Keywords and Flagging (and why Pond 5 might lose sales)

As has been mentioned on a number of occasions there are a few people who are either lazy / careless when they are doing keywording or simply copy the work of another artist. It is easy to find examples of this, even among artists who sell higher priced footage. One clip I just looked at was of a father and (child) daughter sitting on a beach but the keywords include "1 person", "2 people" "3 people" "4 people" "5 people" and a number of other clearly incorrect tags.

Another example would be a shot of a clock tower that is in South America but includes "London" and "UK". This suggests that someone has copied the work of another artist and not been careful enough to remove clearly incorrect data.

There are more "subtle" issues as well which bring me on to the next point. I notice that P5 have added a "flag for review" option in V2 and they give you options of "offensive/inappropriate", "Keywording", "wrong information", "copyright claim" or "other". It would be really good to have a box for more information as well.

Case in point are a number of clips that are an underground train that is obviously (to someone like me who uses it regularly) not the London Underground but the clip includes the word "London" in the keywords. A programme / video maker who doesn't know might assume it is the London Underground. If later it is pointed out to them that it is not London then Pond 5 loses credibility in the eyes of that buyer and possible future sales are lost if they feel they cannot trust the site.

I would not expect the curators to know if this is the London Underground but there is no way in the flagging system of explaining why the keywords are incorrect.

Finally with flagging it would be nice to see some sort of acknowledgement that the "flag" had been received / sent.

TE

I sent P5 a contact mail regarding a very bad example. One artist I'm sure is using templates and the wrong ones at that. Most of the descriptions and keywords are completely in error, others are 75% or more not applicable. And they show up with a pretty high priority in search results. Complete spam, probably not on purpose but due to poor template control. Everyone has a few words that are questionable but when a car radio has words like "gravel pit" "construction" etc and it is obvious a nice automobile that has never been dirty it really hurts all of us far worst than bad quality footage.

IMHO descriptions and keywording is the most important part of this business. A poor quality clip with trash keywords spam hurts everyone due to quality and kills everyone because of keywords.

Yes a "flag" check block that sends the footage back to curation due to keywords should be priority. If an artist is found to be a consistent spammer then do something about it. If someone flags when there is no or minor issues then restrict the flagger from flagging. Advertise on the front page for buyers to see quality on footage as well as descriptions are number on importance here.

try a keyword search for "abandoned building grunge grafiti old military dead iraq" This will result in several different subject series. Just can't figure out the boat and tennis shoes as possibly with a long stretch as acceptable.

Or try keyword search for "semi gravel pit cone fence worker welding street wood" and see what happens. The keywords in this thread are only a partial and random selection of his list to direct the search

The only tenable solutions, still unlikely, are to have (1) curator only tags (2) limit tags to less than 10 to force people to be more precise. I think the train has left the station and we are on the platform wondering how to stop it.

I would think the "easiest" solution would be to offer buyers a "title only" search option which would have the effect of forcing people to think about the title of the clips carefully (in effect the same as restricting the number of keywords).

More complicated solutions involving flagging could work but would be harder to implement.

One of the issues is that the search seems to include the "description" field. In the past I have used this to describe what the "collection" was about so it would potentially show up as irrelevant search results.

So clips like this where the description and keywords are the same and none of them are valid. No way around it, the keywords and descriptions need to be cleaned up. Not sure if this artist is hitting the wrong template but his entire portfolio is like this with many different series and subjects. This is what hurts all of us when the search results show clips that have nothing to do with the subject.

The description for below footage is: Construction, Heavy Equiptment, Factory, Dig, Dirt, Hard Hat, Hat, Chuvel, track ho, back ho, Smoke, Steam, Power Plant, Truck, Semi, Dump Truck, Bulldozer, dozer, scoop, crane, build, building, Road Construction, Street, Orange, Cones, Traffic, Man hole, Yellow, Signs, Wood, House, Vest, Tools

And the keywords are the same.

Well ignoring the keywording, the not great quality (we all can improve) and the low pricing (a debate had many times) they have on their profile a link to their website where you can get "free stock video".

Seriously Pond 5?

TE

Well, they won't be selling that clip unless some random person looking for a construction project falls in love with a building that says "The Gateway" on it, but I'm sure a buyer will have a "wtf" moment when they have to skip over this clip.

I think you have a great idea Movingimages about giving long term users the ability to get a "pass" on reviews..it would free up curators to do some scanning through keywords and such to address this stuff...but the downside to that from Pond 5's perspective would be that one time a long term user lets one slip by that has a logo or something on it and Pond 5 gets hit with a lawsuit. That could be costly.

good point MW