Respect people’s budgets

According to a recent study, ninety-six percent of people in India use prepaid data plans. Indian internet service providers have drastically reduced the price of data, but prepaid plans are still popular because people are accustomed to them. YouTube’s research participants described buying data from a local kiosk and carefully planning how to spend it. Many people said they avoid data-heavy activities like streaming videos, which can consume the daily allotment of data in less than an hour. As we continued our research, we watched participants search, start a video, quickly realize it was not what they wanted, and click on another result. Some people peeked at the video without watching it entirely.

Our team learned that viewers need more than just a thumbnail to decide whether a video is worth a data investment of 200MB. To solve for this we developed “video preview,” a new feature that allows users to glance at the key frames of a video and get a better sense of what the video is about, before deciding if they want to spend data to stream or download it. The preview modal also includes the size of the file, allowing users to calculate the exact cost of the video. For those users buying small amounts of data every day, this awareness can help them maximize the media they download with their data.

