Member Article

Video Marketing 2015

Video, it seems is dominating internet marketing.

In my business, we started running online video in 2005, shortly after I attended a seminar in Atlanta that outlined the marketing power of video and addressed the many technical issues that video attracted at that time. It was a fairly complex process and required a good knowledge of the web.

How times have changed.

Back in 2005, about the time I was in Atlanta, a video startup company by the name of YouTube was emerging.

YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. The domain name “YouTube.com” was activated on February 14, 2005, and the website was developed over the subsequent months. The creators offered the public a preview of the site in May 2005, six months before YouTube made its official debut.

Like many technology start-ups, YouTube was started as an angel-funded enterprise from a makeshift office in a garage. A further 11.5 million dollars was invested and the first YouTube video was titled ‘Me at the Zoo’, and shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, and can still be viewed on the site.

During the summer of 2006, YouTube was one of the fastest growing sites on the Web uploading more than 65,000 new videos and delivering 100 million video views per day in July. It was ranked the fifth most popular website on Alexa, far out-pacing even MySpace’s rate of growth. The website averaged nearly 20 million visitors per month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, where around 44% were female, 56% male, and the 12- to 17-year-old age group was dominant. YouTube’s pre-eminence in the online market was substantial. According to the website Hitwise.com, YouTube commanded up to 64% of the UK online video market.

YouTube entered into a marketing and advertising partnership with NBC in June 2006.

On October 9, 2006, it was announced that the company would be purchased by Google for US$1.65 billion in stock. The purchase agreement between Google and YouTube came after YouTube presented three agreements with media companies in an attempt to escape the threat of copyright-infringement lawsuits.

Nowadays video on websites is ‘de rigeur’ in fact if you don’t have video on your website, Google takes away some of your search juice.

And it’s so easy to do; you can have a video shot, edited and on your site within minutes – just using a smartphone!

There are a few tricks you need to deploy to get it out to your audience, but having a video online is a great start!

Like everything else on the internet, video is evolving; it is now appearing everywhere, not just on YouTube. Facebook is a popular showcase for video, and with their video platform being designed specifically for mobile, marketers are having some glowing results on this medium.

What does this mean for businesses?

Simple – innovate or die!

The sooner you adopt video as a marketing strand the better; but do it and do it well – before your competition does!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Newcastle 360 .