self-ranking of clips

I'm not jumping for joy on this idea.

I see you edited your post to take out the insult. Good idea.

I have over 6000 clips online, and process by which they appear as sales does seem random at first. But it follows patterns, given that the clip is well key-worded, it sales ranking on the internal search engine is controlled by buyer demand. Some lucky niche contributors are searched for as artists, but most of sales are generated by a topical search using a specific set of keywords. I don't thinks there's a lot of value in sales in self ranking of clips. But it's something to think about. Thanks Tiberio.

this is needed because we probably all have clips that have the same title, description, and keywords, and they are not sorted by the best quality video, but by the date they were uploaded (clip id).

pond5 has a huge problem whereby there are hundreds of thousands of clips that most people will never see, and lots of great clips are buried there.

Buyers scan by specific topic, by format, by price, by juicy thumbnails and titles. If your clips is buried under thousands of other clips of the same topic you can tweak those. But generally you don't stand much of a chance at this point anyway (unless you can compete on price, production value) in the saturated subjects. Forget them and find/research something else to sell which has buyer demand but few contributors. It's not easy and I understand your frustration. This is a really tough business.

Now there is an answer one can live by! :)

it is clear from viewing search results that the pond5 search algorithms do not properly rank the larger portion of the video content, and the only way to fix it is to actually rank each clip, and it can only be done by staff, customers, or sellers.

bringing quality videos closer to customers will generate more sales.

as it stands, large portions of the pond5 search rersults seem to be unranked.

ranking will improve results no matter what search options people use becuase it would be 'breakng the tie' for clips that are sorted the same (such as by price, if you have 50 videos of the same price, how are they sorted against each other)

let's say you upload 10 videos of a guy using a computer. you set them all at the same price. they are all uploaded and approved at the same time. at this time, until there are actual sales, there is little to no way for the sort algorithm to determine which of these 10 is the best and which is the worst, individually compared to each other.

if you upload 10 more a month later, the same concept, same price, then it is equally unlikely that they will be properly ranked compared to the similar videos that were uploaded a month earlier. maybe pond5 looks at your new uploads and compares them to your old uploads and ranks them all, but I don't think they do. I never see more than 1 or so from a group of uploads that appears to be given a special rank, and never in comparison to clips uploaded months ago or years ago.

- customers won't do it

- pond5 staff is probably busy at it is, and they probably do a limited amount of ranking on select videos

- sellers are highly motivated to rank their best videos over their worst, and since they are only ranking against their own videos, they have no ability to cheat, they would benefit (along with customers and pond5) by ranking their videos properly and hurt themselves by ranking them improperly.

From my understanding P5 curators do a "rating" on clips when they are curated. This forms part of the search algorithm and is invisible to buyers and sellers.

I sort of understand what you are suggesting but the time involved would be excessive.

Perhaps a better solution would be for artists to be able to select (say) 10 clips for every 1000 they have online as "favourites" which would boost their search result placement.

This would be invisible to buyers and other sellers.

TE

SEO is actually what takes care of this. SEO can not be circumvented as it is fully dependent on how you title, describe and tag your clips. I would guess that the search algorithm that P5 uses is tightly tied in to SEO. I have seen it first hand and it works quite well. When I launched my stock site designed for driving traffic to P5, I have a specific page that instantly got a ton of hits and helped in selling many 4K and 2K clips. What was the driving force? I had integrated clean SEO and hence ended up being the 1st search result when people searched for 4K stock footage on google. So if you want your clips to trickle to the top, then start a marketing campaign of your own. I write about how to do this in my e-book. Here is the page that started the frenzy: http://stockfootage.vadervideo.com/content/large-and-specialty-format-footage-2k-4k-and-verticals as well as the subsequent pages in that topic.

To this day I still have a link on the first return page on Google with that search... but as one can see, many have joined the program since. Hence, my "ranking" went down on Google. This is just the nature of the beast. One can not rank oneself to the top as if that was possible, there would be no top. This is why whenever a company claims they can get you top listing on Google, they are basically lying through their teeth. If that was as possible as they usually claim, then everyone would be at the top which in turn is an impossibility.

If tomorrow I upload 10 images of a guy using a computer and rank/rate them and vadervideo, TheEngeneer, Tiberio, tbmpvideo, and kk5hy do the same how have we helped ourselves? Pond5 will apply it algorithm and it's likely we'd all end up where we would have without the self ranking/rating.

when you have a large profile, you likely have a large number of videos that are sorted under the same rank.

the customers won't rank them, the p5 staff isn't going to rank every individual video, we we should be allowed to do it. self-ranking has nothing to do with the videos of other sellers unless they were all given the same rank.

there are over 2,000,000 videos now, and either pond5 gives each one an individual rank, or they give it a score from 1 to a fixed number, such as 255. either way, a lot of videos get the same score.

let's say a seller has 10 videos that are all ducks, each has 0 sales, each has 0 views. how does the sort algorithm know which one is better? did pond5 rank each of these 10 from best to worst? I doubt it, they probably just mark the best one, and they might say they are all ranked the same. so let use fill in the ties, self rank our videos.

This mainly helps sort the large 75%+ of the database that has no sales, no views, no ratings, etc.

I know the average person isn't going to understand it as easily but the people who write the sort algorithms for the database will know what I am talking about, and they will know why it benefits them.