/ A $15 billion business /

Dear readers and colleagues, I am often asked how important it is for a company to use YouTube to upload ‘Company Profile’ or individual product videos.

I always reply by reporting the numbers declared by YouTube itself, not only because they are incredible but above all because they describe the resolution quality of the videos that the platform lets users upload today: up to 6k, benefiting the professional image of the company itself. 

It should be noted that the actual resolution is what is uploaded, as the platform uses sophisticated compression software to reduce the number of bytes occupied by the videos so as to take up less space on the servers. For this reason, when we upload a high resolution video and publish it, it immediately seems to be poor quality, and only after an hour does it become usable with quality similar to the original. I therefore recommend scheduling publication for at least one hour after uploading, so as not to make a bad impression with channel followers.

YouTube was founded on 14 February 2005 by 3 former PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, inspired by the need to solve a simple problem: it was impossible to find videos on the Internet.

This was back in 2004, and the solution seemed obvious: to offer anyone a platform for uploading videos online. The first video uploaded dates back to 23 April, 2005: it lasted 20 seconds, it was called ‘Me at The Zoo’ and was filmed at the San Diego Zoo by one of the founders. Today it has over 85 million views. 

In October 2006, Google bought the company for $1.65 billion. About a tenth of its annual revenues, which reached $15.5 billion in 2019. And the platform accounts for 10% of Google’s total sales, including from over 20 million subscribers to the Premium and Music Premium services, and 2 million subscribers to the TV service in the United States.

In May 2019, YouTube recorded 2 billion monthly users – in May 2018 it was 1.8 billion. More than 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute, usually in medium-high resolution, 1080p, 2k, 4k and still very few 6k, and it is the second most visited social media platform after Facebook (the latter, however, reaches a maximum resolution of 720p, quite some way from its rival).

Each visit lasts on average 23 minutes. During each session, users view an average of 9.69 pages. 

YouTube ranks third among the most frequently searched words on Google (after Facebook and Google). 1 billion hours of video are viewed every day. 33% of the population over 13 connect to YouTube every month. 45% of users are women, 55% men.

So yes! It is very important for a company to use this platform to advertise or promote itself or its services, exploiting the amplification of the media. Motorola, for example, to announce its return to the telephone market with the reworked Razr model that set the benchmark in the 2000s, making it futuristic with the first folding screen so as to maintain the historic clamshell closure, published the commercial on YouTube in November 2019, and on TV only a few months later.

Oscar Giacomin  / General Manager, Facto Edizioni

© All Rights Reserved