Videos that acheive viral status are not limited to low budget user generated content. Here are 5 examples of big companies making big impacts in the viral world.
Continue reading →

YouTube is at the center and at the forefront of some key trends that affect the world of marketing. The three most important are increasing bandwidth, user-generated content and social networking.
Continue reading →

In some ways it’s the classic Silicon Valley success story, complete with garage. Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen became friends when they worked for PayPal where Karim was one of the founders. In early 2005 they were at a dinner party to which many people had brought their camcorders. Conversation turned to how hard it was to share videos with others using the internet. That inspired the friends to set off to Hurley’s garage to write some code that would make online video sharing easy.
Continue reading →

YouTube for Business is a 111 page analysis of YouTube Report 2009 data. It will help you understand how YouTube can be effective for your business.  Every week, we will bring you a chapter from the eBook so subscribe to our feed and don’t miss a word.
Continue reading →

Domain squatting is nothing new. Despite a number of high-profile defeats for cyber squatters the rise of social media sites now means that major brands are at risk of having their name hijacked. Here are 10 of the biggest brands in the world who didn’t act quickly enough to secure their own Youtube page.

Number 10

Youtube.com/McDonalds (Student From Singapore)

McDonalds has had more than its share of PR problems in the past, but surely a company of this size shouldn’t be scooped to their own Youtube domain by a student from Singapore. The account www.youtube.com/mcdonalds has two videos in their account, and both clips that have nothing to do with burgers. The student is obviously reluctant to give up his account as it could be a cash cow in the future.

Number 9

Youtube.Com/DavidBowie

David Bowie lost out to his own Youtube domain and now has been forced to us the rather clunky username of youtube.com/OfficialDavidBowie. Youtube deals with squatters by changing the url file tree to redirect users to the official page. For example, if you type in “youtube.com/DavidBowie” you’ll land on the “Official David Bowie” page. It’s just lucky for Bowie that YouTube doesn’t always mind making ch-ch-changes.

Number 8

Youtube.com/MTV (Korean Youtube account with over 300 subscribers)

You’d think that for a company that pioneered music videos they would have been more aware than most other brands how important Youtube might become. Unfortunately for MTV their account has been taken by someone in Korea with just over300 subscribers. Instead of showing the latest cutting edge music videos and interviews, anyone visiting MTV’s channel will have to make do with watching Korean gameshows and pregnancy videos.

Number 7

Youtube.com/CocaCola (9 subscribers!)

If you saw the username CocaCola on youtube you probably wouldn’t expect to see such titles as “Tales of the LOLbyss” available to watch. What makes this even more surprising is that Coke recognised the value of Youtube pretty early on when they held a competition for users to upload their videos.

Number 6

Youtube.com/Volkswagen (1 subscriber)

Volkswagen are no stranger to problems with Youtube users. They even tried to take a user to court because a user put a Nazi spin on a VW Golf commercial. If having a spoof of their video put up on Youtube wasn’t bad enough they’ve also lost out on their username to someone who has a the grand number of 1 subscriber.

Number 5

Youtube.com/BMW (Eddi, 48 years, 14subscribers)

Another car company who missed out on their own name was the German giant, BMW. You might not learn anything about cars or BMW if you visit this channel, but you will get to see Britney Spears and Christina Milian.

Number 4

Youtube.com/Disney (9 Subscribers)

Youtube could have been the perfect place to showcase old Disney films and trailers for upcoming movies. Instead, the Disney channel on Youtube has 10 subscribers and the owner of the channel has only watched 1 video.

Number 3

Youtube.com/ IBM (6 Subscribers)

The owner of the IBM channel has watched over 14,000 videos. Judging by some of the comments left it seems that there are other youtube users who think the site belongs to IBM. This is one of the comments left “i hate you!!! i hate ur laptop! (mine) it sucks! but very light =)”

Number 2

Youtube.com/Microsoft (32 Subscribers)

Despite the mixed reactions to the Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates ads last year, surely the Microsoft username would have been far more memorable and valuable than the Youtube.com/WindowsVideo that they eventually went with. You can’t watch the ads on on the Microsoft channel but a clip entitled, “LINDSAY FULLY LOADED” has been set as a favourite.

Number 1

Youtube.com/Yahoo (45 Subscribers)

Probably the most surprising of the companies who didn’t secure their own username was Yahoo. The search giants probably hoped that Yahoo videos would be a bigger success as Youtube, but it still means that they lost out to someone with only 45 subscribers.

While it might seem harmless to most – if you are a brand and are not securing your Youtube name then you could be seriously hurting your brand.

The Youtube Report 2009 reveals that 43% of users click on the username to discover what’s uploaded in that channel. It is important for a brand to own the username to control the messaging being communicated under its name. 61% agree with “ If a username is the same as a familiar brand, I would expect the brand to be behind the channel”.

To receive a the first chapter of the Youtube Report 2009 enter your details into the form below

Music has been a major driver in the rise of YouTube and most other social networking sites. Due to this, it is understandable that artists want an equitable share in their success. Making money online is not easy, even for popular website as YouTube. Online advertising and paid subscriptions are unpopular, especially considering that a large portion of YouTube traffic comes from teens.

So, what is the importance of YouTube for musicians?
Continue reading →

YouTube is one of the most powerful marketing platforms on web when utilized correctly. The difference between hundreds of views and hundreds of thousands of views is all in your approach. We will show you how you can avoid completely destroying any chances of having global YouTube success.
Continue reading →

Comscore today revealed that the popular social network YouTube has reached 100 million viewers. In total, internet viewers have viewed 14.8 billion online videos in January 2009 alone.

According to Comscore: “YouTube led the growth charge, accounting for 91 percent of the incremental gain in the number of videos viewed versus December, as it surpassed 100 million viewers for the first time.”

Google continues to surpass others in terms of online video viewing with a 43 percent market share. Of that, YouTube accounts for 99 percent of the videos viewed. Fox Interactive Media account(3.7 percent), Yahoo! Sites(2.5 percent) and Viacom Digital(1.9 percent) are trailing behind by a wide margin.

In January 2009, 147 million U.S. internet users watched an average of 101 videos per person.

Are these numbers what you expected? Where do you see online video growing from here? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.