YouTube Search Now Ranks Videos by Most Time Watched

By: Kevin Green  |   October 18th, 2012   |   Google, News

Google owned YouTube has millions upon millions of videos and for users that do not have a link for a specific video, the search bar serves as a valuable asset. Up until now Google would use the keywords entered into the search bar to give back a list of videos that had been tagged with said keyword. These videos were ranked based on the number of times they had been viewed. In essence, the measure of popularity was how many times users had clicked on a particular video to watch it.

 

This has now changed and on October 11 YouTube has added another option to the video search section which ranks the results in order of which videos have been watched the longest. Furthermore, YouTube Analytics has also added a “Time Watched” reporting function so that the creators of videos and channel administrators will get deeper insights into their creations. One way to look at the new data is to use it to pinpoint videos that are truly engaging for users. Videos that have people watching them for only a few seconds and then clicking away means that even though the videos title or thumbnail grabbed people’s attention the content was not what they expected or simply wasn’t good enough to hold their attention, an important distinction.

 

Google’s video streaming site was already moving towards this concept when it announced in August 2012 that the discovery feature would be getting an update which would let users dig out videos with the most viewed time instead of views. It seems that Google is trying to give credit to videos that are engaging for users and not just optimized for search. This should help more quality content make it to the top as time goes on, benefiting both the site as well as the creators and uploaders of higher quality content.

 

Source: The Next Web