YouTube Aims for ‘Stickiness’ With Redesign

In December, I wrote about YouTube’s multifaceted effort to keep users on its site longer as it sought to compete more effectively with television. Much of the work to make YouTube more “sticky” focused on helping users discover videos they might want to watch based on what they had watched or liked before.

Now YouTube is hoping to shine a spotlight on some of those behind-the-scene improvements with a new design of its “watch page.” YouTube says some version of this page is seen 1 billion times each day, so the redesign, which YouTube is to roll out on Wednesday afternoon, is likely to be noticed.

By and large, the new watch page is simpler and more streamlined. It has big search box at the top, underscoring the fact that YouTube is the second-most-used search engine after Google, which owns YouTube.

Perhaps the biggest change is on the right-hand side of the page, where YouTube replaced a clutter of modules and links with a long list of suggested follow-on videos. The list is curated using many of the techniques I talked about in the December story.

“We want to offer more choice to users and really make this page optimized for viewing sessions rather than a single view,” said Shiva Rajaraman, a senior product manager at YouTube. If a user watches a music video, for instance, Mr. Rajaraman said that YouTube would tee up a mix of related music videos in the hope that users would sit back and watch.

“We create an option for you to watch 15, 20 or 30 minutes of content,” Mr. Rajaraman said. “You can sit back and click ‘next,’ ‘next,’ ‘next.’ We want users to leave because they run out of time, not because they run out of things to watch.”
YouTube is also making it easier to find interesting comments and has simplified its rating systems to a simple thumbs up or thumbs down from a system using one to five stars,.

The new “watch page” will not be new to everyone. In January, YouTube made an early version of its redesign available on an opt-in basis. It has since rolled out the new page design to some 10 percent of its audience, and the company says the results are good.

Mr. Rajaraman said that in the limited release, the playlists had increased the number of videos users viewed by 6 percent. The changes in comments and ratings have helped “engagement” on the site rise by 7 percent.

That is a good start. But it’s still a long way before YouTube catches up with television, which the average viewer watches about 5 hours each day. By comparison, people spend an average of about 15 minutes on YouTube.

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