YouTube Slam is designed to get users to stumble upon content they might not otherwise see while surfing the site.
YouTube describes Slam as a "place for discovering talented amateur singers, the most adorable clips and the craziest videos on YouTube." Users can play with Slam in five categories: bizarre, comedy, cute (see image below), dance and music.
Showdown winners will get featured on a leaderboard, Google software engineer Tomas Izo said in a blog post.
So what's in it for you? When voting in a battle, you earn points for selecting the video that is already the more popular of the two contestants, so you can "see how you stack up against other players at the end of each week."
In a quick test of YouTube Slam, we noticed some questionable videos (i.e. ones with racial slurs and copyright infringements). YouTube appears to be addressing this issue with a "Flag as Inappropriate" button next to each voting button. The video pool for the categories will be repopulated each week, so offensive or infringing videos might be weeded out during that process.
Will you let YouTube Slam consume some of your time? Or will you toss this tool aside?
Bonus: YouTube in 2011
YouTube surpassed 1 trillion views in 2011, and these 10 videos were the most-watched ones, excluding clips from major music labels. Unsurprisingly, Rebecca Black's "Friday" jam leads the charge.