Estimate: 20% of Web Videos are Spam

Some 20 percent of online videos can be considered spam, according to VideoSurf, a search engine that uses techniques like visual analysis to keep irrelevant videos pushed down in search results.

VideoSurf CTO Eitan Sharon today walked us through what his machine counts as video spam:

• Videos that have misleading thumbnails (e.g. a sexy shot of a woman inserted for a split-second in the middle of a personal blog that is unrelated to the thumbnail — see example above)
• Videos that are accompanied by completely unrelated text (e.g. the tag “Britney Spears” on a random commercial)
• Videos that have only one picture or one line of text (e.g. a URL for another site)

Such techniques are nothing new — see our previous coverage — but it’s notable that they’ve become so widespread.

VideoSurf doesn’t take spam videos out of search results entirely — after all, somebody, somewhere, could be looking for that one particular video. But the search engine pushes them down to the fourth results page or lower for many search terms, Sharon said. It also pushes videos lower down in results that users don’t click on or spend very little time watching. (However, regrettable video watching is minimized in part by VideoSurf’s feature of chunking a video into thumbnails so viewers get an idea of what they’re in for before they click.)

Sharon estimates there are 500 million videos on the web today, and VideoSurf has only indexed 25 million of them so far (though it recently stepped up efforts by doubling the size of its server farm). With so many more videos yet to be analyzed, it could be that much more or much less than 20 percent of all videos are spam. But it’s pretty daunting to think of so many irrelevant spammy videos out there, especially considering the costs involved with hosting and delivering them.

We’ve previously criticized San Mateo, Calif.-based VideoSurf for building itself as an ad-supported destination site, something that doesn’t seem to have worked for video search. Sharon said the company currently receives 1.5 million unique visitors per month, and is looking to make distribution deals in addition to stepping up efforts to attract its own traffic.