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Interesting piece - Web Video: Move Over, Amateurs - in BW about how quality is becoming more and more important for user generated content.

Amateur filmmakers hoping to win fame for amusing moments captured on camcorder ought to stick to TV’s long-running America’s Funniest Home Videos. These days they’re not getting much love on the Web.

One after another, online video sites that have long showcased such fare as skateboarding dogs and beer-drenched parties are scaling back their focus on user-generated clips, often in favor of professionally produced programming. “People would rather watch content that has production value than watch their neighbors in the garage,” says Matt Sanchez, co-founder and chief executive of VideoEgg, a company that provides Web video tools, ads, and advertising features for online video providers and Web application developers.

On Nov. 13 social networking site Bebo said it would open its pages to top media companies in hopes of luring and engaging viewers. “As more and more interesting content from major media brands becomes available, [online viewers] are going to share that more and more because those are the brands they identify with,” says Bebo President Joanna Shields.

Another site, ManiaTV, recently canceled its user-generated channels altogether (BusinessWeek.com, 10/22/07). The 3,000 user-generated channels simply didn’t pull in enough viewers, ManiaTV CEO Peter Hoskins says. Roughly 80% of people were watching the professional content produced by celebrities such as musician Dave Navarro and comedian Tom Green. “What we found out is, we don’t need the classical user-generated talent when we have the Hollywood talent that wants to work with us,” Hoskins says. Sony’s (SNE) Grouper in July relaunched as Crackle, sans user-generated content. Its only fare: professional-grade programming.

I think the deluge of user generated content has made finding quality content a priority for users. At the same time the distributed nature of the content means that its harder to find content by top producer to have a predictably good experience. This is going to be a key issue in the next few years.

You are all probably familiar with my previous posts (New audience metric, AttentionTrust) about the need for better metric to measure the engagement level of users at a particular web-site. The issue with the current metric of page-views can be best understood by comparing it with TV surfing. Consider a user Ms. X, with a remote, who surfs to a particular channel say FOX and immediately switches over to NBC where she watches a full hour of Apprentice. With page-views, which only measures the number of times a particular page loads or channel is accessed in our example, both NBC and FOX will get equal equal credit for the user. Clearly though, NBC had a better opportunity to engage the user and will likely be a more effective advertising medium for somebody looking to reach the Ms. X.

This inequality in the way the page views are measured is further exacerbated by the difference in which web sites can vary in information density per page. The use of technology like AJAX can enable web-sites to pack a whole lot of dynamic information in just one page. Check out the Noisely…I love this web-site design and the whole application is just one page (except for informational pages like FAQ etc.). All this means that we need a better way to measure the user engagement in order to better evaluate the effectiveness of web-sites.

Last week Compete.com, a web measurement company, announced the first metric to measure of this important data. From the compete.com blog:

Today we announce that you can use Compete.com to measure a site’s Attention. Attention fuses engagement (measured by time) and traffic (measured by unique visitors) into a single, more complete picture of a web site’s value.

…

Why is Attention Important?

• A site’s influence can be under/over stated by traditional metrics.
• There are only 24 hours in a day – our time is finite. Where we spend our time is where we find the most value.

Notice in the chart above how runescape.com only ranks 436th in unique visitors, yet based on Attention is the 15th most prominent site on the web. If we relied solely on traditional metrics we would overlook the real value and prominence of Runescape.

This is fantastic…I hope more companies follow suite and we can finally focus on truly important metric rather then the arbitrary page views.

If you want to follow this story further check out RWW coverage.

Check out the post at TrivialTV blog that details, via a graph, the relationship between inbound links and visitors to a site (Great data and thanks for making it public)…

In August 2006 I painstakingly harvested data to investigate the relationship between # of links and vistors/day and the effect of syndicates. I’ve only shared the data with a few friends so far, but one of them has been hounding me to share the plot with a wider audience. With Matthew Hurst’s post about Readers Or Links over at Data Mining today, I decided it’s worth going off-topic for a day. So here’s the plot:

I only included sites that used sitemeter with public data access and that were registered with technorati. Nearly 1800 different sites are represented in the figure.

In aggregate terms, the graph is a good proof that inbound links drive traffic (of course some links are more valuable then other). But it still does not answer the questions about influence…Which of the sites, listed in the graph above, have more influence. Check out this interesting post on the ebiquity blog:

Matt Hurst has a great example illustrating why measuring influence as inlinks (what Technorati does) is too simple. Here are two blogs, their inlink rank as computed by Technorati, their average daily visits as computed by Sitemeter, and the trend in visits over the past year.

blog	rank	visits	trend
Michelle Malkin	~19	~120K	steady
pink is the new blog	~117	~200K	increasing

As Matt pointed out, measuring readership with tools like sitemeter is problematic. As I write this I realize that I read Matt’s post through his feed in Bloglines, so his blogs will not have registered a visit.

Of course, it all depends on what you mean by influence which is mostly a function of why you are interested in it. For example, if your goal is to sell shoes, ads in “Pink” probably have more impact. If you want to push your new book “Taxes are evil” then Malkin’s blog is the way to go. So influence also has to be measured with respect to the community you want to influence.

Other factors that can determine influence are the kind of visitors that are coming to the site (meaning are these influential visitors or not), what these visitors are doing once they are on the site and how engaged are they … Check out our previous post on the subject that deals with how the engagement level of the users can be gauged using the attention data. Another measure of the influence of blogs can be the number and quality of comments. Of course without a universal measure of the quality of comments, relying on just the number of comments, could be very misleading. Bloggers can just turn off the spam filter and that will generate a huge number of bad comments and thereby game the system for judging influence. But with a common gauge of comment quality, the number of comments can be a useful measure of influence. Developing and popularizing a universal gauge for the quality of comments, is a tough nut to crack but its importance cannot be overstated. I am looking forward to more research (I am waiting for the paper that ebiquity guys mentioned) and new ideas on how best to measure influence…Indeed the future of online communities might depend on it.