YouTube: Five Stars Dominate Ratings

Stats from YouTube show that very few people use anything except the ’5′ in a 5-star rating system. So they switched to a thumbs-up or thumbs-down system. But i wonder what the point of the thumbs down is? the 1-star was not much more popular than 2-4 so why not simplify further?

This is exactly the situation with my client Our Oakland, whose site I built with Drupal.  They want to list most popular videos but with 5-star ratings there is a dilemma of how to balance average vs total votes. Does a video with 1 vote at “5″ rate higher than a video with 100 votes at “4.9″? So for their upcoming contest we’re switching to a simple “vote for this” and we’ll rank most popular by number of votes. Done.

The Drupal “5 Star” module allows building of a sophisticated mathematical analysis of votes so you could roll your own solution but that seems like a lot of extra work to solve a common problem.

Anyone else find a good solution to this issue?

…if the majority of videos are getting five stars, how useful is this system really? Would a thumbs up/thumbs down be more effective, or does favoriting do the trick of declaring your love for a video?

via YouTube Blog: Five Stars Dominate Ratings.

Related articles:

• YouTube’s big redesign goes live to everyone (news.cnet.com)