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I'm making an app that has tonnes of categories of videos and within each category could be hundreds of videos.

The problem is that users generally only scroll through maybe 30 results which means that a lot of the content doesn't get a chance.

How do you expose more of the content to users?

The app's structure is category-page > category-page > content (through which you can scroll down indefinitely)

The navigation works pretty well, it's just that the less popular videos or videos from a long time ago don't get exposure.

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  • Are you able to access analytic data to examine user paths throughout the app? Commented Aug 25, 2014 at 21:19
  • yes :) There's a massive user-base. But we want a general solution that caters in some way to everybody Commented Aug 27, 2014 at 5:39
  • Factor when the video was made into how you order videos. That way newer ones have a better chance of being shown and old videos just naturally fall off the first page of results (kind of like reddit's hot filter) Commented Jan 23, 2015 at 20:12

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There are a bunch of different ways, how to show videos, that are not in top:

  • Just a bigger amount of categories
  • Special categories, like "Hot", "Top", "Best", "Best for today/month/year", "Random" etc.
  • Showing new content shuffling it inside the standart list of videos. For example you have 100 videos that are arranged by popularity. You can insert a new video after each 10th, you can also show some promotion videos in such a way.
  • Search for related content
  • Adding filters to make categorizing more accurate.

These things would help you to make content more flexible. But anyway, in every media app, that is based on ratings somehow, more popular videos would have more power and it is obvious for perception, so that's ok.

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One suggestion would be to condense your categories so there are simply less of them. If users aren't bothering to scroll through all of your categories, you've probably created too many. Unfortunately, this doesn't help solve the problem for older/less-popular movies, though.

For increasing the visibility of those seldom-seen movies individually, maybe you need to have more ways that movies are linked together. Like the "Users who watched Humflorbadoof also enjoyed..." category services like Netflix have. If you can manage it, try using movie info like tags on a website -- linking together otherwise unrelated movies that have the same actor/director/etc.

Additionally, you could always see how your users like a "25 Random Movies" category, or something. It sounds kinda dumb, but many people like rummaging through the virtual bargain bin, so to speak.

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The order of the results is completely in your control. If you want to make users view more less popular videos and videos from a long time ago put them within the first 30 results that the user sees.

It's pretty easy to put one random result that has the respected category from the database within the first 10 results that the app lists.

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Do you currently have any search? If you do, do you have search query logs that you can analyze?

I ask because often search is a great way to find out what kind of problems your navigation might have (navigation always has problems). If your users are searching for specific kinds of topics, or dates, or any other categorizing terms, perhaps you could experiment with those kind of navigation patterns and see if they bring up different data.

In my opinion, your best bet isn't really to ask users to view more than the first few pages, but rather to put more videos into first few pages so they can view them. So perhaps there need to be more ways to get specific video lists.

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