Yahoo Video Critique

I’ve been finding a few of my videos getting great spikes on Yahoo Video and I have three theories:

1. It’s the #2 online video site
2. There isn’t as much competition for videos (Yahoo indexes a lot of videos, but hosts fewer consumer-generated videos than YouTube for instance)
3. The editors are being kind occasionally

It’s interesting but not surprising that Yahoo video is ahead of Google video in views and in interface. Yahoo is more of a media company than Google, which is evident in the way the two companies have approaches their online-video sites. Don’t stop submitting to Google. They’re due for an explosion and there’s a cummalitive effect (old videos just grow and grow in views for reasons I can’t explain).

Now let’s make a good video site better. First the good parts of Yahoo:

• Improving user interface- especially the single panel featured, popular and recent thumbnails
• Excellent upload speed
• Nice organization of my “studio” (although others prefer the all-text views display of Google)
• Consistently better views than other sites. Especially when featured on the video homepage or the actual Yahoo homepage.

Please improve

• Search is really mercurial. It indexes my videos on other sites (like Blip) better than the videos I’ve uploaded directly. But it also does a pretty good job of searching for other online videos. However the regular Yahoo search field (upper right corner) always tempts me and then I realize I’m searching the web, not Yahoo video.
• The headers for featured, popular and new need to be hotlinked to those respective sections. More takes you to that artist not to the popular section.
• Allow us more sort options (this week, this month, this year, all time) for popular videos.
• More featured “consumer generated” stuff. Otherwise its feels like another television channel.
• Give us an easier access to archived feature videos. And let us know if our video has been featured.
• Share ad revenue with creators. Share ad revenue with creators. I can give you a hundred reasons. Just give me a ring.