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YouTube and You
Since YouTube’s launch back in 2005 the video sharing website has literally exploded in both size and popularity. Millions of people have uploaded videos to this site for both personal pleasure and for commercial use. It has been reported that over thirteen hours of video is uploaded every minute and that YouTube’s bandwidth costs are over $1million a day.
So as a business should you have an active presence on YouTube?
The simple answer is ‘Yes’. But there are a couple of things you need to know before you go ahead.
The first is that you will loose the ownership rights to any video you upload. This is not as scary as it sounds, it just means you have to be clever about ‘what’ content you put into your video. Remember, because of the ‘Viral’ nature of YouTube, the possibility of your video appearing on other external websites and third party discussion forums is very high.
Second. Do your competitors have an active presence on YouTube? If so, then you must remember that if you choose the same or similar keyword tags for the YouTube search engine as your competitors video, then once your video has stopped playing a list of ’similar’ videos will appear on the video screen. This has its advantages and disadvantages, but if you are hoping to embed your new YouTube hosted video on your own website as part of your sales pitch to your customers, you should be aware that you could be giving your rivals some free advertising.
Don’t forget YouTube is a ’social networking’ site and the premise is all about ’sharing’ your content with others. Some will like your video, others will not, but what YouTube gives them is the platform to voice their opinions both good and bad.
Finally, in 2006 YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65Billion and because they are now part of the ever increasing Google umbrella, YouTube videos appear in the Google search engine results. So if increasing your organic listing in Google is important then having a presence on YouTube is a sure fire way of making that happen.
