Curator Ratings Effect Sales?!

Clip ratings are very important because they directly correlate to sales. Higher rated clips will generally sell more because customers will feel more confident in buying a higher rated clip than a lower rated clip. Higher rated clips also seem to benefit from Pond 5's Default Sort in the search function. This Default sort seems to be based solely on keywords and the clip Ratings: when I just do a basic search for "business" HD and the thumbnails come up, it's sorted by "Default descending". The first page of clips that appear in the default search results are all Five Star. The second page starts with all 4 star. Coincidence? Or is "Default Sort" a synonym for Highest Rated?

Since all clips are rated by the Curator first, before any customer can view it, this rating (a default of Three Stars, an "exceptional clip" can be higher) effects sales. In other words, by granting a 4 or 5 star rating upon approval, the Curator is effecting the Default sort, personally giving priority to the clips he/she likes because the customer will see the 5 star rated clips first. These clips will in turn be the most likely to sell because not only do they come up first in Default search, but is rated higher than another, similar clip.

It seems to me that the customers should be in charge of rating the clips, as they do on many other stock sites. As a user and contributor on other sites, I assume that all ratings of the footage are given by customers, not staff. And nowhere does it say who rated the file (or why). This "Average 3 Star Rating" the Curator gives by default can be very damaging for a file. Customers will wonder "why is it only a 3 of 5? There must be something wrong with it." For example, yesterday I saw a clip that had a 3 star rating and a single download. While I really liked the clip, I thought to myself "The only person who downloaded it found something in it they didn't like and went out of their way to go back and rate it a 3, warning everyone that it was substandard in some way." One download, one rating, one warning. Because usually there are only ratings if users really like it or really don't.

So can someone from Pond 5 explain how and why it uses this rating system?

Default sort is determined by a number of secret sauce factors, including rating. We adjust the algorithm periodically, with the idea being to have the most relevant and most likely to sell clips appear first amongst the results. This helps everybody, including (especially) potential buyers.

We're going to continue refining this system, so your suggestions are appreciated. There's some talk of doing away with the curator ratings altogether, although I must say that we curators have absolutely impeccable taste, and make our aesthetic judgments in a purely objective and scientific manner. And yes, I am kidding. :)

Thanks - we're constantly working on improvements to the system, and will take your ideas into account.

Actually I prefer it this way. At every other site not getting the highest possible rating is a big warning - either the file sucks or the contributor has made enemies. Here the rating actually means something. 3 is actually good qualitly, 4 is really, really good and 5 is f***ing brilliant!

Obviously we somehow need to communicate to the potential buyers, that the review system works differently.

Rating clips is ofcourse one of the hardest things from our perspective. We never really intended that the curator point would be the one that set the score for the clip indefinitely.

Please note that logged in users can vote on a clip by clicking on the stars. [Right now] user votes weight equally strong as curator votes and the thought was that curator gives a start value and other users adjust this value according to how you want it to be.

If an owner of a clip votes it doesn't count.
If you vote more than once, only the latest vote is counted.

I like this rating, because is a good point of view what others think about the clips or just to get an idea.
Ok, if the user rates a clip, maybe there should be also a field where the user has to write why he is rating in this way, otherwise there will be also a risk that a clip get worse for any reason but maybe is a really good one. Is there already such a field (-:

Lars

It seems other users can vote on one of my clips giving a lower overall rating without even purchasing it. This seems to allow other Suppliers (not customers) to increase their clips visibility by decreasing others.
For example, clip 63530 had a default rating of 4, now is 3 1/2 with no purchases.

This may not be such a good idea. Only users who actually purchase clips and see the full res clip at full frame rate should be able to vote and rate clips. This would eliminate the ability of Suppliers to attempt to downgrade the competition.

Gman

Hi!

From my short 2-months experience on Pond5 I can tell that higher ratings had no effects, or even negative effect on sales (see summary ClipBins below). For sure ratings have effect on default display of clips on Artist page, but if buyer needed some clips he just searched for keywords.

Any of my clips for which rating=5 was given initially by reviewer(s) were not sold at all:
Clips with rating=5 (no ONE was sold):
https://www.pond5.com/index.php?page=search&q=clipbin:1313

And the best selling clips have rating=3 and rating=4 with about 50/50 ratio:
Best selling clips (no ONE has rating=5):
https://www.pond5.com/index.php?page=search&q=clipbin:1317

Also note, that all my clips are PAL format (HD 1080i/50). This also could affect sales, but ratings for sure did not affect sales at all (at least for my live video clips). After month or two or more I'll have more precise statistics.

Zygis

Got to agree there. Clips seem to sell regardless of rating.

And I don't really believe being able to rate other people's clips will result in submitters downgrading the competition. I've got about 650 clips online now - if I wanted to downgrade everything else, I'd have to spend WEEKS just to rate everything not mine. Not very efficient... Besides, if that would really happen, I guess our admin team would do something about it.

What I've seen on other platforms is that friends give each other high ratings when they are deserved and no rating when they are not so impressed. I would assume we'll see the same once the community here grows.

With the sheer volume of uploads is it really that important that clips are rated at all? So far as I can tell the only way to see a clip's star rating is to click each file one-by-one. With many thousands of files already uploaded it seems impractical to expect people to maintain their interest in a rating system with so many choices. Perhaps converting to a thumbs up and down rating system like they do on you tube would be easier. It could be added to the preview pop-ups for each video clip indicating how many gave an up and a down rating with a bar graph to visually represent the two. That could be added to the individual pages that give enhanced stats per clip.

Again, remember that clip ratings aren't the only factor that determine the default search results view, the "secret sauce" our hardworking curator referred to is made up of many different things, curator/user rating being only a part of what is considered when someone does a search.

The most important thing is to have relevant, specific keywords so when a buyer does a search for something your clip embodies it'll be there in the search results for them to consider, hopefully being exactly what they're looking for. A high rating on a nature clip means nothing when the buyer's looking for a businessman for his corporate video.