Google’s decision to buy YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion was clearly a smart move for the search engine’s ruler. The platform’s exponential growth has been worldwide, and to date YouTube is the second largest search engine, after Google. This information should help understand how Youtube can become an essential tool for companies and start-ups looking to reach an always wider audience.
A good video marketing strategy including YouTube is a necessary step to achieve success: the platform provides a priceless showcase thanks to its ability to attract thousands of users to your product/message.
YouTube as a search engine: the data
An in-depth understanding of YouTube is definitely a good way to start creating a successful marketing strategy for your business. The numbers of the platform are indeed very interesting: in just 60 days, more videos are uploaded on Youtube than American television broadcasted in 60 years.
- The Google’s video platform is used by users of all ages: the largest of its community, 58%, is between 18 and 49 years (35% of users aged between 18 and 34 and a 28 % Between 35 and 49 years). What does that mean? It means that YouTube is a platform young people feel comfortable with.
Furthermore:
- YouTube daily visitors every day spend on average 15 minutes on the platform;
- Google’s advertising service is used by more than one million advertisers;
- Over 2 billion videos views are sponsored;
- Over 6 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube every month, i.e. one hour per person on Earth;
- More than half of the videos are rated or commented.
And let’s not underestimate mobile viewing: many users nowadays make use of the YouTube smartphone app on a daily basis. This is partly due to the regular graphic and function upgrades that the application provides, which is a great solution for watching YouTube on the go.
YouTube: will it become a real social network?
Let’s be honest: from the very beginning YouTube has always been considered as a social network. The reason for it is simple: the platform allows users to interact with the content creators, leave comments and react to videos, but also interacting between each other. Mountain View is upgrading Youtube in order to make it a real social network, borrowing some of Facebook’s features that will improve its interactivity: some of YouTube’s major changes towards a more social future will probably be focused on interacting more with subscribers and other youtubers. One of the features that will likely be introduced will be the ability to share videos of other youtubers on a feed’s board.
Will this ever be considered as video marketing? It’s obvious that if this is the future of YouTube, the best thing to do is to maximize your potential by investing on the platform.
Considering the new features that YouTube will introduce, it is advisable to focus on it to improve your online presence: it’s already quite a unique opportunity for those who want to invest in web marketing. Very soon it may well be the best solution to expand your growing audience.
