Zero Views

Recently, my favorite NPR show, On the Media, had a story about an interesting blog called Zero Views.  The blog celebrates “the best of the bottom of the barrel” by posting the funniest YouTube videos that no one (NO ONE–hence the name “Zero Views”) has watched.  I found several things about this story that are worth commenting on. 

First, this is the kind of meta-site on the Web that I love.  It’s a site that highlights content from another site.  But here’s the thing.  As soon as this site focuses on a video that has zero views, it is HIGHLY likely that the video will no long have zero views.  And in fact, if the Zero Views blog is at all popular (and my sense is that it is fairly popular), any site that it talks about is likely to go viral and become incredibly popular with thousands of views.  That, to me, is a really interesting phenomenon.

The second thing that I find interesting about this story is an underlying issue about popularity.  This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while.  What makes a blog, a site, a video “popular?”  The easy answer has to do with numbers of views.  But that somehow feels unsatisfying to me.  I’ve watched many videos and traveled to many links that were recommended to me, only to feel…dissatisfied with what I’ve seen.  This makes me think that popularity must have something to do with “likeability” or some other related concept.  How would we measure “likeability” and surely, the fact that someone “recommended” a particular site, blog, video to me must have some relationship to “likeability,” right?

There are sites such as Technorati that try to measure “popularity” by measuring the number of links that each site has to it.  That is, the more other sites link to your site, the higher you rank in Technorati’s popularity rankings.  There are many problems with this idea of “popularity,” the most obvious of which is that more tech-literate folks are more likely to link to other sites.  So if you are “popular” among less tech-literate folks, you are less likely to be linked to so you will be ranked as less “popular.”

I don’t actually know how to measure “popularity” of websites, blogs, videos and so on.  The proliferation of “top 100” or “top 10” shows on TV makes me think that “popularity” is a cultural phenomenon, something we are interested in as a culture.  But I’m curious about what various groups of people mean when they use the word “popular” when it comes to online content.  What do you think?  I’m also really interested in the kinds of activities and behaviors that can affect the “popularity” of online content.  What do you think about that?