YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim on How YouTube Got Viral.
1) related video recommendations
2) one-click emailing to spam a friend about a video
3) more social networking and user interaction tools like video comments
4) an external video player
Re: #4, the external video player did have an amazing impact. In a matter of months, YouTube seemed to go from nowhere to everywhere due to that slick and easy to embed player.
A big reason why the external player was so effective: Play buttons are seductive. When people see one, they instantly know what it does and want to click it.
Similarly, Coudal’s technique of showing showing video toolbar buttons in its Jewelboxing ads is also a great way to attract clicks.
Some more musings on YouTube’s interface:
YouTube's Interface: If You Build It, They Will ComeSo, in a space with plenty of big players, but no real successes, how did start-up YouTube manage to get so big, so fast, and why was it successful where other big players were not? It’s the interface, stupid! While the technological and bandwidth barriers to getting video online easily have only just recently ebbed away, YouTube managed to be the first to take advantage of this new opportunity in a way that, quite simply, works.
Harmonization of the interface
Streamlining and harmonizing the interfaces people need to use to get to you makes good sense. YouTube offers a way for its users to search, navigate and mark favourites that each user knows how to do instinctively after the first few times. As Steven Johnson says in his book Interface Culture: “…knowledge becomes second nature to most users because it has a strong spatial component to it…” And so it becomes easier for people to find my videos on YouTube, because they don’t have to learn the user interface of my own website.
Worth noting: Chad Hurley, YouTube co-founder, comes from a design background (he started his career as a graphic designer and worked on PayPal’s logo and its user interface in his pre-YouTube days).
Jeremy
on 20 Nov 06All of these details explain how the interface let the content sing and helped people do what they naturally wanted to do with it. Isn’t the other key ingredient to YouTube’s success the content itself? They allowed everything, copyrighted and otherwise. That’s a key part of the YouTube experience (or was).
Another great interface detail: They store your volume setting from visit to visit, which helps head off sudden NSFW office embarrassment with an unexpected blast of audio.
Iain
on 20 Nov 06Isn’t the Coudal ad really just a variation on those incredibly annoying fake error message banner ads – only instead of fake error messages tricking you into clicking through, they have a fake play button tricking you into clicking through?
Jeff Croft
on 20 Nov 06I’m with Iain, here. Much as I love and respect Coudal and company, I find the “click-me-I’m-a-video-NOT” ads to be pretty shady. I’m sure it’s a, “great way to attract clicks,” as you say, but it seems like it’s also a great way to piss people off by making them feel stupid.
Coudal
on 20 Nov 06Thye progress bar graphic quickly communicates that if people click the ad, they are going to see a video. If they do click, the video starts, as promised. Not sure how that is deceptive.
Jeff Croft
on 20 Nov 06I think it’s a matter of comment interface elements which don’t do what you expect them to do.
If I see a play button, I expect it to play the video in place. And that’s a perfectly reasonable expectation, as that how nearly every video player works. If I see the progress bar under the photo, I assume that means I can “scrub” the video by moving its thumb back and forth. If I see a drop-down “triangle” widget, I expect clicking it will give me a drop-down menu. And yet, none of these things are true. Instead, clicking on any of them will lead me to another page, and I’ll realize I’ve been tricked into clicking an ad.
You’ve clearly mimicked the QuickTime player (and all the derivatives of it, such as YouTube’s payer) in appearance, but changed the functionality people expect from that UI. To me, it just feels like you’re trying to trick people into clicking your ad.
If that wasn’t your intention, fine. But clearly people think it was. Even Matt said himself, “Coudal’s technique of showing showing video toolbar buttons in its Jewelboxing ads is also a great way to attract clicks.”
Jeremy
on 20 Nov 06The Coudal ad design doesn’t strike me as shady or deceptive, it strikes me as effective. What better way to communicate “click and see this video” than a graphic like that? I click it and land on the page with that video. Why would I be annoyed or feel stupid?
Paul
on 20 Nov 06In addition, the elements on the Coudal ad are super-tiny; I wouldn’t expect any reasonable media player to feature buttons that small.
Nathan Borror
on 20 Nov 06Coudal: It’s deceptive because it’s lying. It’s one step away from “YOU ARE A WINNER!” This type of deceptive design chips away at any ad provider, even one as honest as The Deck.
Coudal
on 20 Nov 06So the whole deception is that the video doesn’t run in the 120×90 ad space? I think that’s slicing the bread a little thin Jeff. Especially as it is quite clearly marked as an ad and there’s a text link under it too. To me it’s an effective visual shorthand that says, “Here’s a video of Dawson demonstrating the JB system. Click if you want to watch it.”
A fake error message is pretending to be something it’s not. That’s a whole different story in my book.
Matt Haughey
on 20 Nov 06Jason, I disagree with your hypothesis a bit. They redesigned the player early this summer. Prior to that, the play button was quite small, and I used to prefer Google Video over YouTube for my own embedding, since the play button and controls were so much easier to use in Google Video (which hasn’t changed much).
I recall the tracking forwards and backwards in a youtube video used to be really difficult and buggy because the controls were small.
Check out these screenshots: The first youtube player I remember (tiny controls, hard to use)
The second (still teeny buttons)
A third design (they got popular with this design, though the current one is much easier to use with bigger buttons)
siftee
on 20 Nov 06I totally agree that coudal is lying. the deception is not that the video doesn’t run it’s that you’re taking controls from a user interface and putting them on another element entirely. Its all very well that they will see a video but using the exact same controls makes the customer expect to see the video in the web page they are currently viewing… just like the youtube external video player.
you can argue all you want but coudal your ad is no different than the other ads of this type that use message boxes to decieve the user. if you want to stay on their level, fine but don’t try to justify it by saying the text-link underneath – which is in no way intergrated – excuses you.
antonio
on 20 Nov 06I agree with Jeff Croft.
Coudal, these are the 6 tricks I interpret that you use to confuse and mislead your users for clicks: - A false play button - A false fast forward - A false rewind - A false options menu - A false video box - A false progress bar (its almost sinister how you offset the progress bar)
It’s reasonable to extend this to other poor advertising techniques: - A false error message - A false software detection message
compiler
on 20 Nov 06Hehe, the article “YouTube’s Interface: If You Build It, They Will Come” is also great. Thansk for the informations.
Coudal
on 20 Nov 06I am really starting to feel evil now.
The link is not lying when it says “Hey, I’m a video, click me.”
It’s also clearly an ad. Ads take you places. The strength of that convention far outweighs any other I think.
If, like Siftee and Antonio, you are upset that the video doesn’t run in situ I dont know what more to say. As designers we’re always looking for clear visual metaphors to allow us to communicate quickly. I think this is one of those and really only possible now that video controls have become ubiquitous, like stop signs and envelopes before them.
Isaac Weinhausen
on 20 Nov 06One must ask them self, “What in particular is effective about Coudal’s video ads?” Is it:
1) They indicate that a video lies on another another page. 2) They indicate that this graphic is actually an interactive embedded object.
I myself would click out of an interactive expectation triggered by the UI elements. After all, isn’t that what a UI is supposed to do, trigger an interaction? In that sense, I would feel (and have felt from experience) deceived.
matthew
on 20 Nov 06buttons are seductive. When people see one, they instantly know what it does and want to click it.[/i]
The catalyst, or one of them anyway. Nice observation.
Zune will suffer against the iPod for this very reason: Apple values and understands simplicity as catalyst. MS with it’s convoluted Zune Marketplace, for example, clearly does not place a value on simplicity.
antonio
on 20 Nov 06Coudal: “The link is not lying when it says ‘Hey, I’m a video, click me.’”
Yes, it does. It is a hyperlink that generates money, not a video.
Coudal
on 20 Nov 06A point well-taken Isaac. But I do think that for the most part the reaction is along the lines of your first point. Namely that people click the ad because the want to see the Jewelboxing video and and the rest of the discussion (as fun as it is) never enters into it. Don’t you?
Isaac Weinhausen
on 20 Nov 06Coudal, I completely agree that we as designers must look for clear visual metaphors.
Sometimes though, while a metaphor attempts to represent something, it can inadvertently be mistaken for the very thing it is trying to represent.
For example, try representing a stop sign at a street corner. How do you do it without actually creating a sign that would inadvertently stop traffic? This is a great challenge, especially because the stop sign already has such powerful visual recognition. It is the same case with UI controls.
(Coudal, I do not think you are evil. :-) In fact, like many others, I have great respect for you. Regardless though, I must remain objective. Caio.)
Jeff Croft
on 20 Nov 06Jim, I don’t know if it’s evil. It’s just not entirely transparent. It’s not any more evil than when I get a “check” in the mail for $1,000,000 and then find out it’s not a real check, but rather an ad for some kind of sweepstakes in which I could win $1,000,000 if I were to do such-and-such.
I think your ads for Jewelboxing are mostly the same as the ads for security software that say, “WARNING: Your computer is currently broadcasting an IP address!” and then show two buttons, one for “Secure my computer” and one for “Cancel.” People click “Secure my computer,” but the button doesn’t actually secure their computer. And people that click “Cancel” get the exact same thing as people that click “Secure my computer.”
In both cases, common UI elements that we expect to do certain things have been repurposed to do something else. Specifically, they’ve been repurposed to generate another click-through in your ad stats. That feels shady, whether you intended it to or not.
There is a difference, though - the “Secure my computer” button doesn’t actually secure your computer. Instead, it tells you you’ll need to buy something before your computer can actually be secured. Your ad doesn’t do that - it does actually play a video, without requiring your to make a purchase first. Therefore, it’s definitely less shady. But, it still doesn’t play until it’s registered a click-through in your ad system and it still plays a video no matter which UI element I click on (for example, it plays even if I click fast-forward).
Seems to me the whole deception aspect of it could be solved by simply changing it to an underlined text link that says, “click here to watch a video on Jewelboxing.” We expect text links to go to a different page…
Phil
on 20 Nov 06The problem with Coudal’s ad is that, yes it’s an ad, but it gives the impression that it’s an embedded video that won’t navigate me away from my current page. Many ads these days do play videos inline, so it’s not an unfair assumption that this will do the same. If you just wanted to indicate there was a movie to be seen when clicking the ad, you could have shown a film reel icon or something… this seems like the play button was a deliberate “click me and play video… oops now you’re on my website!”
Isaac Weinhausen
on 20 Nov 06Coudal, I see your point. I could click the link, wanting to see a video, and I would get. In that sense I agree, functionally it’s very effective. However, I don’t think the means justify the end. Regardless of its effectiveness, a small part of me would still feel tricked. Being that I’m human, I don’t like being tricked. On the other hand, a lab rat could care less (I hope PITA is not reading this… ;-) ). As a designer, I do not only want my design to be effective, I want it to be human.
Dan Boland
on 20 Nov 06People, come on. I see nothing deceptive at all about the Jewelboxing ad. Anyone in the target audience of the ad (hey, that’s us!) knows that this is a picture of a video, not a real, playable video. The progress indicator is even set to the middle of the bar, further illustrating that it’s clearly a picture.
Coudal
on 20 Nov 06It seems that it all comes down to whether the video plays in the ad space or somewhere else. In the first case it’s all perfectly fine and in the second it’s deceitful on some level. I’m not sure that distinction matters very much to most people but I do appreciate that it matters to this audience at SvN and I love that fact that there’s a place to discuss this type of thing.
Coudal
on 20 Nov 06I do agree however that it is dishonest to show a viewer one thing but when they click you then give them something entirely different.
Paul
on 20 Nov 06I don’t think the Coudal ads are deceptive. The media player in the ad looks so dinky that I would never mistake it for an inline player. My first impression was, “Oh, it’s a screenshot of a media player playing a video.” Then I clicked it, and I was taken to a page that showed the same video that was shown in the ad. The experience met my expectations; I didn’t feel violated or deceived.
Now, if the media player in the ad was large enough to look like a real inline media player, then I would feel deceived if the video it didn’t play inline. I agree with the sentiment that there is a lot of advertising online that uses deception to market to people, but I think we’re going a little too far in our witch hunt by implicating Coudal as being deceptive here.
Isaac Weinhausen
on 20 Nov 06I second that. Were would we be as designers and a society if we didn’t take time to think and reason? Thanks SvN (and Coudal) for all your your thought-provoking blog posts and discussions. I’m a better designer because of ‘em =)
Sam
on 20 Nov 06Coudal: 1 Hataz: 0
Chris Carter
on 20 Nov 06It’s funny, the whole Coudal Ad thought was the first thing that came to my mind after reading the original post as well.
I don’t think the ad is on par with those shady security popups, mainly because that’s what they are – popups, they are far more intrusive and made to look like a legitimate part of your OS, rather than just a deceptive ad that looks like a normal part of the browser.
Yes, I used the word deceptive, however I’m not implying malicious intent, simply that the advertisement does deceive visitors. It is made to look like an embedded movie, rather than just a picture that says “click here to watch a movie on another site”. It’s the fact that the very first time I saw that ad that I actually clicked the play button – and was immediately taken to another page. The font size for “ads from the deck” is incredibly small and I didn’t originally see it.
So, from my point of view, the ad is deceptive. Is it effective? Of course, we’ve trained ourselves as web users to click the play button on embedded video. But it masquerades as something it’s not, and that, my friends, is deception at it’s core.
Now, I don’t really care. “Fool me once…” as the saying goes. Personally, I think it’s brilliant (as has been said, what a great way to get clicks), but please don’t pretend that there isn’t any deception involved, intended or not.
Keane
on 20 Nov 06Coudal’s “video” is certainly deceptive, though probably (hopefully) not deliberately so.
It’s deceptive precisely because of the success of the external/embedded video players created by YouTube and Google Video and others. These video players have conditioned us to expect that things that look like video players on websites are actually video players. And because each of these embedded video players looks different and evolves its interface, it’s easy to believe that there could be an embedded video player with tiny buttons, designed to be placed in sidebars for just this purpose. Why not?
For my part, knowing that Coudal do cool things like Jewelboxing and making short films and innovative competitions and so on, I could easily believe that they would do something like embed a video in the ad to show just how easy Jewelboxing is (“look, it even looks easy when it’s the size of a postage stamp! Imagine it for real!”). So I was deceived in part because I know about Coudal…and I’ve even got an answer for the progress bar defence: I’ve seen plenty of embedded videos that start playing before they’ve finished loading and then stop when they’ve played the bit they’ve loaded whilst they load the remainder, which leaves the progress bar stuck somewhere in the middle, just like that.
It’s certainly a great way to attract clicks-either because people can tell it’s a link to a video and want to go and watch a video or because people think it’s a video and want to watch a video instantly (in which case they’ve been deceived, but not evilly)-and takes advantage (in both cases) of the recent proliferation of video content on the internet.
On a slightly related note, I’m a bit concerned about how many SvN readers think it isn’t deceptive purely because they themselves weren’t deceived. I’d have expected SvN readers to be slightly more objective about interface design than that.
dave glasser
on 20 Nov 06Um, do click-throughs on Deck ads even result in money being exchanged?
pwb
on 21 Nov 06YouTube keays were: 1) Going with low quality Flash video. That enabled the virality which QuickTime and WMA have never delivered. 2) Identifying a host (MySpace)(right out of the PayPal playbook)
Agree with the dissenters: the Coudal ad feels a bit dirty, like the fake dialog windows.
Owen van Dijk
on 21 Nov 06I don’t know, but wasn’t the whole thing that was a bit odd ‘bout Youtube’s player that if you clicked the video-area instead of just the UI navigations ( scrubber, playbuttons, volume ) you were redirected to the Youtube site ( with a deeplink to that player ). I always thought that was a bit sneaky ( though smart nonetheless )
Jeff Croft
on 21 Nov 06Last I checked, the QuickTime player was a legitimate part of my OS.
Torley
on 21 Nov 06I’m kind of musing here on how to portray a set of QuickTime movie controls without being so “blatant” as to show a picture of the actual thing… hmmm… I say that a bit tongue-in-cheekily.
But, at least that ad alludes to it being so — “ADS BY THE DECK” — atop the graphic.
I really like how attractive YouTube’s play controls have gotten: I was reluctant to be a YouTuber at first because of rough edges, and still am in some ways (e.g., ratings displayed in search results, as well as numerous more things I’ve observed). Yes, I can’t see those shaky, tertiary-color ads existing when Google gets their hand more into things!
But… it remains so fun and easy to use!
Jeff Croft quotes a fascinating point I agree with to a large degree; I have a variation, perception becomes reality. It’s a transformation of thought into action!
Jeremy
on 21 Nov 06Someone wiser than the both of us once said, “You’ll find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly upon our own point of view.”
As designers it’s so easy to split hairs and spin wheels in a heady conversation over stuff like that video ad, but at the end of the day a bunch of people you don’t always get to know decide it’s success and failure. Their expectations and reactions tend to blast right through nuanced arguments like this one and keep a designer honest.
I don’t think we’d find as much cynicism about ads or revenue from a broader group outside the design community.
Coudal
on 21 Nov 06Um, do click-throughs on Deck ads even result in money being exchanged?
No. The Deck is not structured around click-throughs, page-views or impressions. There’s a flat cost for the ads. If it works for an advertiser they’ll re-up for another month. If it doesn’t, they won’t.
manuel
on 21 Nov 06relax you guys.
example: since when is a screenshot a lie? a screenshot of a xp desktop is a lie becauser it is only a picture of a desktop? a picture of a “videoplayer in action” is just a picture of a videoplayer in action, not a lie.
the fact that this has something to do with ads/moneymaking makes some of you guys go nuts and call it a lie? the screenshot of the player leads to a video. not in one window and with one click? oh my god! is there a priest around?
when was this macro control button QT player released anyways? ;)
ecne
on 21 Nov 065 cents on YouTube interface: I never quite liked it, back from the days it was launched; it felt dull and unconsistent. Funny how in the article they compare it to Flickr, which I adore.
John
on 21 Nov 06All this hubbub about Coudal’s ad reminds me of a post by Kathy Sierra from a few days ago. Love is good. Hate is good. Indifference is trouble.
Good job, Coudal!
James Head
on 21 Nov 06The quicktime controls within the ad are scaled down. If they were 100% the size of the normal controls, I would feel decieved. As is, I just feel slightly uneasy.
To me, the scaling makes it obvious this is a screenshot.
The real question should be, – how do you, in that adspace convey to the user that a quicktime movie exists if you click through?
Iain
on 21 Nov 06Just checked back in on this comment thread and am quite surprised by the amount of controversy. While I stick by my opinion that the ads are somewhat deceptive, I will admit to the use of hyperbole in comparing them to the fake error messages.
franklin lyons
on 27 Nov 06Actually shooting ourselves in the foot here no? Conditioning users to ignore this potentially useful type of mini-player ad metaphor.
I’ve been tainted.
This discussion is closed.