YouTube Versus Other Sites

I think the graph below is very telling.

I started a new series of video channels on various video sites. There is only one video on each of the channels. It isn’t very interesting. I didn’t tell anyone – not even my closest friends who routinely visit video websites – that they existed. The channel has a grand total of two subscribers (on YouTube) and one of those is another of my own accounts. So obviously we are not expecting big things of these channels or this video. But if you look at the chart produced by Tubemogul you can see a very obvious trend.

A lot more people are finding and watching the video on YouTube than any other video sharing site specified. I’m sure this is something we all know anecdotally. YouTube is synonymous with video now in the same way Google is with search. Indeed the Google owned video sharing website is actually the second most used search engine after Google itself, surpassing Yahoo.

But the other thing to take away from this little experiment is the kind of views a video can get without any kind of promotion whatsoever. I didn’t do anything to promote this video. I could’ve; I have a fairly sizable group of friends within my social network, I could’ve promoted this hard. But I didn’t. Indeed I went out of my way to keep this secret. There weren’t any salacious or misleading keywords, no provocative video thumbnail. It was just a boring video unapologetically presented for what it was and it still got its fair share of views.

If you’ve ever doubted the benefits of having video content on YouTube, I hope those doubts are now alleviated.