YouTube revealed the staggeringly large figure to Alexei Oreskovic of Reuters recently with an addition that over 4 billion videos are streamed daily. What does this mean for video marketing though? Web video is one of the most dynamic and engaging forms of marketing a company can engage in and forsaking it these days is surely a mistake but how can you stand out amongst all the other videos?
We'll get to that in a minute but first here's another intimidating statistic about YouTube: 86,400 videos are uploaded to video every day; that's the equivalent of Hollywood making and releasing 302,400 features every week. Of course the content comes in many forms, which is why some of the web videos get so many hits, the viewers are out there for sure.
The recent Star Wars Uncut film is over two hours long. It fan creation project that involved the recreation of Episode IV with filmmakers sending in their own 15 second clips to make up the entire movie. It has garnered just under 1 million hits since its upload last week. Sticking with the force, the latest VW advert 'The Bark Side' running at 1 minute long and uploaded on the same day has a whopping 7.2 million views.
With the amount of views the top videos are getting and the amount of time your average person spends on YouTube you would think that advertisers would be going crazy for a chance to get on board with the web video production site. You would be wrong though.
Around 30% of the videos on the site get 99 percent of the views. About 10% of that figure is actually getting monetised by advertisers, leaving around 19% left without advertising. That is the equivalent of roughly 16,675 hours of video a day. The fact is that advertisers fear YouTube, the concept of web video advertising is still quite new and they are all dipping their toes at this point in time.
This won't last though so if you are thinking of monetising videos with your adverts and getting your brand out there, now is the time. The prices will begin to skyrocket very soon and video sites, especially YouTube are going to get carved up for the high bidders. It won't be Groupon ads forever.
Web video is a big part of the future of the internet as well as the broadcast experience, so getting involved with it now and marketing your content via sites like YouTube and its contemporaries is incredibly important if you want to showcase your business and brand as engaging and appealing.
Getting creative with your video content is incredibly important if you want to stand out and there are many ways to achieve this. With YouTube it really boils down to two choices if you want to be hitting the big numbers. You can either go kooky and viral like Chuck Testa or you can market heavily and hit your social media and audience targets over and over again like Old Spice.
Once you get your clip up there you'll find YouTube less intimidating than you first thought. Become part of the 60 a minute; you won't regret it.