YouTube Multimedia Marketing business
When it comes to web video, there’s one really big dog that shouldbe the centerpiece of your marketing plans. I’m talking about YouTube
www.youtube.com, the Internet’s largest video sharing community.
If you’ve never heard of YouTube, you should probably be fired from
your day job. More likely you’re a fan of the site and use it to watch
all sorts of interesting videos. That puts you in good company.
It’s hard to believe, but as of this writing, YouTube has only been around for
five years. Before YouTube, there really wasn’t a central place on the Web to
upload or view videos.
The whole thing got started by three former employees of PayPal, who had a
little cash in their pockets and the suspicion that there might be a need for a
service that facilitated the process of uploading, watching, and sharing videos.
Anyone, individual or business, can upload videos to YouTube.
These can behome movies, video blogs, old television
programs as long as copyright isn’t an issue, commercials,
even independent films. Videos can be up to 15 minutes in
length, although most are much shorter.
YouTube proved immensely popular from virtually the first day in business.
Site traffic that first month was 3 million visitors, which is pretty good for a
startup. The number of visitors tripled by the third month February, tripled
again by July to 30 million visitors, and reached 38 million visitors by the
end of the site’s first year in business. That made YouTube one of the top 10
sites on the Web, period—and one of the fastest-growing websites in history.
If a viewer likes a video, he can easily share it with others; this is how a video
goes viral, by being passed around as a favorite. Viewers can post YouTube
videos to Facebook or MySpace, send links to videos via email, even embed
videos in their blogs or web pages. All the sharing mechanisms are right there
on the video viewing page, just below the video itself.
YouTube represents an essentially free advertising channel. The site doesn’t
charge producers to store their videos or to serve up the bandwidth necessary
to view them. It also doesn’t charge viewers anything to watch those videos.
Other YouTube videos are uploaded by businesses. These videos attempt to
promote a company, a brand, or a product. Some of these videos are blatant
commercials including existing commercials repurposed to the YouTube site,
some offer in-depth prepurchase information about a given product or service,
some offer post-purchase information or support, and some use other
approaches to gain viewers—and prospective customers
The first type of video you can produce is an informative video—that is, a
video that imparts information of some sort. This most often is the YouTube
equivalent of a newscast, with you (or your spokesperson) acting as reporter
or anchorman. Alternately, an informative video may function as a video
brochure, presenting in-depth information about you or your products.
