Netflix Uses Human Film Taggers to Categorize Movies

Canada.com has the story about Netflix film taggers, people who get paid to watch movies and answer more than 100 questions about the movie. 

Every week, Canning receives a list of movies and TV shows. Usually there are about five, ranging from Quebecois preschool shows to crazy violent Sci-Fi flicks.

She watches each with a spreadsheet open on her laptop and notes every detail imaginable in the film. Does it end tragically or have a happy one? Was there a high squirm factor? What about the use of curse words?

“It covers everything from big picture stuff like storyline, scene and tone, to details of whether there is a lot of smoking in the movie,” Canning says.

Each Netflix entry in the massive Netflix library is tagged with north of 100 data points. Some are simple, like the gender and jobs of the main characters. Others are ratings, like how violent is the title on a scale of one to five?

These tags power the Netflix suggestion engine. The company has created algorithms that suggest films based on user behavior. If you watch ten films with depressing endings, Black Swan might pop up the next time you log in. (Sorry, spoiler alert.)

Early in its existence, Netflix tested out film tags provided by external companies, but found that they failed in comparison to actual human taggers.

Has anyone worked as a Netflix Film Tagger?

Comments

[Katrin Tibidor]

Does Netflix track the search words that user enter in the search box?

I tried to search TV shows "M.A.S.H." numerous times (of course I know they don't have 'yet). But nowhere Netflix suggests any similar flicks whether in TV or Movies. I think this is lame.

[Retro Hound]

Dream job! How do I apply?

[AFG]

Do actual humans write the copy on the DVD sleeve? It's amazing just how consistently their summaries are inaccurate or totally miss the point. Not that it really matters, but you it looks bush league.

[GeeEmm]

Do those stats get used only in the suggestion algorithm, or are they used for actually categorizing the films and shows? I ask because there are hundreds of titles (maybe thousands) that don't show up in searches using logical related keywords. Much content is virtually invisible unless you know the name/title of something that you are looking for, even if you know the genre. I watch a lot of foreign films and often have to find the titles on other sites, or through a Google keyword search, before I can find them in the NF catalog.

[GeeEmm]

Not sure that being a film tagger would really be much of a dream job, but it would certainly be interesting. Because you don't get to choose what you are given to view and tag, it would remove any entertainment value from the experience. One would also have to be an objective observer. Even if you hated the film or program, you'd have to set that aside to be able to effectively rate the content based on the criteria in the questionnaire. Tagging - compiling a list of what a film is or contains - isn't the same as critiquing - opining about its quality or whether it was worth watching.

Wonder what the burn-out rate of the average tagger is...

[mido]

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[moviegeek]

I'm against any form of tagging, Netflix should not hire gang-bangers to put graffiti on their DVD's.

:)

[Neil]

Hey genius, the phrase "spoiler alert" generally precedes the spoiler, such that one is "alerted" to the upcoming spoiler and can avoid it. You kind of got it backwards... thanks for ruining that movie for me now.