Startling Facts 3 - YouTube

Some startling facts about YouTube, the video sharing site that is the third most visited site on the internet. This data is all as of late 2010.

In November of 2006 Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion (that would but a lot of videos. It would also buy five Boeing 747 airplanes with enough left over to buy a country or two).

According to Alexa.com YouTube is the 3rd most visited website in the world (The #1 spot belongs to Google and #2 is FaceBook).

Facebook has 500 million users, YouTube has 300 million users and Twitter has around 100 Million users (although I have recently heard the number 200 million users - I will stick with the 100 million number for now. Either way, it is a lot of users).

The traffic on YouTube is 22% from the USA and 78% from the rest of the world.

A more detailed breakdown provides this information: User %

• 22.6% USA
• 6.7% Japan
• 4.8% Germany
• 4.8% India
• 3.7% United Kingdom
• 3.7% Italy
• 3.6% Brazil
• 3.6% Mexico
• 3.3% France, and,
• 2.7% Spain

(Looks like YouTube, in addition to being a very effective marketing tool is also great for reach an international audience.)

If you sat down to watch all YouTube content previously uploaded, it would take you 1700 years to watch it all. It is a safe bet that you would need to take a nap at some point during your viewing.

A full 24 hours of video is uploaded every minute.

That works out to 10 videos being uploaded every second, and

829,440 videos uploaded every day.

In addition to the short videos (they average about 2 minutes and 46 seconds each),

150,000 full length films are uploaded every week.

YouTube gets 10% of all internet traffic, that is 1 out of every ten visits to the internet is to YouTube.

YouTube get 2 Billion views per day (that looks like this, 2,000,000,000 views per day)

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world (behind only Google).


And finally, all that traffic to YouTube breaks down into the following traffic by age percentage.

• 3 to 11 years is 3% of the traffic
• 12 to 17 is 19%
• 18 to 34 is 35%
• 35 to 49 is 23%, and,
• 50+ is 19%

Thanks to www.go-gulf.com for the statistics

The Power of Social Media

Why is Social Media so important to your business? It is not just that there are 500 million users signed up to Facebook or 175 million registered users on Twitter that you can try to get your message to. Rather its is that the buyers of your products and those that follow or friend you can communicate back to you about your product and that you can then engage them in a discussion. The possibility of engagement is where the real power of Social Media lies.

Traditional advertising is like a one way street. You throw out your message via TV or print ad and hope that it gets heard and then sticks.

Social Media on the other hand is a two way street. You put out information. Your customers and prospects put out information. Then both of you interact with each other about your respective information. Sometimes this two way street may seem more like a 25 lane super highway with no speed limit. But it is manageable and once managed, can be very lucrative.

The Biggest Shift Since the Industrial Revolution

Last week I attended SMACC2011 (#smacc2011). It was a conference at the Newhouse School of Communication at Syracuse University on the blending of Social Media and A Cappella singing. There was a lot of singing, but I spent my time in Social Media Marketing seminars. One seminar started on the phenomenal growth of Social Media. Some of the statistics and thoughts they revealed were, I thought, astonishing. Here are some of those revelations (the source of most of them are a book titled, Socialnomics dated May 5, 2010 - also found at www.socialnomics.com).

First, Social Media is called "The Biggest Shift Since the Industrial Revolution".

More:

Over 50% of the world's population is under 30.  96% of them have joined some form of Social Media

Facebook now tops Google for weekly traffic in the US

Social Media has overtaken pornography as the #1 activity on the web

Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users

Television took 13 years to reach 50 million users

The internet took 4 years to reach 50 million users

The iPod took 3 years to reach 50 million users

Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year

If Facebook were a country it would be the 3rd largest country in the world

China would be first, India second, Facebook third and the USA fourth

Facebook has more users than there are people living in the United States

80% of companies in the US use Social Media for recruitment

95% of these use Linkedin

The fastest growing Facebook segment is 55 - 65 year old women

Generation Y and Z consider email to be passe

YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world

There are over 200,000,000 blogs

34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.

(34% of 200,000,000 is a very large number)

Only 18% of traditional TV ad campaigns generate a positive ROI (return on investment)

90% of viewers skip TV ads completely by means of Tivo/DVR

where as, 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations

(such as they get on social media)

and only 14% trust advertisements

On Facebook, there are over 60 million updates a day.

And, a couple of quotes:

"Social Media is not a fad, it is a fundamental shift in the way we communicate".

and

"The ROI of Social Media is that your business will exist in 5 years".

(These are powerful words - and the emphasis is added).

These numbers are compelling evidence that if your business is not involved in Social Media, at the very least, it is missing a huge opportunity to be more profitable.  Further, this opportunity exists for every type of business, be it professional or store front or creative.