YouTube is a free online video sharing website where any visitor can upload, watch, and share video clips. The site has several ways to show the popularity and quality of the videos such as a 1-5 star rating system, the ability to leave comments, and a running count of how many times each video has been viewed.
Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim founded YouTube, Inc. on February 14, 2005. The founders were former employees of PayPal, another huge success. The domain name “YouTube.com” was activated on February 15, 2005, with the website launching shortly thereafter.
If you are interested to see what the founders look like, you can see a video message from Chad and Steve the founders at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCVxQ_3Ejkg. It is interesting to note the relaxed and informal atmosphere of this video, and it tells you a lot about what the vision of YouTube is.
In fact, YouTube’s informality and confidence which has led to wonderful success. Informal, almost amateur videos of people clowning around ad-lib (like the founders in the video) are part of the major driving force behind YouTube.
In November 2005, just 10 months after its founding, YouTube received funding from Sequoia Capital and the service was officially launched in December 2005. In the time since, YouTube has had a sensational and meteoric rise to very top the entire internet, and is currently (as of writing this) in the top 5 most visited sites online.
• The startup company was acquired by Google in October 2006 for $1.65 Billion! (Only 20 months after the company was started!), thus combining the biggest force in search and internet advertising with the biggest force in online video.
• YouTube has changed the entire landscape of TV advertising, and rivals network television in viewing.• In 2006, YouTube won TIME magazine's "Invention of the Year”. © MMVII www.UndergroundTrafficBook.com Page 6
• Online video is projected to be the biggest online trend of 2007: YouTube has a lot more growth left in it yet!
• YouTube is in the top 5 biggest web properties in the world.
• YouTube features videos made by thousands of internet users, and has already made many people famous.
• More than 65,000 new videos are uploaded everyday
• Major media outlets are monitoring popular videos and stories on YouTube, and are using videos they find there to create stories featured in the largest papers in the world.
• YouTube serves up over 200 million clips daily.• YouTube streams all sorts of video content including movies, t.v. shows, music videos, commercials and probably most importantly, a huge amount of amateur content contributed by an enthusiastic and thriving community.
• The major advantage of YouTube’s technology over the other various forms of internet video is the video playback technology which is based on Macromedia's FlashPlayer 7 which is present on over 85% of computers connected to the internet.
• It’s rapid growth has far exceeded the growth of major websites as evidenced by the chart below. Craigslist, MySpace, eBay, Blogger.comWow! Just to give you an idea of immense popular this site has become in such a short period of time, take a look at the graph below which shows 5 other heavyweight internet companies: eBay, MySpace, Blogger.com and Craigslist.
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As you can see in the Alexa chart above, YouTube came on the scene in early 2006 and its growth blasted to the top of the charts! And keep in mind, this is still a very young company!
While online video has been around for quite some time, prior to YouTube, there was really no easy or practical way to share video on the internet.
Videos were long and slow loading, and required separate software to view them. If you ever tried watching video prior to YouTube, you may know how frustrating it was indeed!
YouTube revolutionized online video by developing a technology that easily allows people to watch videos in the web browser, as well as embed YouTube videos in remote websites.
The embedding feature can be a huge advantage in promotion as you can easily place numerous videos on your websites, blogs, MySpace pages, and practically any other page were you can add html code.
Unlike it’s predecessors, the video from YouTube actually streams nicely from the internet, even on a wide range of internet connection speeds. Video play starts almost immediately (unlike other videos which require either complete download, or take up
© MMVII www.UndergrounTrafficBook.com Page 8to several minutes to load) and videos can be paused and rewinded for careful viewing.
While the previous section does not contain any ‘how-to’ information, it is important to impress upon you a sense of the enormous impact online video has had on both the internet, and on network television advertising. Online video will probably be the biggest and fastest growing advertising media for the next few years, so hopefully you’ll be inspired to take advantage of it.
While the majority of videos are posted by amateurs looking for laughs, notoriety, and 15 minutes of internet fame, a savvy internet marketer will find that this service can be used to drive traffic to websites, get sales messages to potential buyers, and to market products and services.
Also, this traffic is relatively inexpensive…Almost free. Online video sites pay for all of the bandwidth for the videos, and most sites host the videos as long as you want to keep them up. So once you’ve covered the initial cost of making the video, your investment may pay off for months or even years without additional fees! (Unlike banner ads which always require more money to keep the ad running).
In fact, as videos get more views, they tend to increase in popularity due to the ranking systems of video sites which tend to favor videos with high view counts in their rankings.
Due to the ‘newness’ of this advertising medium, you can gain a sizeable advantage before this method of promotion becomes competitive.Take a look at search engine optimization.
When search engine optimization was very new in the mid to late 90’s, one could just add a keyword title to their webpage, maybe add some keyword meta tags to the HTML code, and within days, have a page that ranked at the very top of the search engines. (Imagine what a cake-walk it would be to make money today if that situation existed!)
If you look at the search engine optimization field today, it is a very expensive and very difficult task, fraught with peril, disillusionment and outright fraud. It is extremely difficult to get great rankings and results are rarely if-at-all guaranteed, even with the hard-earned money you spend.
With this in mind, it is a good idea to take action now.The bar for promotion with online video is currently set very, very low , and the competition is not fierce like it is in SEO.
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While having a well ranked video on YouTube is certainly not the equivalent of having a top ranking page for your best keyword in Google, it is comparatively easier to accomplish, and may yield fantastic results immediately, as well as down the road.
It is easy to get many people to view your videos on almost any keyword you choose and it is possible to get a top 10 ranked video in YouTube’s search results with little effort (even with lousy videos).
And despite the huge success and growth of online video in the last year due to Google’s much publicized acquisition of YouTube, there is still plenty of growth coming.
With this thought in mind, we will continue to the next chapter which tells us about how exactly YouTube works.© MMVII www.UndergroundtrafficBook.com Page 10