If you are not currently leveraging YouTube as part of your online video marketing strategy, you might want to give it another look. Quite simply, when it comes to list building, lead generation and search engine optimization (SEO), YouTube is the definitive place for getting your videos published.
(And hording your video content on your own site and on your own player — unless you have a specific reason as to why it shouldn’t ALSO be made available to the masses — may have you missing out on an incredible opportunity to improve those aforementioned areas of your business.)
Why? Well, because when it comes to the vast sea of video content-sharing websites out there, YouTube has the VAST majority of the market.
In Fact, Let’s Take A Look At Just How Ingrained Into Our Culture YouTube Has Become
According to yesterday’s press release from comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world, in December 2008 — just in that one month alone — U.S. Internet users viewed more than 14.3 billion online videos during the month. (Which, by the way, represented a 13 percent increase over the previous month of November.)
Now, mind you, here we are just talking about the U.S. If you expand this out into the global arena, I’m sure you can imagine the numbers are astronomical.
More importantly (in our YouTube Secret Weapon opinion, anyway 
), comScore points out that YouTube led this growth by accounting for 49 percent of the incremental gain in videos viewed versus November.
Furthermore, as we take a look at image of comScore’s “Videos Viewed” chart below, we learn that in December 2008, Google Sites ranked as the top U.S. video property with 5.9 billion videos viewed — a 41.2 percent share of all videos viewed online… And know that YouTube (which is a Google property, remember) accounted for more than 99 percent of all videos viewed among these Google properties!
Online Video Viewership Statistics by Videos Viewed - comScore - Dec 2008
Also note in the chart above just how far YouTube’s fellow video content-sharing sites lagged behind:
Fox Interactive Media (which includes MySpace) ranked in a very distant second with 445 million videos, which is only 3.1 percent compared to the 41.2% held by YouTube and the Google properties. Wow, and look how far behind the Yahoo! Sites are with only 2.3 percent of the share, followed by Viacom Digital at just 2 percent.
(Do note that comScore tells us Hulu.com continued its upward trajectory with a 6 percent increase in views over November, to a total of 241 million videos viewed.)
Additionally, in this next chart below we see that comScore’s Video Metrix data indicates that nearly 150 million Americans watched an average of 96 online videos per viewer in December 2008. Of those, once again, Google Sites attracted the most with 100 million viewers, who watched an average of 59 videos per person.
comScore also points out that in surpassing the 100 million online video viewers mark in December, Google video properties (again, of which YouTube accounted for 99 percent) represented two out of every three Internet users who watched video!
Looking at the lagging competition again: Fox Interactive attracted the second most viewers with only 56.9 million U.S. viewers watching an average of 7.8 videos. What a difference, huh?
Online Video Viewership Statistics by Unique Viewers - comScore - Dec 2008
Realize that what these two graphs are telling us is that in December of 2008, just on YouTube alone, there were 98.9 million U.S. Internet viewers who watched over 5.9 billion (that’s with a b, baby, BILLION) videos that month — just on YouTube.
Too, it was 59.2 videos PER VIEWER that were watched on YouTube!
Now these average videos-per-viewers numbers are important, because what they are telling us is that people coming onto YouTube.com — for whatever reason — are sticking around to CONSUME MORE CONTENT.
…And YouTube has many features enabling you to grab those eyes that are sticking around! Of course, we tell you how to take advantage of such features in our YouTube Secret Weapon 2-part DVD tutorial.
Other Notable comScore Findings From December 2008
- 78.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
- The average online video viewer watched 309 minutes of video, or more than 5 hours.
- The duration of the average online video was 3.2 minutes.
Now that last bullet point above is something to take note of as you plan out your video content strategy: 3.2 minutes is the AVERAGE duration of content being consumed. In other words, attention spans are short these days.
TIP: Consider keeping your online videos — especially those going up on video content-sharing sites like YouTube — to between 3-5 minutes MAXIMUM (with 2-4 being an even more optimal duration).
Another TIP: If you are on YouTube and have more content than can be covered in a 3-5 minute video, consider chopping it up into several shorter clips and then linking them together via YouTube’s “PlayList” feature.
So, How Do You Get Noticed On YouTube?
How do you get your content noticed when there are so many videos for these large audiences to choose from? Well, you produce great content… That is certainly one way to go. (And there really is little substitute for that!)
Yet here’s the thing: No matter how valuable your content might be — or how hilarious, shocking, inspirational, what-have-you — in order for your videos to even stand a CHANCE to be seen by thousands upon thousands of your target audience viewers, they have to be able to FIND your content in the first place!
Bottom line: You need to get your YouTube videos optimized and indexed FIRST so you stand a chance to grab those hundreds of millions of eyes and turn them your way.
So, how do you drive that traffic? …What are some guerilla marketing techniques to get those initial views on your YouTube videos in the first place?
For that, my friends, you’ll need to grab your own copy of YouTube Secret Weapon and find out!
Meanwhile, if you aren’t currently using YouTube as part of your online video marketing strategy, it might be time to get with the program…