Gaming Online Video with YouTube Ratings

A few days ago a client asked me to rate a video that he'd posted on YouTube.  I was happy to do so and after watching it gave the video a rating of four out of five stars.  He semi-jokingly complained that I only gave him four stars.

The underlying expectation here is that because he and I like working together and we get along well that I would give him four stars on anything that he posted.  However I'm actually doing him a favor by giving him four stars.

Here's why.

Imagine that you're YouTube (or Google) and you want to put the best possible videos at the top of the search list when someone searches for particular topic.  You know that people try to game the system by getting everyone that they know (and probably a lot of people that they don't) to rate the video as highly as possible.  You don't have to be too sophisticated to recognize that when a video has all five stars it would be an outlier, and easy to find algorithmically.

On the other hand, by ranking a video anywhere from three to five stars that gives it a much smaller signature if you're working to improve the rankings of your video in either Google's or YouTube's search engine.

Thus, the people who oversee the algorithms that decided which videos get ranked higher can give a more prominent listing to videos that have a more "natural" rating profile.

So my friend (you know you are ) I was actually doing you a favor by giving that video four out of five stars.