Finding YouTube gems among the dross is increasingly impossible task: Bird Lovegod

There’s something like 800 million videos on Youtube. That’s a pointlessly large number. And it increases every millisecond.

Ok, sometimes you want something specific, like a film trailer, in which case there’s only one or two to choose from, but if you want something less individual, like archery videos, or football videos, or entertaining videos or comedy, there will be an impossible number to choose from. So the algorithm chooses for you, taking you in an ever-decreasing circle.

I think there’s absolutely a commercial opportunity for properly and professionally curated video content. I don’t want a million football videos, I want to be able to choose from a maximum of 100, but I want them all to be good. I don’t want 99.9999 per cent of what’s on YouTube. I want the best of what’s on YouTube. The top 100 of everything, at most.

But how to determine quality? Number of views isn’t a factor. Where’s the expertise? The good stuff? The quality?

How hard would it be to create a platform that had human-curated content?

It’s a bit of work, sifting the wheat from the mountains of chaff, but once it’s up and live, anyone wanting their content considered for Top100 or whatever it’s called could submit it and the reviewers would either accept or decline.

This would drive quality ever upwards, rather than the current system, which drives quantity only. Including millions of junk videos uploaded with inaccurate and hyped descriptions and all of it designed purely for ad revenue. It’s a bit low end, is it not?

Would people pay a subscription for a high-end professionally curated quality-assured videos? Some would, for sure. Perhaps respectfully placed and actually relevant adverts could be unobtrusively embedded, if that was part of the business model.

The ever-increasing quantity of content on YouTube is like an avalanche of gravel, and the diamonds, which there surely are, are for the most part buried in the slurry.

Personally I can hardly bring myself to use it for this exact reason. It’s a visual hot mess.

As AI becomes the ever present buzzword and implementor of our everything, I foresee, perhaps optimistically, a backlash in the form of human created and human curated media. People who know what they are talking about, who understand the subjects, who can appraise and apply standards and make human centric choices.

I think, at least hope, that the proliferation of AI will generate an equal and opposite force of appreciation for human generated and curated content of all forms.

We appreciate hand made goods, we respect and value them and pay a premium for the enjoyment of quality.

I suspect the same will soon be said of digital media, made by humans, for humans.

Bird Lovegod is MD of Ethical Much