Google launches YouTube Slam to encourage video discovery

By Mike Flacy December 27, 2011

cute-slam — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Announced within an official blog post earlier today, Google rolled out a method of comparing two videos called YouTube Slam. Designed by a team of developers within Google Research, the video discovery tool places videos into five different categories including dance, music, bizarre, cuteness and comedy. The user clicks a category and launches a new page with two competing YouTube videos. After the user watches both videos, they click the blue voting button underneath one of the videos. If the user chooses the video that’s the most popular among other YouTube users, they receive two points as well as increases the multiplier between votes. If the user chooses the most popular video several times, the multiplier continues to double and the amount of points could earn the user a spot on the Slam leaderboard.

On the leaderboards, users with the most points are shown in the “Top Voters” list and videos that have gained the most points are listed in the “Top Videos” section. Users can also modify the “Top Videos” list by videos chosen last week or over the entire existence of YouTube Slam. Google has also included a “Play All” feature that launches a continuous stream of the top ten videos for each category. Using a new interface at the bottom of the screen, users can scroll through the entire lineup of videos in addition to shuffling the videos for random play.

Since the launch of the project, the most popular category has been Comedy resulting in over 200,000 votes from approximately 25,000 people. Google plans to roll out new selections each week and the choices are curated by internal employees likely using an algorithm to categorize each video. With the creation of YouTube Slam, Google hopes to encourage more YouTube users to discover new videos while participating in a game at the same time.

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