I probably blog about Youtube too much, but here goes another. This week I tried a video experiment in human nature, attempting to comment on society at large. Better than Diet Coke and Mentos, right?
The hypothesis: If you're a hetero male between the age of 12 and dead (homosexual perspective would be appreciated), no matter what you're looking for on Youtube, if the thumbnail image in a search result contains cleavage, you will click it on it. You know it's probably spam, but you click on it. What's the matter with you?
This would be a good time to talk about Youtube's Insight feature. Insight allows you to see aggregate data about your video views - what percentage come from a particular state, age group, sex, and how your video was discovered: search, related vid, embedded link, etc. I'm not sure how they count views that come from people who don't have Youtube accounts, but what experiment is perfect?
Experiment: Create a 30-second video for which the thumbnail is a woman with cleavage. Find the top 100 Google and Youtube searches for the day and add those in the tags and description.
Control Group: Add another video with the same tags, title and description, but the thumbnail is a deer antler. Also, add a chastising and shaming message in the cleavage video, ensuring that it won't likely be shared among friends. Add acknowledgment the viewers have participated in a very important scientific experiment.
Result: The deer antler got 0 views. Zero. The cleavage video? 400 views in 24 hours. Zero ratings, 1 comment: "26 canada watching bifoot video saw those amazing boobs and couldnt resist looking at them." Someone flagged the video and Youtube took it down for violation of community policy, presumably misleading tags. That's what I expected, but I didn't realize that I wouldn't be able to go back and check the Insight stats after the video had been removed. Rats.
Conclusion: Work in progress. I keep thinking about this question in terms of cognitive decision, but maybe I should have been thinking philosophically, like what people are "really" searching for. Also, I might take an economic perspective, and look at the limited resource of time and reference the relative utility of one video with another.
I'll try to think of a classier experiment next time.
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