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Quiz time.
How many videos were watched on YouTube in May this year? Was it 1.4 million? 14 million? Or 140 million?
Actually it’s a trick question. The answer is a mind numbing 14.6 billion. And that’s just the number watched by American residents!
According to figures just released, May was a record month for YouTube with the average visitor watching 100 videos. YouTube now accounts for 43 percent of all video viewed online.
The most popular videos include; Lady Gaga’s pop video “Bad Romance” (nearly 236 million views) and the annoying “Charlie Bit My Finger Again” (almost 205 million views).
Anyone can get in on the act. Two youngsters from Kent, inspired by England’s World Cup woes, made a spoof video mimicking goalkeeper Rob Green’s faux pas. Filmed in their garden, complete with vuvuzela sound effects, it knocked up well over 6,000 views in a week. They had to disable the comments section as not everyone found it funny (a number of West Ham fans in particular were not amused). You can see it here; http://tiny.cc/p7ppk
It’s just one of a series of Rob Green spoofs. My favourite (which has attracted almost half a million views) cleverly re-works the footage to show Green actually saving Clint Dempsey’s shot during the match against the USA! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsTWjueuLz4
And the rise in the popularity of YouTube shows no sign of slowing down. Last week an American court made an important ruling in a 1 billion dollar lawsuit between YouTube and media giant Viacom.
Viacom had claimed that tens of thousands of videos based on its TV shows and films had been posted on YouTube, and that YouTube had done nothing about it. But a judge ruled that YouTube had done nothing wrong because it removed the offending videos as soon as it became aware of them.
The popularity of online video is also being exploited by increasing numbers of Kent businesses to raise their profile online. It’s a technique known as “video marketing”.
Search engines, such as Google, love video content. So businesses with their own video find they tend to perform better in search engine results. (Google loves video so much it bought YouTube back in October 2006 for 1.65 billion dollars).
Creating online video is therefore becoming a way for businesses to find new audiences and customers; as well as for kids to parody England’s dodgy goal keeping!
Graham Majin is Head of Video Marketing at Kent video production company www.kershmedia.co.uk and www.kwikvid.com
