Video as Quality Play, not Popularity Contest (Q&A with VideoSift)

In this segment I'm speaking with James Roe of VideoSift, a new video-sharing site that provides a democratic new take on the space. Positioned as a "community-driven video clearinghouse", VideoSift users submit and rate videos from sites like YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo! and iFilm, with the top-rated videos "sifted" to the site's front page. So "best in show" is driven by opinions (quality) not page views (quantity).

According to Roe, "The number of views a video receives is not a strong indicator of quality, although it is a relatively decent indicator of popularity. Lots of the most popular videos on all of the video-hosting sites derive their popularity from factors that are not necessarily quality, such as scantily clad people, hate in the form of racism or general intolerance, or just plain frivolity...lip-synching videos come to mind in particular here."

It makes sense when you compare it to video across other media platforms--take American Idol: while the zaniest, least-gifted singers (William Hung, anyone?) may raise a lot of chatter and spawn countless parodies, they've never been voted Idol.

Just launched in February, the site is already ranked 591 out of 46.1 million sites tracked by Technorati and has clocked 4.3 million page views. But what drew me to VideoSift was not their ranking methodology so much as their rules: with the exception of special monthly promotions, all videos are submitted by third-party viewers, not the authors.

Why do they only allow third-party submissions? "Because we think that anyone promoting their own video is less likely to see it objectively and it helps to limit the abuse of our site by advertising agencies and self promoters". So by providing an agenda-free safe haven, VideoSift's value proposition becomes stronger as marketing abuses exacerbate. There's a BIG lesson there folks, many more in the following Q&A:

What type of competitions do you run on the site? We actually have two categories: normal videos (daily competitions) and 'Sift Offs' (monthly competitions). For normal videos, the author or content creator is specifically barred from posting their own videos. For the Sift Offs, conversely, they are only allowed to post their own content.

What drove your decision to restrict users from submitting videos they've created into the daily competitions? We believe that a community functioning as an editor tends to be more democratic and finds more interesting things than any one person could hope to do, or post, on their own.

How does the voting...er, uh..."sifting" system work? Whenever a user posts a video it goes to the queue. Logged-in users can vote on videos in the queue, and when those videos reach an arbitrary number of votes, they move out of the queue and onto the front page. This means that a video must get a certain number of votes--not downloads--before hitting the main page. It's not so much a competition as it is an attempt to allow as many human editors to weigh in on inherent quality. Recently we enabled a new feature that lets users with a 'reputation' on the site vote against videos, as well as discard them. This is an attempt on our part to make the site more of a community-based experience and enable our users to become editors.

For our monthly Sift Offs, the top three videos are cross-posted to our main page and the winners receive links to their respective corners of the blogosphere. (Note: May's 1st-place winner was covered in Wired's Blog; the 2nd-place winner received nearly 60,000 views. They've also been covered in Wired for a fan-made lightsaber battle that, on choreography alone, you simply must check out).

How do you know someone is not posting their own content, since you can't "see" them and ensure they're not posting from an e-mail alias? We use a system of checks and balances based on popular Internet anonymizer services, as well as a 'smell test'. Sometimes videos, especially from a new user, just smell funny.

Is posting videos, from sites like YouTube, getting you into any copyright trouble? Fortunately, because we are posting the videos through a technology provided by all of these sites, we are insulated from copyright harassment. But unfortunately, none of these sites have a mechanism for letting us know that the video is no longer working, so we have to do housecleaning from time to time when a video shows up as being no longer available.

Have you done any formal advertising or has it all been buzz? It's all been buzz; we have found sites that were talking about relevant material and have included links to our sites. But we have never tried to create a dialog about VideoSift, rather we include links to videos on the site that are apropos to the content we were commenting on. We also show up on blogs where people mention us and debate particulars about VideoSift to help maintain a view of our site that is compatible with the ideology we have.

End note: In addition to being "worldwide", VideoSift qualifies as an international endeavor--partners Dag Houston and James Roe hail from down under and down south, respectively. Dag is a full-time Web developer in Australia and James is a part-time Web developer, full-time college senior in South Carolina. Yep, I purposely waited until interview's end to tell you James is still an undergraduate--I'm wondering if you're as impressed as I with his business savvy for a "college kid" (and his marketing savvy for a French and International Trade major).

I asked James why he didn't major in marketing. The answer? He quickly became disenchanted with his marketing professors' inability to understand the Internet. Go figure.

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VideoSift blogger interviews blog marketing Christina Kerley CK James Roe Dag Houston Video Bloggers Video Sites