Time spent on Youtube has gone down by 20% day over day. What would you do?

Question

Time spent on Youtube has gone down by 20% day over day. What would you do?

Asked at Pinterest over a year ago

782 views

Problem Solving category

Analytical Thinking

Problem Solving

Analytical Thinking

Asked at

782 views

How to answer Problem Solving questions

Interview Guide

Answers (1)

To answer this question, Log in.

Top Problem Solving interview questions

Invite members
Invite by email

Add another

jbuto12 · Answer 1 · 2023-12-20T20:47:15+0000

Clarifying Questions:

What is the time period over which this drop in metrics occured? One day?
By 'Time Spent', do you mean the average time spent per user per day? Or the average time spent per user per session?
Metrics questions:
1. Are you able to give me anymore information regarding the segmentation of this metric?
  1. What do we see if we segment by content creators vs viewers?
  2. What do we see if we segment by region, device type, or OS?
  3. What if we segment by number of channel subscriptions, average number of videos viewed per day, average number of comments left per day, etc?
  4. Are there any factors that correlate with more time spent on the website per day?
2. Has there been a change in any other metrics?
  1. Avg number of sessions per user per day?
  2. Registration Conversion rates?
  3. DAU, WAU, MAU?
  4. Active User Retention?
  5. Average number of videos viewed per user per day?
  6. Average number of channel subscriptions per user?
  7. Average number of comment per video?
  8. Average number of views per video?
  9. Average number of likes per video?
  10. Percentage of users viewing their first video (within 7 days, 30 days) after creating an account?

External Factors:

My approach to this section would depend on what information was shared with me from the clarifying questions.

Its possible that external factors such as bad PR or a cometiro launching a new feature or product has led to this drop in metrics. I would investigate these factors.

Recent Releases:

My approach to this section would depend on what information was shared with me from the clarifying questions, and the external factors section.

I would evaluate recent releases to see if there was an update which corresponds to the drop in metrics.

If so, I would check to see if the drop in metrics is anticpated based on the context of what was released. For example, the release may have boosted another metric at the expense of time spent per day on the app.

Also, I would test the release to see if there are any bugs or obvious changes to the user interface that may have caused this drop unintentionally. If there was, I would create a JIRA ticket to correct this and try to get it into the current sprint.

Possible Pain Points:

My approach to this section would depend on what information was shared with me from the previous sections.

Users are annoyed with advertisements, which has led them to spend less time on youtube.
Users are not able to efficently find content that is interesting and relevant to them due to the huge volume of content on the site.
If the drop was specifcally for content creators, they may being seeing too many negative comments on theri videos - which is discouraging them from visiting the site.

Solutions:

Assuming the issue is that user are not able to effidently find content that is interesting and relevant to them due to the huge volume of content on the site.

Create an new user on-boarding experience which asks users specific questions about their interests and then organizes their feed based on their responses.
After a user watches a video to completion, prompt them to subscribe to the channel with a pop-up modal.

Prioritiy of Solutions:

Impact - high, Confidence - low, Effort - low
1. I'm less confident about this solution because there may be a difference between the type of content people say they like and the actual content they want to consume.
Impact - high, Confidence - medium, Effort - low
1. I'm assuming that the numbers of subscriptions a user user is strongly correlated with the time spent per day on the website.

Metrics to measure success:

Assuming that we implement solution 2: after a user watches a video to completion, prompt them to subscribe to the channel with a pop-up modal.

I would measure these metrics to check on the success of the feature:

Time spent on the website per user per day. (this would be my primary metric for this feature)
Percentage of new users seeing the pop-up prompt within 7 days of account creation
Percentage of users who see the prompt, who then subscribe to the channel.
Average number of channel subscriptions per user.
Active user retention.
Average number of sessions per user per day.
Average time per session per user.