Baking bagels at 5 a.m. may have been the worst job Jordan Canning ever had. She also tried worked at a catering company but quit after just two shifts.
The filmmaker, instead of food, has a passion for the screen. Already she’s made a few shorts, some music videos and is now working on a feature film.
To continue producing, though, Canning has to pull in some extra income. None of those jobs – including some at the Toronto International Film Festival and writing reviews for a local newspaper — have been quite as cushy as her current part-time gig as a Netflix film tagger.
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.
Enter the slacker dream job: getting paid to sit on your couch watching movies. Netflix employs over 40 taggers to watch its movies. Most live in L.A., but there are a handful in each of its major markets, including four Canadians.
But it’s not just any slacker Netflix is scouting. “We’re looking for people who have knowledge of movies and TV shows,” says Todd Yellin, vice-president of product innovation at Netflix.
“In Jordan’s case, she’s a film maker. She’s been around the industry,” he says. “She’s been a script supervisor—a script supervisor is an awesome background for doing this.”
“They’re very detail oriented because they’re watching every detail of a movie, saying, ‘Hey! You were wearing glasses at the end of that scene.’”
Before a tagger is hired they have to successfully complete a tagging test to a gold standard. Yellin likes to use Fantastic Mr. Fox as a test film. Wes Anderson’s quirky, anthropomorphized foxes provide pesky nuances that defy the straight-forward categorization taggers complete more easily for other titles.
If the tester passes, they become a full-fledged tagger and receive their first to-watch list.
So what’s the pay for watching movies?
“We can’t tell you specifically what they get paid but we can tell you that for a part-time job they can make a few hundred dollars a week doing this,” says Yellin.
A few hundred dollars plus $7.99 worth of free monthly Netflix, Canning says.
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