Wrapping Up YouTube Quick Capture for Community Voices

This is a follow-up report to my earlier post about utilizing YouTube Quick Capture to create a community voices component for The Black List Project.  The exhibition closed yesterday, so the time seemed right to post an analysis of the experiment.

black list by neenna via Flickr.  All Rights Reserved.

Stats

Let’s take a look at the basic statistics.  During the show’s four month run, visitors recorded 482 videos, 236 of which made it to our Black List Project YouTube channel.  Of the 236 that were published on the channel, 96 made it to the Brooklyn Museum favorites playlist.  We had 43,386 video views overall, but keep in mind one video (recorded by one of our security guards) was seen over 23,000 times when it was featured on YouTube during MLK day. Also, the channel was given non-profit status at YouTube which means auto-play is activated for videos featured on our channel and this will raise the view count.

Moderation

The project required a sizable amount of moderation.  Videos went live throughout the day and were post-moderated in the evenings.  Depending on how many videos were recorded, moderation took between 5-15 minutes per day.  When we had higher volume at Target First Saturday, we’d see anywhere between 40-80 videos recorded and this moderation required an hour or two. Interestingly, we received some of our best comments during Target First Saturday and the ratio on those days was much more signal than noise, so even in the volume, it felt worth it. Moderated videos fell into three areas and I’ve left a few of these live so you can get a chuckle:  1) kids goofing off 2) adults goofing off 3) people who would press record and walk away.  There were also more than a few instances of will our hardware make it out of this experiment alive!!??! Only one video was removed because it violated our comment guidelines. Typically, we don’t moderate this heavily, but on this particular project we decided to do so because wading through video content to get to decent recordings is a lot more difficult than scanning text comments for gold.  As someone who did almost all of the moderation on the project, I can tell you it’s a time-consuming process and not one that I’d want to put our web visitors through.  We toyed with the idea of letting the community moderate itself at YouTube (ratings were left on), but we ran into issues there.   For starters, we didn’t have enough traffic to the channel to generate enough ratings on all the videos.  You can see what happens when you look at most viewed.  Some videos were seen a lot (due in part to our featuring the videos in different ways) and others were not seen much at all—had we left all the content, I have a feeling the view numbers would have plummeted out of sheer viewer frustration.

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