that great video link.
I agree with your second post about "... relative to your own channel I don't think would make one bit of sense..."In the last month while tracking the Popular board, I got a huge lesson in how it operates. I will continue to monitor that board, but will now switch gears and focus on specific YT Channel's videos performances, like yours, CommunityChannel, WhatTheBuck, etc. This is heady stuff as I am juggling data in three or more dimensions.
For example, the HFW "Am I Normal" video landed on the Popular board last night and I noticed a very interesting correlation / coincidence, which dovetails with your comment above (i.e. "relative to other videos").
Your video landed on the board when the Popular Avg. views dropped by 24% which caused the Popular/HFW views ratio to drop into the "magic area". This drop occurs either when there is a drop in YT Popular views in relation to yours, or your video rises in relation to the YT Popular views. This has happened many times before.
This is very fascinating and I think I may be able to predict when your video gets on to the board. This is not easy as it is similar to trying to shoot at a target while the target moves and you are moving. Got the next three days off, so I'm gonna be busy as a beaver.
Posted 8 months ago # -
leonard
MemberOk...this was todays "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCXiiUb15sw&feature=recommended"...when I clicked 'you tube'...How many people actually click popular? for information?...thank you from the "Feed"
Posted 8 months ago # -
pedanticKarl
MemberMarina, I read all of your comments on the YourTubeAdvocate, and as always, I am highly impressed with your comments and replies, specifically;
"... but how do you think I feel competing with extremely funny people, or talented musicians? Or Miley Cirus? It's a competitive world out there and sometimes you have to do something to stand out. And it's not just about knockers as there is plenty of that."
Damn straight. Personality is everything, but you can't put that on a thumbnail. I applaud you for putting your thoughts into context of the subject of popularity. Very well said. You're awesome.
In regards to the subject of relative views to measure popularity; that gentleman didn't have to make that educated guess. YouTube spells it out clearly. Where? On one's YouTube channel, "Insight" pages.
Go to your YT channel, click Account, then Insight.
The breadcrumb link at the top will say: My Account / Insight - All Videos
Click, the Popularity link. Notice the definition:"Popularity is a relative measure between 0 and 100 of how the
aggregated video views for your channel compare to all other channels."The definition of Popular for one video:
Click on the SUMMARY link, and it shows "My Videos" on the right.
Pick a video. The breadcrumb link at the top will now say something like.
"My Account / Insight / MyVideoAboutSomething"
Click, the Popularity link. Notice the definition:"Popularity is a relative measure between 0 and 100 of
how the views for this video compare to all other videos."Even though, the definition does not clarify "other videos", I think it is fair to expect this definition to be in the same context as previous definition. After all, there are channels that only have one video. How can you compare that one video with other videos you don't have? Obviously, that doesn't make sense as you had already stated that above in your comments.
Posted 8 months ago # -
Che Rambler
MemberBottom line Marina is these people are a threat to your income & the other main YT talent.
Why these A-holes feel the need to do this is unknown to me. But it seems they are shooting themselves in the foot.Posted 8 months ago # -
pedanticKarl
MemberMarina, the "Sexting" video appeared on the
Popular board on Mar 14 at 1:00 PM
at position #62 (pg4 #2) with 31,757 views,
and by 7 PM had moved up to #51 (pg3 #11) with 40,455 views.Posted 8 months ago # -
pedanticKarl
MemberMarina, I am highly confused, or there is something shady going on with "clicks" again. I was about to post some graphs with lots of informative stuff of your "Am I Normal" Video, and I was comparing it to "NoDoubtTv" who was on Pg1 of the Popular pages. As I looked at the "NoDoubtTv" stats, nothing made sense, except that which you had described in your "Stats & Honors" blog, which is, something is rotten in click land.
First, I like the band "No Doubt" with Gwen Stefani who happens to be from nearby where I live. "NoDoubtTV" uploaded about 7 videos in the last week all or most of which have been on Pg. 1 of the Popular board. Here are the stats compared to your "Am I Normal" video.
Current Date/Time: Mar 14, 9:30 PM
HFW video: "Am I Normal"
Published: Mar 10
On Popular board: Mar 11, 9:16 PM with 25,767 views
Current View: 89,552
Current Comments: 829
Current Ratings: 1,034
Clicks: 1,451 http://www.hotforwords.com/2009/03/10/normal/NoDoubtTV: "Vol 1 It's My Life"
Published: Mar 2
On Popular board: Mar 12, 1:18 AM with 15,583 views
Current View: 73,439
Current Comments: 48
Current Ratings: 87
Clicks: 23,348 http://perezhilton.com/Why am I confused?
"NoDoubtTv" was published 8 days before HFW's video and they could only muster 15,000 views in that time where HFW had 25,000 views in one day. Clearly, the rate of views favored HFW.How is it possible for "NoDoubtTv" to have such an extreme low comment count and ratings count with similar views? Is this is a huge red flag indicating manipulated views?
Looking at the "NoDoubtTv" Stats, it shows that the top 5 clicks all come from "perezhilton" and the top 23,000 clicks are from "perezhilton", yet when you visit the perezhilton site, the NoDoubt videos are not at those links in the stats section but on some other page.
OK, lets say that the embedded clicks on the perezhilton site caused NoDoubt to appear on Pg1 of the Popular board. What happened when HFW's "Phelps..." video had 34,000 clicks and normal views and comments ratios. Why did that HFW video not show up on Pg1 of the Popular board? See my comment about that here.
Posted 8 months ago # -
pedanticKarl
MemberMarina, the "Sexting" video is now #39 (pg2, #19) on the Popular board. It has been progressing nicely and there are now 61 Honors. Here are some of the top Honors.
#1 - Most Viewed (Today) - Comedy - Germany
#1 - Most Viewed (Today) - Comedy - Israel
#1 - Most Viewed (Today) - Comedy - Mexico
#1 - Most Viewed (Today) - Comedy - Netherlands
#1 - Most Viewed (Today) - Comedy - Czech Republic
#7 - Top Rated (Today)
#11 - Most Discussed (Today) - ComedyThis is very similar to the FTW video which was designated as 'Comedy'.
I think the category is one factor, but it seems YouTube has also done some tweaking whereby your videos are appearing on the board earlier than before.Hopefully, early Monday morning I'll be putting up the graphs for the "Am I Normal" video which shows the mechanics of how a video progresses forwards and backwards on the Popular board. Very enlightening stuff.
Posted 8 months ago # -
pedanticKarl
MemberAnatomy of a HotForWords video on the Popular board
Before you go cross eyed looking at the graph below, I will list the three important things that I learned from this graph. Click the graph to see the larger extended version.1. The YT Popular board is on a 2 hour cycle (4 bars on the graph) for adding and removing videos.
2. When YT adds and removes videos off of the board, those videos can make or break the progress of your video. Look at the large YT Avg swings.
3. The amount of time that a video is exposed to the world varies. It seems that the videos on the Popular Pg1 have less exposure time than pages 2-5.
Click to see the large extended - scrollable graph.
Why did I choose this HFW video to present certain YT Popular board items of interest?
The HotForWords video, "Am I Normal?" in the graph above represents a full run on the Popular board from debut to the last day of viewing which is appx. 2-1/2 days, which is typical as shown by one of my graphs above. Specifically, this video was not expected to get many views because of a problem with YouTube. The graph above reflects that, but it also shows that everyone else was affected as the YouTube Average views above is down from a typical 150,000 to 119,000 views.Posted 8 months ago # -
pedanticKarl
MemberAnatomy of a HotForWords video on the Popular board (continued)
I ran out of time in the post above. Too many times to the fridge.
You can open the larger graph in another window and follow along.
The HFW video debuted with 25,767 views which is much sooner than had been the typical case, probably due to all views being down due to the YT problem. The initial position was #82 (pg5 #2). Initially, the video was visible to the public for 5-1/2 hours, then disappeared for 6 hours, then re-appeared for 2-1/2 hours.The length of exposure and disappearance depends on what other videos are competing for placement on the Popular board. Look at the last run which was a hard hitting 20 hours of prime time visibility for the US and Europe. Notice that during those 20 hours, the Popular board was subjected to nine different video removals and additions, and the HotForWords video survived them all. The recent HFW video "Sexting" did very well also.
Marina, as any of us would, would preferably have our videos placed on page 1 of the Popular board for best exposure. However, from everything I see right now, I would not dismiss the last pages of the Popular board as being worthless since being on the front page of the Popular does not give you as much time exposure. Marina of course is correct, the majority of people never go past page 1. That's true for me as well, especially when I'm busy. However, even if one person out of 1000 looks past page 1, then there might be as many as 100 visitors viewing the last pages every day. It's possible that as many as 5 new subscribers will discover HotForWords this way.
What is not shown in the graph above, but what is worth mentioning is that the HFW video "Am I Normal?" was also on the Most Viewed board from Wed through late Thursday. When this video's run expired on the Most Viewed board on Thursday, the video was still being presented to the public on the Popular board for another day and a half. This video debuted on page 5 and finished the run at position #74 (pg4 #14) with the best position being #63 (pg4 #3) with 85,217 views.
What else is not shown, but worth mentioning is that the user "NoDoubtTv" debuted on Mar 12, 1:18 AM with 15,583 views at position #15 (pg1 #15) (see comments above)
This is nearly the same time that the HFW was debuted on the board, but yet the "No Doubt" video was placed on the first page of the Popular board. I have developed a crude model of why that is and it needs to be refined. What is interesting is that the "No Doubt" video exposure on the first page was very limited in duration and was only shown for a very limited number of hours, specifically, 2 hrs, 4 hrs and then finally 2 hrs.Posted 8 months ago # -
pedanticKarl
MemberMarina, two HFW videos are on the Popular board. The "Hail Mary" video is on pg3 and the "Sexting" video is on pg4. Both videos are designated as Comedy. Both videos are making an attempting to move forward to page 1. The Sexting video has 249,586 views and 4,105 ratings and was published 5 days ago on Mar 13. It still has 35 Top Honors, so this video is poised to be on the Popular page 1.
Posted 8 months ago # -
HotForWords
Key MasterInteresting article about the website Digg going through a similar transformation as YouTube and the results of that transformation:
Interesting parallel here. Digg wanted to encourage diversity and get more new user's submissions on to their home page, much like YouTube... so they changed their functionality much like YouTube.
And the results have been:
Newer and less active users have seen their stories hit the front page of Digg (much like YouTube getting less popular users on the front page)..
But the sources have tightened to 46% of all Digg front page now coming from only 50 websites.
Much like YouTube's #1 Popular page showing newcomers throughout the day, but a tightening of the sources that are providing the rest of the videos.
So it appears that others are experiencing the same growing pains as YouTube. It seems as though you fix one problem and another problem will sprout up in its place.
Here is the Digg article:
Posted 8 months ago # -
leonard
Member"...state of flux" and " the spam portion of the algorithm recognizes it " seems to be part of the expanding Space-Age diversity. thanks all and master
Posted 8 months ago # -
originalistrick
MemberSuch a crock. Unless some serious corporate egos are involved you have to believe they will eventually put things back the way they (essentially) were.
Posted 8 months ago # -
pedanticKarl
MemberA lovely pair - HotForWords videos, that is.
Two videos again on the Popular pages. Not as good as being on page 1,
and much better than being on page 5. Both videos are designated as Comedy.
Buckey's video "Miley Cyrus Vs. Radiohead" is just 8 videos down from yours.
In the next few weeks I am focusing on finding that magic bullet that gets a videos on page 1. I'm making good headway and just augmented my database by collecting lots more data.
Marina, thank you for your input on the Digg article on the Soshable site. I've been casually following the Digg controversy since they first started and did not know about the Soshable site. Great info.
Posted 8 months ago #
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