SAScon 2010: Bruce Daisley (YouTube) Keynote
Carolyn Hughes is a communications consultant and was live blogging from the front line at SAScon. You can also view the reviews by PushON and David Towers for more information.
Video is now one third of all web traffic, but by 2013 this is predicted to be a massive 90%. This is what we were told at here at SAScon by the key note speaker Bruce Daisley from You Tube. He went on to talk about just how massive video has become online, and how integral it is to search marketing.
In terms of marketing, television advertising had been out of reach for all but big national brands. The rise of online video streaming has given the same power and, arguably just as large a reach, to any brand, SME or individual – potentially.
Bruce also talked about the emotion of using video on You Tube, and this is because it comes from the every day person. A great example he used was of the ‘big snow’ we had this winter that dominated the news with doom and gloom of how it ground the country to a halt, and cost so many millions to UK businesses.
There were 1,000 news results on Google (when Bruce searched) BUT there were 3,000 uploaded films to You Tube. And these were people throwing themselves down hills on sledges, rolling giant snowballs on Hampstead Heath and generally having fun.
In Bruce’s words there is a “freer flow of debate, and that is very empowering. The social aspect gets you closed to the truer story.” That’s because it’s real, it’s not filtered by a news organisation.
In the same vein, Bruce also mentioned in the early days of the internet people thought that e-greetings cards would be massive. And you can definitely see why they would think this, but it certainly didn’t work out. An interesting insight from Bruce was that people actually send each other You Tube clips to convey emotion – to cheer someone up, make them laugh, send them something meaningful.
And you don’t need an online greetings cards company to do this.
I really didn’t realise that You Tube is only five years old – that’s a very young brand which is now so powerful and globally recognised. We were told that 24 hours of video are uploaded to You Tube every minute. But what does this mean?
Well, half of all those videos are either rated or commented on. So in terms of basic ROI you’ve got a 50% chance of being seen to begin with without any tactics.
The average iPhone user watches three to four clips a day, while the average Android user watches twice that. I wonder if that’s because the Android phones have a younger audience who can’t afford iPhones but have more time to watch clips?
The power of the smartphone has really been unprecedented, and brands should really be aware of just how many people watch videos on their mobiles. I rarely spend time watching You Tube clips because I’m so busy with work but I recently found myself watching a clip someone had posted on You Tube while sitting on a cliff in North Wales. Now I’m old enough to remember the Channel 4 test card so the thought that I could have a breather on a hike and watch a friend’s (terrible) film is a massive sign of the times.
Moving onto the advertising and marketing side, Bruce pointed out the changes in the homepage. Interestingly the research told them that people just wanted to watch film, so they actually took stuff away from the homepage and made it look sleeker. I wish more companies would think down the ‘less is more’ route when it comes to websites and the user experience.
He went onto talk about the paid advertising, which works very much like Google keywords, and only puts your video and keyword next to cleared content – which essentially means it won’t appear next to dodgy home videos which you can’t control.
However, a Techcrunch article found you get 51 times better results from natural search, so they would always encourage companies to have their own channel and encourage their own inbound links.
In short, any brand looking at search marketing would be crazy not to embrace You Tube as part of its marketing strategy.
Just a final point of note, the Chat Roulette piano man was You Tube’s biggest ever clip. Now Chat Roulette is just downright disturbing, but if you’ve not seen these clips go on and add to the stats.
