Firefox Flicks Backstage

The default sort for clips thus far has been Most Popular, which means that the most popular (most played) videos appear first. We realize this is something of a self-fulfilling prophesy: visitors with limited time are more likely to watch the first few videos they see, making the popular videos even more popular. Hundreds of thousands of people, however, view the clips on other sites such as Revver and YouTube or are linked directly to the best videos by their friends, which is how even recently added clips like Give Me the Soap and Xraalthraal and John have made their way up to the first page. We also continue to highlight newly posted videos directly on the front page.

Even so, we are instituting a change to make newly posted videos more visible on the clips page: half of all visitors will see clips sorted by popularity, and the other half will see clips sorted by recency. This is a temporary change until we can implement a new sort option, “Random,” and make that the default. We realize this may be slightly confusing, since you may see different ordering when you return to the page, but the same would occur with a randomized sort order anyway.

We are also increasing the number of videos per page from 10 to 12 and adding a navigation bar to the top of the clips page, and we will soon increase the number of videos featured on the front page from 3 to 6.

And finally, allow us to emphasize again that clip popularity does not affect the outcome of the contest, which is judged entirely by our esteemed panel.

We would love to hear your feedback on how else we can better highlight newly posted videos. Thanks all!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 24th, 2006 at 3:06 pm and is filed under Firefox Flicks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.