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What's with the super-popular youtube videos that are just slideshows??

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tranglos:
Don't they have some new rating system, voting system?  Seem to recall something about that on an RSS feed a week or so back.  Just figured it was a[nother] popularity contest, so didn't pay much attention.  YouTube doesn't get but a sliver of my time  :P.
-barney (January 04, 2012, 04:50 PM)
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You can click "Like" or "Dislike" under a video, but it's been around for a long time. It's just that you don't see the number of dislikes early enough to influence your decision of whether or not to start watching a clip.

superboyac:
47 million views for a slideshow?  Nobody likes it, nobody cares, yet there it is...-superboyac (January 04, 2012, 02:57 PM)
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I know what you mean. Of course YouTube (i.e., Google) could easily rectify that by doing one of the following:
- show the view count only to the uploader of the video
- not show the view count together with video thumbnails (show it only on the video page proper, after you've clicked through)
- show both the view count and the like/dislike counts with video thumbnails. You'd see the impressive number of views, but you'd also see that thirty five million people hated it.

But, doing any of these things would cause a drop in pageviews, so they won't do them.
-tranglos (January 04, 2012, 04:42 PM)
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yup, exactly.  That doesn't bother me as much, since business is business.

Most of them I've seen are "music videos." That is, somebody wanted to put a song on YouTube but didn't have a video to go with it, so they made a slideshow that may or may not be related to the song/band so that you wouldn't be staring at a blank screen the entire time.
-Deozaan (January 04, 2012, 04:17 PM)
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That's what I thought, almost exactly!  But the ones I'm talking about are not that.  The music ones are cool: you find a lot of old LP recordings that are nice.  The ones I'm talking about are the gimmicky ones; the ones that "trick" you to going there usually with a great thumbnail.

The internet is crazy.  The chaos is both impressive and overwhelming to try to understand.  It's like trying to understand 4chan in any kind of logical way.  There's no real logic.  It's just anarchy.  Chaos.  There's no beauty, no quality to it...it's basically just pure quantity.

JavaJones:
I'm glad they show view numbers on search results, I use those as indicators a lot of times and while total number of views sometimes steers me wrong (depending on the search), it's still useful. But use thumbs up/down numbers on search results would also be nice.

As to whether there's money in this, do you see ads when you watch the videos? If so then your answer is most emphatically yes, there is money in it. :D

- Oshyan

tranglos:
As to whether there's money in this, do you see ads when you watch the videos?-JavaJones (January 04, 2012, 05:56 PM)
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I swear I did. Once. In Chrome, which I hardly ever use. The ads were actually overlaid on the video, in the lower-third, translucent text-filled rectangles. I don't know if they were clickable. I felt this influx of visceral disgust and I didn't try to click them. They did not seem related to the video, or rather, I didn't get the impression that they were placed there by the uploader. (The video was a game walkthrough by a fan, totally non-commercial.)

I know I was not hallucinating, but like I said, it was only once and only in Chrome (with AdBlock Plus). Maybe YT is/was experimenting with ads, maybe they only work in a version of Chrome, or maybe the overlays were inserted by the uploader after all, I cannot be sure. But I saw what I saw and I never want to see it again :)

barney:
But I saw what I saw and I never want to see it again
-tranglos (January 04, 2012, 06:54 PM)
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Get used to it if you spend much time on YouTube.  They've determined how to insert ads into/onto the videos while they are playing.  So, apart from whatever ads might be integral to the video(s), now you have Google doing their bit.

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