Google today announced its YouTube Slam, a contest where folks can vote for their favorite viral videos in various categories, among them Cute, Comedy, Music, Bizarre and Dance.
According to Google’s official YouTube blog, it’s not just a shameless promotion. It is, ahem, an experiment.
Have some free time this week? Think you can find the next singing sensation, viral video like Charlie bit my finger or Surprised Kitty? Then come play YouTube Slam–a video discovery experiment we cooked up with folks from Google Research. Each week a new crop of videos battles head-to-head in Comedy, Cute, Music, Bizarre and Dance Slams, where your votes determine who wins the Slam and gets featured on the leaderboard.
The experiment has some nice promotional side benefits. It’s all promotion, actually. Look at these numbers — way to get people’s eyes off other streaming systems.
This video, one of the first two YouTube offers up in the YouTube Slam category for dance, only has a few hundred views. If nothing else, we’ve got an experiment here that, seemingly, is designed to drive hits and perhaps keep the most viral videos exclusive to YouTube.
