Keyword Stuffing On YouTube

November 14th, 2008

I was cleaning out some (now-stale) presidential race viewership data when I discovered that videos including the terms “John McCain” or “Barack Obama” in the tags/keywords appeared to be disappearing from YouTube at an alarming rate. Were people deleting videos about the candidates now that the election is over?

No, it turns out. The real reason for the decline is that some YouTube users were using the candidates’ names as keywords in totally irrelevant videos to inflate their views and, now that the election is over, were swapping out the candidates’ names for other of-the-moment keywords (i.e. “James Bond”).

On election day eve, 7.89% of the videos mentioning the candidates in the tags were of this misleading ilk. Some prominent examples of abusers include Tay Zonday’s “Chocolate Rain” and “Dramatic Chipmunk,” who, apparently, was not “dramatic” enough.

Entry Filed under: Video quality