Unintended consequences: Why your songs got shorter and your videos got longer

-

These are my favorite examples of unintended consequences that I happened to walk someone through last week.

Years ago, in a coffee shop, I was listening to someone at the next table (yea, I know eavesdropping on phone conversations is bad, but people should be less loud :-P) confidently telling their friend/client, "Trust me. You need to make the YouTube videos longer - over 15 mins. That's what they prioritize. Just drag out the content." 

I couldn't help grinning. I'd recently stopped working at YouTube then, and so while I knew that person was not exactly right, they were not completely wrong either. 

It's conventional logic now among the creator community that you do better on YouTube if your videos are longer. It's why when you search for [Peppa Pig] on YouTube for you kids, the first few videos you get are either long-running livestreams or videos that are an hour long, and if you're listening to music you can often end up in a compilation video instead of individual songs. All the systems at the time were, famously, optimizing for watch time as the team focussed on a watch time goal. 

When the decision to set watchtime as the goal and optimize systems towards it, no one  quite anticipated the impact it would have on creator culture and incentives (or how quickly), and the kinds of videos that would get uploaded. Everyone anticipated people would watch longer, but didn't anticipate how it would change what got uploaded, and correspondingly how that would change usage of the product. 

The even starker example is of streaming (specifically Spotify) on songs - basically top songs have gotten shorter (here's a really great podcast about it). 

And it didn't just changed the length of the songs, it changed the structure - the threat of the "skip" and the fact that artists are paid based on if a certain length of the song the streamed, meant the incentive was now to hook the listener early and keep them listening - something no one could have anticipated when working on a streaming service.

What're the unintended consequences of your next product change? 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A short love letter to ~8 years on Google Search - 8 things I’m grateful for.

-
  After a few weeks off, I started a new gig within Google yesterday and it hit me that for the first time in almost eight years I won’t be working on some part of Google Search. Eight years ago, I told the team when I was interviewing that I was “looking for a place to call home for a while and grow there”. My experiences here more than met that need.  I used to write a regular “10 things about…” listy column for a while at a college newspaper. So in that style here’s 8 things (one for each year) I feel grateful to have experienced/learned in this time. Also, like that column which I banged out the night before it was due, this post is something that I don’t need to do, yet I feel somehow compelled to do (and so it’ll likely be longer and less crisp than it should be :-))    It actually is awesome to work on something so many people use and love, and that positively touches people’s lives. There’s a talk I give externally about Search and a line I often end up using is how the mission
Read more

Why don't you love Chocos, America?

-
Image
A few days ago I had the following conversation with a customs agent at San Francisco airport - as an Indian returning from India I get sent to the customs line even when I check "No food" on the customs form. :-) Agent: "Any food?" Me: "No" Agent: "Sure? No jira or cadipatta ? Me : "No....     well actually I do have a box of cereal." Agent: "Huh. What? Really?" Me: "Yes. Its a brand you don't get here." Agent: "Seriously. Even in the Indian stores? I've never heard that before." Me: "Ummm....yeah." I love reading local customization stories, particularly about how international chains tailor their offerings to local markets - the food industry has the best examples of these - check out this McDonald's story about the McPaneer , or how KFC is incredibly successful in China . But I seem to have missed that the customization extended to breakfast cereal. Turns out the
Read more

What might Twitter and/or Facebook have cost us if they were invented earlier (or should some things stay deliberately un-social?)

-
Image
So I was reading an ebook last week, and came across a quote that I liked. My first thought wasn't "I should write this down" , it was "I want to tweet this." My ebook reading software wasn't equipped for it, and it wasn't trivial to do so I didn't, but I expect most ebook reading software will be updated to do this in the next couple of releases and probably encourage me to as well. Why should reading be left behind? Twitter is already saving live TV . As I look back on the last week watching the Cricket World Cup , a huge part of it for me was watching my Twitter and Facebook feeds for reactions and being part of them. My parents were the only ones that actually called me during the match, but I felt connected to so many more people through FB and the Big T . Wether you're shopping, eating out, playing games, even searching ... apparently "everything gets better with social." We all have a very human, internal urge to express ours
Read more