With over 100 million monthly visitors in the US alone, YouTube is one of the most popular websites on the internet. With all of these visitors, there is so much potential for businesses. There are three main ways that companies could use YouTube to advertise and promote their company:

Make YouTube videos:

Businesses can upload as many videos as they want to the site, whether its an advertisement or a video that gives more information about the company. The biggest benefit of this is that it is FREE. However, the traffic of the video will probably be fairly low, as the only way viewers would come across the video is if they typed in the exact title or listed keywords into the search bar.

Buy Border Advertisements:

Companies can buy space on the site to show their logo, a title and description, or even a simple animation. These advertisements will get a lot of traffic, and also they can be set to appear with relevant searches. For example, when I type in “Line skis,” there are advertisements for ski helmets and cheap Alaskan ski vacations. The drawback to this type of advertising is the fact that it is very expensive.

Buy Video Advertisements:

For the fellow YouTube users out there, you may have noticed that when you click on some videos, you have to watch an ad before viewing the intended video. This is great advertising for a business, but from a customers standpoint, I get really annoyed with these adds, and usually end up hitting ‘back’ and finding an unsponsored video.

There are many ways to advertise and promote a business on the internet, and YouTube is by far one of the greatest ways to do so.

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Believe it or not YouTube is more then just a tool for entertainment. It has many other benefits, I am only going to list 3.

1. YouTube can be used as learning tool. Members can upload how to videos. Viewers then have a resource to use if they have any questions about a task or activity.

2. Another benefit of YouTube is that it is a tool that can be used to make a name for yourself. If you make an exciting video that goes viral you could get recognized and possibly get an interview on the news or a guest appearnace on a television show.

3. Possibly the best benefit of YouTube is that if you create a solid fan base and have a lot of memebers you eventually get a royalty for each view. “There are people out there making a living on YouTube, take Michael Buckly from the “What The Buck Show” he is making 6 figures off of YouTube.”
Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Can_you_get_paid_for_being_on_Youtube#ixzz1DIdUmisy

Entrepreneurs, small business owners and marketers around the world have the ability to maximize the exposure of their product with just a few clicks of the mouse. You can brand your name and your corporate image in just minutes. The target consumer group you have now will expand rapidly. The opportunity you tube brings, introduces a powerful new tool for marketers everywhere.

One of the great things about You Tube is that you can sure someone is always watching.

24 hours of video is uploaded every minute

You Tube has exceeded 2 billion views per day

Remember what I said about your target consumer audience?

You Tube is localized in 22 countries across 24 different languages.

As far as getting your product out there, more products/features were released on you tube in 2009 than in all of 2007 & 2008 combined.

You Tube has become one of the most influential and most simple form of advertising. All you have to do is be a little creative to maximize your You Tube potential.

The possibilities are endless. Just start throwing random things on You Tube, it doesn’t even have to be related to business or anything important. You will be shocked on who will read and watch almost anything thats there. Spark an interest and see what happens, I dare you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_L7qC2IrOI (here is a link to good tutorial on You Tube Marketing)

YouTube has evolved into much more than a site to upload your latest America’s funniest home video. It has become a resource to finding how to do about anything you can imagine. From learning a workout routine, ironing a shirt, developing technical anaylisis of the stock market, or even making the perfect scrambled egg YouTube has the How To video on each subject. A wealth of video knowledge at your fingertips.

I question how much YouTube is actually used as a how to resource. After all I don’t think I have ever used YouTube as an instructional website. However, as I pour over the videos I mentioned above the search term workout bring over 3 million views for the first two how to workout videos on the page. How to iron a shirt has over 165,000 views, the first few on technical analysis average about 60,000 views each, and the perfect scrambled egg breakfast comes in with over 800,000 views. Clearly people are turning to YouTube to learn how to do everyday tasks.

What does this mean for the average web user? I suppose there is another reason to not need the advice of your mother or the reading of a cookbook or instruction booklet. All you need to do now is go to youtube.com to find what you need to learn. One final search – How to Tie A Tie – Yes over 4,000,000 views.

Feel like a beach comber when surfing YouTube?

YouTube is one of the most successful uses of internet technology and Web 2.0 that we see today. The “largest worldwide video-sharing community” has provided procrastinating college students and bored office employees with hours of entertainment. YouTube also gives companies and celebrities yet another promotional platform, enables amateur filmmakers to easily release their art to the world and is a source of thousands of useful instructional videos. Unfortunately, YouTube has also spawned many millions of boring, irrelevant and meaningless videos. Their owners: teenagers who somehow believe the rest of the world wants to see their foot-high back yard bike ramp being put to use and middle-aged hillbillies who want to share a 10 second video of their new brood of puppies.

This isn’t a rant about me not caring about these people’s lives; it’s a statement of concern for the growing ocean of garbage on YouTube. A similar problem is the endless copy-and-paste videos! How many “Charlie Bit Me” videos do we really need? And why is an official music video buried amidst dozens of fan videos featuring nothing but lyrics or nature pictures? I fear that YouTube may suffer from the plague that so harshly affected MySpace. As more and more noise is added, the good videos that drew us there in the first place are becoming drowned out.

Perhaps YouTube needs to be more exclusive about who can upload public video. Would it be possible to automatically delete clips that have less than fifty views after the first month of existence? I have no suggestions for a quick fix, but I would like to see a higher standard enforced.

Do any readers have suggestions for improvement? Please comment below!