Don't disable ratings - Here's why

[ThioJoe]

So my most popular video, "Double Your Internet Speed for Free" usually get's the most views out of all my videos, but I've had ratings disabled on it basically forever. This is because it's historically gotten a lot of negative comments, so I figured it would ultimately get a ton of dislikes.

A few days ago, I decided to enable ratings just to see what would happen. These are the results; I think they speak for themselves. As soon as I enabled ratings, the daily views basically tripled. Obviously this means that either having ratings enabled, or getting ratings at all significantly affect ranking for suggested videos, since that's where most of these come from.

 

[GmanCrafter]

I didn't know that!
I remember watching this video, and although I was searching for a serious tutorial, it still made me laugh at the time

 

[Ukraine Arsenal]

According to that Youtube uses likes/dislikes in its rating alrorithms and enabling them puts your video higher on the search que and thus giving you more views, in your case your video is actually funny so i doubt people would dislike, other than the super uptight ones who cant take a joke

 

[Masuoka101]

Also, when people like the video, it shows up on their subscribers feeds so the video is getting shown to more people there too

 

[markkaz]

Quite a while ago, I disabled the ability to rate my most popular videos. You can see my top 25 videos at bottom of this page.

http://socialblade.com/youtube/user/racegrooves/videos

Nowadays, I don't worry about the negatives unless they are really out-pacing the positives. If I believe that somebody is intentionally sabotaging a video, then I will turn off the ratings.

If one can suffer throught the negatives, allowing viewers to give it a thumbs up also winds up allowing them to promote your video if they have such options enabled. In other words, If they like a video, they might also have that auto-publish to their social feeds such as Twitter and Facebook.

Congrats on the growth of your video!

 

[NotoriousDBAG]

Cool dude, thanks for sharing! I always wondered about disabling ratings. I guess YouTube keeps those videos further back in the search results since they don't know what the opinions are on the videos. Or maybe comments/ratings have something to do with the algorithm of search results.