Youtube and its development through time

YouTube is a free online sharing video service where you are allowed to view, upload and share your video content. It was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen who were ex PayPal employees. While at PayPal, they saw the power to simplify a process and give everyone a solution.

Since 2005 the site has gone from strength to strength and you really should be adjusting your online marketing strategy to include YouTube. Within three months YouTube went from zero to over four million visitors to their site. Today the number of visitors continues to grow. Did you know that an average YouTube user spends 15 to 25 minutes a day on the site?

Google bought YouTube for a whopping $ 1.65 billion in 2006. Now the world’s biggest search engine had teamed up with the biggest online video content provider.

It was reported in February 2011 that YouTube has 490 million unique users around the world each month. They account for approximately 92 billion page views per month. That’s amazing if you think about it. It has been noted that we spend about 2.9 billion hours on YouTube per month.

YouTube streams a variety of video content including TV shows, music videos, commercials, movies and also amateur content. The growth of the site far exceeded other major websites such as Craigslist, eBay and also Myspace.

Although online content has been around for quite some time, before YouTube came along there was no real way of sharing this content. Videos took a long time to load and could be quite long. Specialized software was needed to view videos. It was all a little frustrating, to say the least. YouTube created a revolution by allowing people to watch a video in their web browsers as well as embedding YouTube video on remote websites. This means video can be shown on Facebook, MySpace or your own website.

The playback of YouTube videos is a smooth process compared to what came before it. The video starts almost instantly and you pause, rewind or forward. No lag or jerkiness is present and this makes it a pleasure to watch.

How Does This Apply to Internet Marketing?

Online video content is the fastest growing media there is and shows no sign of slowing down. You really should be taking advantage of it to market your own business, product or service. YouTube can be used to get your message across and drive massive traffic to your website. Think of all the potential subscribers you could be getting. What about sales as a result of this massive traffic? It really is a win situation for your business and if you had not thought about it before then it is time to do so now.

Video marketing is low cost when compared to other marketing methods. It is free to host your video on YouTube. Some other companies will actually charge you for hosting a video. Also the more views your video gets the higher up the rankings it will move. Higher rankings mean more traffic and gain more sales for you. It is much easier to rank a video than a website for example. It may not have the same prestige or power as ranking a website, but it can certainly produce impressive results.

An online video strategy should be part of your marketing arsenal. Online video is big right now and will be in the future also. If your marketing strategy is not working for you then perhaps it is time for you to refine it and turn those sales pages into video content.

How To Set Up Your YouTube Videos

So you are ready to use YouTube. You have all these awesome videos that you can share with the cyber world, but what’s the next step? First, you want to visit YouTube.com. This is the YouTube website. In the upper right corner, there is a link titled “Create account”. Follow the steps to create your account and then be ready to share with your videos.

Before trying to publish your videos, remember that there are some requirements that each video must follow in order to publish them on YouTube. Most of the time, this will not be a problem, since the most important guideline is that the video should stay below 10 minutes. They also have requirements for file size (100 MB or less). The following is a guide for beginners to upload a video to YouTube:

The first thing you have to do to upload a video is to click on the “Upload videos” link. These are on the top right of the page and are found on almost all YouTube pages.

Next, you will be asked to briefly describe your video. First, you must enter a title and a description for your video. Keep them simple, since people will not want to read a long description (they are in a video site, not in an e-book). After the description section, there is an area to enter labels for your video. Tags are keywords that will help you find your video based on what the user is looking for. You will want to use important words for this section.

After the tags section, you will have to select a category and language to place your video. It is important to select the correct category and language, as this will also help you find your video to users looking for that specific type of content. Finally, click on “Go upload a file”. The next page asks if you want your video to be available to the public or private. If you want to get the name of your company out there, you want to keep this public, as this allows millions of visitors the opportunity to watch your video. The next step is to click on “Upload Video”. This will take you to a page to scan your computer for the video you want to upload. After finding the video, select it and your video will be live in minutes.