As YouTube celebrates its fifth anniversary, I felt it the perfect opportunity to talk about how the web video giant (which still hasn’t turned a profit) has revolutionized how we view, share and host our videos. Whether you are posting videos of family vacations or your company’s latest product demonstration, YouTube has completely changed how individuals and businesses publish content.
Prior to YouTube’s launch in 2005, company’s often hosted their own videos. They would produce a video and then convert it to either a Quicktime, Flash or Window Media file and build the videos into their website. At the time, it was the only viable option and it allowed companies to control their message and keep content on their pages. This practice predates social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, so most companies weren’t thinking about allowing others to embed their videos or share their content easily.
As a web content developer with a Northern Virginia-based government contractor in 2003, I was tasked with producing videos and posting them on the company’s various sites, internal and external. The biggest obstacle was video compression and bandwidth. Seven years ago, a 20-30 megabyte compressed video was a fairly large file and when added to a website, it can eat up a ton of bandwidth on our web servers if viewed enough times. This became an issue, even as compression technology was rapidly improving.
Along came YouTube. And suddenly, those movies that were eating up bandwidth on companies’ servers, could be uploaded to this new service, in virtually any format, and be converted to a Flash movie, that could be shared via a link or embed code with anyone in the world. For most, this was an incredible new offering and it was free. Most companies, however, were skeptical. Why would they allow their video to be available to anyone in the world? Once it’s out there, you give up some control over who sees the message and how it is presented, right? Well, yes and no.
Fast forward five years. It’s hard to find a well-known company that does not have a YouTube Channel that it uses to share its official videos. Businesses finally came to the realization that once your message is out there on the web, regardless of where it’s hosted, anyone can get it and manipulate it. It’s just a risk of doing business in today’s wired world. And with the advancement of privacy controls on YouTube, we can control whether or not people can leave comments, rank the video, or even embed it on other sites. So the old arguments of losing control of your message are invalid and unfounded.
First, let’s get the bandwidth issue out of the way. It’s a non-factor today thanks to plummeting media storage costs. Next.
The biggest advantage to using a site like YouTube to host your videos is the search engine results. Believe it or not, there are still people out there who believe that by posting your videos on YouTube, you will cannibalize your own website’s traffic. My response to that belief is, “so what?” Look, YouTube allows you to create a channel, with a link to your official website. Your videos can provide viewers with easy ways to reach you. And you can monitor traffic and views of your videos, so don’t look at YouTube as competing with, or cannibalizing your site’s traffic; instead, consider your YouTube Channel an extension or your website. The point is to get your message out on the web and YouTube will do that for you.
And let’s not forget that YouTube is a Google property. Hello. Google. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? The world’s most dominant search engine. More and more Google searches are yielding YouTube videos at the top of the SERP (search engine results page). If a YouTube video shows up at the top of the page, don’t you want it to be yours? I would.
Lastly, we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out that YouTube is not the only video sharing site on the Web, so even if you’re not wild about it — maybe that Leave Britney Alone dude kinda creeps you out — check out other popular sites like Vimeo (my personal favorite) or Viddler. Regardless of which video sharing site you choose, if you have videos you want to share, get them online today and get your message out there. You never know who could end up watching it… it could be your next client.
And now, a perfect example of a major corporation that has truly embraced the power of YouTube and social media:
