How YouTube battles its biggest competitor television

YouTube,the video site owned by Google,is about 10 times more popular than its nearest competitor.

YouTube,the video site owned by Google,is about 10 times more popular than its nearest competitor. But Hunter Walk thinks of it as an underdog. For Walk,director of product management at YouTube,the competition is not websites: its TV. Our average user spends 15 minutes a day on the site, he said. They spend about five hours in front of the television.

Walk leads a team of engineers,designers and project managers who are fine-tuning YouTube. YouTube has said that about 20 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute. With hundreds of millions of clips to choose from,the challenge Walks team faces is to figure out how to select the 5 or 10 or 20 users enjoy most.

The payoff could be large. It could go a long way to extend its dominance against sites like Hulu,which are attracting users with full-length movies and television shows.

For YouTube,the challenge is in handling peoples searches. In November,Americans typed some 3.8 billion search queries on YouTube,according to comScore,a market researcher. But perhaps more important,YouTube must finesse what technicians call discovery. Thats the art of suggesting videos that users want to watch.

Recently,Walks team began tackling what it calls topic exhaustion. No matter how much users may like to watch,say,Shaquille ONeal highlights,they will inevitably reach a point when they will have had enough. So while YouTube used to suggest more of the same topic to users who watched a particular video,it has gently begun to nudge them toward related topics. The Shaquille ONeal video may prompt suggestions for Kobe Bryant highlights,NBA clips or topics further afield. If we guess wrong,you could leave us sooner, said Jamie Davidson,a member of Walks team.

During a meeting,engineers were brainstorming what might be the next step: pages that would begin playing a stream of clips tailored for a user,instead of offering suggested videos. The idea is to push more videos at users allowing them to abandon the keyboard and experience YouTube from the couch.

On YouTube,every 45 seconds,you are stuck at a decision point, Davidson said. Any time there is a decision point,people may leave.