Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
There's so much variety and useful content that in many ways surpasses regular search results. For instance, I needed to see how to create a particular regional dish and there was a certain technique for dealing with the dough that I needed to understand. So I went to YouTube and queried it and there it was, a video of a woman at a street stall in another country making this dish.
The NY Times has a must-read report on how YouTube has become a reference tool [nytimes.com].
YouTube, conceived as a video hosting and sharing site, has become a bona fide search tool. Searches on it in the United States recently edged out those on Yahoo...
The article illustrated typical searches:
FACED with writing a school report on an Australian animal, Tyler Kennedy began where many students begin these days: by searching the Internet. But Tyler didn’t use Google or Yahoo. He searched for information about the platypus on YouTube."I found some videos that gave me pretty good information about how it mates, how it survives, what it eats," Tyler said.
The story relates how the child uses it to research everything from anime trading cards to finding solutions to his Wii games.
Apparently the traffic is there. The challenge is in producing video to tap into the additional stream of visitors. The barrier to entry is higher than twittering but maybe that's a good thing?
In November, Americans conducted nearly 2.8 billion searches on YouTube, about 200 million more than on Yahoo, according to comScore.This startling statistic prompted Alex Iskold, the founder and chief executive of Adaptiveblue.com, a Web start-up, to ask in a blog post, “Is YouTube the next Google?” In other words, is YouTube effective as a mainstream search engine, and might it supplant or rival Google some day?
Lol! Bearing in mind the obvious fact that No1 owns No2, I wonder what prompted G to buy YouTube in the first place, or how it achieved such prominence in G's serps?
Remember that old chestnut: The best way to control the future is to invent it.
Syzygy
How do you make money out of it?
The best known example I can think of is George Wright of Blendtec, who was a keynote speaker at Pubcon last November. His "Will It Blend" video campaign is credited with boosting company revenues 700%. You can learn more here: [pubcon.com...]
I'll ask the crass, but obvious and burning question.
How do you make money out of it?
Or is this a case of "do it for love" until a new system for monetising it arrives in the future.
Perhaps good ole' commercials on a CPM basis?
that's not an example of video search working, that's an example of social media marketing working
Sure, there is a social media component but it does not thrive on its own. After the viral buzz kicks in, then video search takes over and builds on the effect.
Today's online marketing often thrives on complex channels, even for text-only content. But it uses finability as well as social media. "Will It Blend" became a very common video search term, and George Wright met that demand with a full series of new video content.
Researchers of education/learning have been in unison for years about the following:
1. The great majority of humans learn best by doing
2. If doing something isn't an option, they learn best when they can see it being done
3. Very few people are best-educated through reading or hearing about how something would be done
The web doesn't provide #1 (yet), so if one has a question about a complex task rather than a simple fact lookup, most of us would get our best results from video search, not traditional search.
Although my own personal search habbit has changed quite a bit. Tutorials for example. If I want to find out some tips or tricks for usign a piece of software I used to simply use Gooogle to find an article. Now I use Youtube to find a video about it.
Likewise if I was going to buy a new car I would be more likely to use Youtube as opposed to Google. I want to see it, not read about it. I imagine for certain searches video is a lot more useful than text.
Google know this. A lot of Google searches are now showign youtube thumbnails within serps.
Mack.
How do you make money out of it?
the new york times featured a youtube partner [nytimes.com] that was making a full-time living by uploading funny videos.
Mr. Buckley is one of the original members of YouTube’s partner program, which now includes thousands of participants, from basement video makers to big media companies. YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, places advertisements within and around the partner videos and splits the revenues with the creators. “We wanted to turn these hobbies into businesses,” said Hunter Walk, a director of product management for the site, who called popular users like Mr. Buckley “unintentional media companies.”
[edited by: tedster at 4:22 pm (utc) on Jan. 23, 2009]
[edit reason] fix formatting [/edit]
One of the things I've wondered about in this area is that Google's home page puts their Video Search in the dropdown box, not in the immediately visible text links. The day that it moves to visible will be a sign that video search has really come of age.
Once Google figures out how to make YouTube as profitable as AdWords then it'll move the Video link to the visible menu. Why send traffic to a property that is not making as much money as your mainstay.
Perhaps that's what was between the lines of what you wrote.
I might trademark VidSense and AdVid.
[edited by: Shaddows at 5:02 pm (utc) on Jan. 23, 2009]
VidSense and AdVid
line extensions; like the Mc40 ounce of st. ides McD's would let you buy with food stamps ;)
Once Google figures out how to make YouTube as profitable as AdWords
moment of inspiration: why doesn't youtube show sponsored relevant videos to the right of their organic results when one performs a query?
Our office sells product/services directly. Clients in this niche are always confused over the same two things (i.e. should i buy red or green widgets?). I have a unique approach I take to answer their questions. I'd consider making a video answering those questions (pretty sure there's nothing like this on youtube yet). But I've got the standard questions:
- host it myself? Or put it on youtube?
- how do I create the video?
- how do I get it into the search engines?
- how do I use it to drive traffic or business to my site?
This may result in either less traffic on YouTube, or their might be less "Junk" videos so that users get better information. Not sure how G will know what direction to go to make a profit till the copyright issues get resolved.
Besides YouTube partners, ad revenue sharing etc. a lot of people use the videos to drive traffic to their sites where the money is made. Since people use YouTube to search as mentioned above and video also showing up in the SERPS, just another channel to drive traffic to your sites.
Video search may be growing (and who knows, it may become extremely important) but "New search paradigm--shifting from text to video" is about as accurate as "New news paradigm--shifting from text to TV" would have been in the 1950s.
Video search is just a way to search videos, in the same way that Google Image Search is a way to search videos and Google News Search is a way to search news. Video won't supplant text in the foreseeable future, and neither will video search replace text search.
It hasn't replaced regular search because of weeding through the junk videos(loud music, no narration, bad rendering) but it's becoming significant in my online life.
And/or what effect does the fact that Google jams those videos down everyone's throat by putting them in the top 5 of many SERPs [webmasterworld.com] have on Youtube traffic...
I'm not saying there isn't a trend towards people searching for videos more, but it seems like saying people are turning to youtube.com FIRST to look for videos might be inaccurate when I suspect many are going to google.com FIRST and then being led to videos through the SERPs.
We need a video primer thread here. I can't do it, but I'd love to read one.
this might be a start, thanks to Samizdata:
Rough Guide to Web Video 2007 [webmasterworld.com]
Web Video Production Techniques [webmasterworld.com]
