By now you know how important it is to create goals and look at metrics.
But other than tracking those goals, how do you affect them?
Your routine,
as a marketeer at a startup should be based on trial and error.
Experimentation and iteration is the most important thing for a startup.
Let's hear what some of our experts have to say about this.
>> We did some sort of behavioral studies of
what a new user to YouTube, how they utilize the service.
And it typically, what we would see
would be the first time they would come visit this site would be through some
kind of viral marketing that may be they saw one of their friends share a video.
Maybe it was on Myspace, maybe it was an email, check out this video,
this was really funny.
But the first time generally it doesn't really stick with them,
they don't remember this site, maybe they'll remember the site.
They will remember this site, but
they won't remember the site that it came from, because I think we get that
all of the time where people would just be sharing the instant messages
through emails, just check this thing out on the Internet, it's very funny and
you see it, you laugh and then you close the browser window.
But I think the second time, there would be another time where somebody
would share this, another video.
Maybe it'd be somebody else sharing and then after a few times visiting
the site, it starts kind of, the logo starts kind of thinking in a bit,
the sort of domain names start sinking in a little bit.
And what we would see is that people,
they themselves would type in YouTube.com into the browser and
they would actually go to the site themselves.
And then from there, It's about sort of uploading their own videos,
finding their own videos and sharing it, so it kind of spreads out that way.
But we've always kind of looked at it required a lot of sort of effort with
the design of the site to be able to say within the first five seconds, that's
the amount of time window that you have to be able to really grab the users.
And so there was a lot of work that was done on the related videos on the right
side, because the video that you were sent may not be interesting at all, or
may not be up your sleeve in terms of what you'd be interested in,
but something on the right side would grab you.
Same thing on the front page, there would be ten videos, so we're always any
page on YouTube there was always one link away from starting another video.
And so in case you got bored, instead of closing your browser, I think
psychologically it's always easier to kind of spend more time on a site,
rather than closing the browser and going to do work.
And so there's always something that's within one click
that can start another video and if you don't like that, again,
then there's another, one click away from another video.
One significant
part of YouTube is not the first video viewed but the subsequent video.
That whole experience and so whether, and we've different
metrics giving us different times, but it has been as high as something as, or
it has been as low as sort of the average length session of YouTube is
like 12 minutes, but it's been as high by some metrics as 28 minutes and
that's incredible when you consider the average length of the videos.
Whatever, 30 seconds to minutes and so well,
one important part of that is and not the first video.
We're assuming that people are already getting to the site but
how do you get them to watch and click on the second video and
then after that how do you get them to click on another video.
And more importantly cause like if they get disappointed by that second,
third video how do you still get them to click on the fourth, fifth, sixth,
seventh video.
And the solution to that, partly, is the related videos
on the right side and we always put that high because that was going to be your
channel to get into more content, but then the follow-up question.
And this is where we had the smartest engineers at YouTube working on this day
end, day out, which was how do you populate that related to video?
One idea of thinking about the content on YouTube, is you can
think about it and sort of almost different islands that are connected.
Somehow, but different islands, they're islands about sort of singers and
the different types of genres of artists out there.
And then there's islands of sort of movies, there's islands that related to
fashion and food and there's islands that's more directed towards kids.
So there's all these different islands, some of them are bigger,
some of them are continents and some of them are tiny.
But people are very passionate about that and
they're all interconnected with graphs and if you can visualize that then it's
kind of what if you are watching a single video on one of these.
Maybe it's a big continent and maybe it's a small island.
What do you populate with all the other videos on the right side?
And the obvious approach is if you're watching a content about cooking,
everybody on the right side is more about cooking and so
it's all within the same island.
But what if by the fifth video they're just sick of watching cooking videos,
how do you get them to watch something else?
And so we realized early on, but there was a lot of testing involved with this,
is, what if we actually start stuffing in different types of content in there.
So what would be coming back from search results would be the things that
are most related with this video is obvious it's going to be cooking.
But let's just say artificially we take out 50%, 75% of this content.
We just make it so it's impossible to show more than 25% related
videos is cooking, then you start actually feeding in this other content.
Maybe we find out that people that are interested in cooking also like soccer.
And so we start actually putting in 10%
of the videos which are related to soccer.
And started playing around with this and so
maybe people that are interested in this abstraction of soccer and
sports if they're watching sports videos maybe they're also interested in
watching football or maybe they're interested in watching tennis.
And so we started playing around with this idea,
what percentage is tightly related to the video that you're watching.
How much of it is, it's not unrelated ever, but there was a algorithm
that went behind, how do you actually create this sort of loose relationship?
They're still related, because we do know that people that watch this content
also watch this content.
But it would be hard to explain if you didn't look at what the actual watching
sessions and patterns are to be able to
create that connection between say food and football.
Well, that's probably an easy one to create, but so
we started doing a lot of research along these lines and
trying to create algorithms to be able to better guess as to people that
are watching this video would also be interested in watching this video.
But it took a lot of theories and testing those theories,
and pushing stuff out live and seeing what the users would actually do,
and tweaking and tweaking and tweaking that.