YouTube is the next frontier in Search Marketing
TechCrunch is reporting that YouTube accounts for over 25% of Google’s search volume. To put it another way, YouTube by itself is 1/3 the size of Google (in terms of search volume) and bigger than every other search engine… bigger than Yahoo, bigger than Live.com. That’s quite a stat to wrap your head around!
We’ve been saying for quite a while that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) strategies need to take video into account. YouTube is beginning to offer really significant usage volumes, and the search engines themselves are mixing video results into “universal search”. Keep your eyes open — there will be a lot of smart marketers making money on Video SEO in 2009.
Filed under: Google, YouTube, effective online video, market size, marketing, online advertising
While video is definitely the media of the moment, it’s important to not lose sight of the purpose of advertising-to convince or help a consumer buy your product or service. Simply videotaping a product from several angles and putting the shots together in a straightline movie doesn’t always impart much useful or new information to the viewer. Generally the video is quite compressed or has such small pixel dimensions it’s had to really experience anything. The viewer really doesn’t have any control of what he’s seeing which hearkens back to the days of the VHS tape where you have to hunt forward or back in the tape to find what you want to see.
Product displays and tours using photography with video interspersed effectively can allow the consumer to actually learn about and interact with the product. Also having someone do the photography who is an experience advertising photographer who understands lighting and compostion adds to the viewer experience.
As with all new media since advertising began, it starts out with the idea of ‘we can do this’ but the winner in the end is who can do it well.