YouTube Reevaluates its 5 Star Ranking System

Richard MacManus over at ReadWriteWeb recently turned me on to an interesting YouTube blog post about the effectiveness of the popular video aggregator’s 5-star rating system.

The post, written by YouTube product manager Shiva Rajaraman, explains that the majority of YouTube users who rank videos give them a perfect 5-star ranking. He continues:

Seems like when it comes to ratings it’s pretty much all or nothing. Great videos prompt action; anything less prompts indifference. Thus, the ratings system is primarily being used as a seal of approval, not as an editorial indicator of what the community thinks about a video. Rating a video joins favoriting and sharing as a way to tell the world that this is something you love.

Rajarman goes on to solicit the community for feedback on how useful the current ranking system is and what can be done to improve upon it.

We’re really glad to see that YouTube is finally examining its rating system with an eye on delivering more value to its community and look forward to seeing how the system evolves from here. Ratings and user generated reviews, though often misleading, have become an expected part of the online experience and encourage deeper engagement. I don’t think anyone would take away points from YouTube on their ability to engage an incredibly large, diverse and influential community of users. However, YouTube’s review system- and others like it –  must also find ways to inform ratings based on valuable sentiment and implicit feedback gathered from the vast majority of their site visitors. Not the loud minority.

With a truly integrated approach to recommendations that blends both implicit and explicit feedback, companies can expect to improve engagement and overall user experience by directing site visitors to the best content based on their intent.  I talk a lot about this concept in my paper, entitled “7 Deadly Biases”.

In the end, explicit versus implicit user feedback shouldn’t be viewed as an either/or scenario. Please let us know your thoughts on the matter and share examples of sites that are doing it right.