Computer Info

A recent opinion poll by Lightspeed Research for Oxygen media reported nearly 34% of the women in the age group 18-34 surveyed revealed that logging in at Facebook was the first thing they did every morning, even before brushing their teeth or visiting the washroom. The results are not awesome considering industry statistics show over half the young adults in the age group of 20 to 30 do not brush their teeth early in the morning.

However Facebook’s increasing success at eyeball retention at over 6 hours per day, compared to 2 hours per day for Google, Yahoo and other social media sites, has had others in a tizzy since it was revealed by Nielsen statistics earlier this year.

Facebook’s coup at eyeball retention had ad-men scurrying towards the site where youth would spend a quarter of their lives socializing with friends on the net and which has rapidly overshadowed the popularity of friends at the club. Now YouTube has announced a new format called ‘Leanback’ in which the viewer will be fed HD videos of his or her choice, one after another, so that they do not have to surf the website to select programs of their choice.

In May of this year, Google, the owners of YouTube, battling to retain the largest chunk of online ads, revealed their plan to unleash internet-focused television, with new features of browsing on auto feed without the use of remote when Sony launches its new range of products in the fall this year.

YouTube, though the biggest of the video sites, hopelessly languishes in eyeball retention amongst the video segment, perhaps because it does not look at solutions from the user's point of view. The problem with its thinking is that viewers will never give up the choice to eject dumb program mes from their screens and YouTube has no mechanism in its site to ensure viewer popularity other than celebrity videos.

As a matter of fact, YouTube's video selection for featured videos and promotion of those selected as featured presentations, leaves a lot to be desired. When compared it to smaller presentation sites like SlideShare or Scribd, which also feature YouTube videos, the shortcomings are obvious.

There is no mechanism by which a video uploaded on YouTube gets a decent viewership unless actively promoted. Whereas a SlideShare upload would give a reasonably well done video a few hundred views per day for the first week, and Scribd would ensure at least half the eyeballs were on the video, but on YouTube, such a video would go virtually unnoticed unless actively promoted by search engines.

Maybe key words get lost in the maze of YouTube, or perhaps the site is too big and unwieldy with its 4.6 billion streams for one to categorize and feature in its pages for easy public viewership. It's possible it needs its home page load to be re-distributed by category-wise inner pages or a development of category-based communities like the other presentation sites have.

Whatever it may be, YouTube will have to look into the micro-features of its site and facilitate social interaction to increase the eyeball retention, instead of adding auto feed formats to surf videos. For apart from watching music videos on auto feed, it is very difficult to conceive that other videos shall suit the user’s mood, tastes and needs on a pre-set basis.

http://technorati.com/business/article/youtube-steps-up-bid-for-eyeball/page-2/