CrowdRules Blog

Not YouTube - Better!

Welcome!

So nice to see all of you visiting CrowdRules. I'm glad you're enjoying the site. We're getting visitors from all over the world, and a lot of attention from the press.

But one of the headlines for a review called us a YouTube clone, and one or two people who haven't been to the site, or didn't spend much time there, have pointed out that YouTube has voting and contests too. They're wondered what makes CrowdRules different. So, let me address those questions.

First of all, we don't host videos. We either refer to them with a link that you cut and paste from YouTube, Veoh, Brightcove, and many others; or we stream them from a private source for our corporate sponsors. YouTube hosts and streams videos.

Second, we have honest voting. So why does that make CrowdRules different? Because we prevent what are called information cascades - things that bias voting - from happening on our site. When you let information cascades happen, everyone games the voting, most videos get rated only by the people directly involved with the video, which means that no one can find out if a video is any good without watching it themselves. YouTube doesn't even try to prevent information cascades. It would be difficult for them to do so at this point. And it wouldn't fit in with who they are - a wonderful, free-flowing, viral site.

Third, we allow anyone to create self-serve contests, set their own rules, set their own times for open submission periods, determine how long voting will stay open, and how long the results will be reported. YouTube creates contests for its sponsors and advertisers on a one-by-one basis. No self-serve is available.

CrowdRules in seven words: Crowdrules is video contests with honest voting. Those seven words mean something if you run contests. Yet we built CrowdRules because contests have a lot in common with qualitative media research. And by creating a self-serve contest system that sits on top of a dynamic-panel system (patent-pending) we’ve opened up media research to everyone. And harnessed Collective Intelligence.

Listen, we love YouTube. It's groundbreaking. It's the new standard. It provides a wonderful place for people to store their videos and have other people watch them. We just happen to be the place where you can do something meaningful with those videos you upload to YouTube. And Veoh. And PhotoBucket.  And...;>)

David

What CrowdRules is all about

Wow! Thanks so much to everyone who's written about us already. That was fast!

I'd especially like to thank Stan Schroeder at Frantic Industries for being the first blogger on the planet - besides me, of course! - to write about Crowd Rules. Thanks, Stan!

Kristen Nicole had a great review at Mashable yesterday that's being picked up all over the web. Thanks you ever so much, Kristen! But I especially liked the riffing on Kristen's article by Naveen at Internet20. He got what Kristen missed: that we're not a YouTube clone. I mean, really: we don't even host videos!

So, what exactly is CrowdRules? A lot of people are seeing it as a fun video-sharing site. That's cool. But that's like having a Lexus and seeing it as a fun place to sit and eat lunch. Sure, the seats look comfortable, but wouldn't you get more use out of it if you drove it?

To extend that metaphor, driving at CrowdRules means creating your own Crowds and Challenges. Lots of Members are doing just that. Everything from political videos to anime music to movie trailer spoofs. Members are putting up lots of new Challenges every day. Jump in and vote in a Challenge, or try creating your own!

Yesterday I created two new Challenges, both for campaign videos, linked in a bunch of videos from the YouTube Campaign 2008 channel, and placed the Challenge widgets on my CrowdRules MySpace Page in just minutes. Votes are now flooding in.

You can do this kind of stuff too. It's really easy! You can use Challenges whenever you need fair and accurate results. It's like Yahoo!Answers with videos: whatever question you can think of that has several possible answers, you can ask with videos on CrowdRules. If you can't think what those answers could be, the crowd will help you with that too. They're nice people. Really.

Oh, you need ideas for Challenges? How about audience testing, auditions, band battles, film festivals, market research, mash-up contests, poetry slams, political ad testing, talent searches, video resume reviews, and a million other things. Or you can just create any video about any subject and ask for video responses. On YouTube, only the first couple of responses to a video ever get looked at. Here at CrowdRules, they all get looked at and voted on, and we make sure that the voting is honest. And that helps the best ones get noticed.

So, what CrowdRules is all about is really up to you. We've made tools for honest voting. You get to use them. For free. Just two things, to paraphrase HotOrNot: keep it fun and clean.

That's all for now. Got lots of emails to answer. Peace out!

My Technorati Profile

Thanks!

Technical Thanks!

Crowd Rules was built by Devin Ben-Hur, Igal Koshevoy and Tom Cox. These amazing men have shown extraordinary dedication, superior technical skills, and amazing talent in creating an industrial strength application with Web 2.0 in its DNA.

Crowd Rules Public Beta went live on March 20, 2007 at http://www.crowdrules.com.

Thank you Devin. Thank you Igal. Thank you Tom. Thank you all for your work on this project.

David

Welcome!

It seems like all of us have at least one group we belong to on MySpace, Facebook, Linkedin, or the hundreds of other social networking sites out there. Yet all we do in most of our groups is exchange messages, or let our friends know about good content we've found. But there's so much content out there that it's almost impossible for us to find good stuff anymore without wading through a lot of junk - even from our friends! So we created CrowdRules to use the power of your groups to rate and rank content. That makes it easier for everyone to find great content!

Let's say you have a Myspace page with 150 friends - that's near the average on Myspace. Now let's say you want to find the best of 50 bootleg, concert, cellphone video camera, and other videos for the band "Muse" that are on the web. Watching them all yourself, at 3 minutes per video and with time to rate them, would take at least 2 1/2 hours, assuming you had some way to keep track of how you'd voted.

But you could do it. Then publish the list of your results. And it's pretty likely that no one except you would ever use it, because it's just you that created the list. Seems like a waste of time. But what if you could get your friends to help? You can do that using CrowdRules. It's like coordinated group list-making to help you find the best content, while creating value for people you've never met who'll search later. You spend less time, you find good stuff, and you make a difference.

So there you are at CrowdRules, creating a "Muse Video" Challenge, and pasting the video links in from around the web. You can even ask your friends to find and add the videos. It takes just a few minutes. Then a widget is automatically created to invite people to the Challenge, which you can place on your Myspace or Facebook page or blog to invite your friends to vote in your Challenge. You can even blast a message with the widget in it.

Even with only those 150 people participating, and no one else, you now have a statistically significant, demographically appropriate, self-selecting media research panel. You and your friends can zip through the 50 videos together. The result is that anyone looking for videos by Muse in the future - including you - will be able to find them in true ranked order, from best to worst. Your friends who help you vote will have spent only the average amount of time they'd spend on YouTube - which is about 24 minutes -and much less than the 2.5 hours you would have taken. That's good for you and good for everyone else that follows you on to CrowdRules looking for the best Muse videos.

So anyone with a group - that's probably all of us now! - can use Crowd Rules to leverage those groups to rate and rank videos. And there will be lots of people who just hang out at CrowdRules, waiting for a fun new Challenge. Because CrowdRules can also be used for comparing ads, running film festivals, judging band battles, picking the best film trailers, even honing a political campaign's message. You name it. First a few, then hundreds, then thousands of parallel Challenges will rattle and hum across the Internet on to CrowdRules, each creating value for one person and simultaneous value for everyone. The crowd will rule, and everyone will benefit.

CrowdRules is going live in Beta, and we're excited to see all the things you'll do!

David Moss

CEO

questions @ crowdrules dotcom