Has Everyone Gone YouTube Mad?
On a casual online browsing session, I’m sure it would be almost impossible to avoid the constant presence of that black and red icon lurking in almost every corner. Whether you’re on Facebook, on your favourite band’s page, or even on your local city council’s website, that big red ‘play’ button has become rather inevitable.
You would have had to have been living under a rock for the past decade to have not heard of this multibillion viewed video hosting site. An astounding proportion of people have jumped on the band wagon though.
More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month.
Those billion viewers watch over 6 billion hours of video every month, and while all of this is occurring, 100s of hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. So what is this craze all about? What is video doing that ordinary motionless words aren’t?
At the end of the day, it’s all about communication.
It all revolves around getting a message across to as many people as possible in a short time period whilst being as cost effective as possible. It doesn’t matter what this message is, or how serious it is either, virtually everyone is using YouTube as a method of advertising, marketing and entertainment. Small and large businesses are using it as tools at their disposal, and so are ‘celebrities’ on various levels on the fame spectrum in attempt to increase their fan base. And why shouldn’t they? Up and coming actors and smaller businesses would have to be stark raving mad not to use YouTube in some respect in the weird and wonderful digital age we now live in. To put it into context, according to Nielsen, YouTube reaches more US adults aged 18-34 than any cable network.
Keeping all of this in mind, it’s not surprising to hear that video is having a much greater impact than words. Video blogging is overtaking blogging quite significantly. So what seems to be the attraction to video over text communication?
Low Cost
The means to produce video blogs and relatively decent ones for that matter is becoming rather inexpensive as the years go by. DSLRs are becoming cheaper and cheaper, which means you can create almost professional looking videos from your very own bedroom. Businesses as well as individuals are choosing to employ video production companies or make their own because it costs much less than it did five years ago.
Short and Bite Size Information
The average person reads around 300 words per minute. According to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research, a 1 minute video is worth 1.8million words. This is the equivalent of 3,600 typical web pages. Theoretically speaking, it would take the average reader 1000 hours to read the same content they could in a one minute video. Some may say that video watching equals laziness, but in a world where time is money, it’s just seems to be common sense to watch a video rather than read a long tedious article that may not even permeate the brain on first reading.
Importance of Personal Branding
Videos are the perfect medium in a digital age where online ‘branding’, (no matter how awful it sounds) is so vital in the current competitive job market. You can sell yourself to an audience in less than 2 minutes, in a way that is easy on the eye. Add some soothing music and you’re on to a winner. What is so great is that young and dynamic video production companies which specialise in helping you to create the best video for your company are popping up all over the UK. These companies are dedicated to online video marketing campaigns. A single video production company can serve a range of small and large companies which means more video content is being produced than ever. For instance, video production company, Lambda Films are one of the many businesses who are dedicated in producing these online marketing campaigns through audio-visuals.
Shows Personality
On a similar train of thought, it is just wiser to convey a company’s work morals in a video rather than on paper. It resonates more with most people to add visual to a message, and it remains in their mind for longer. Similarly, for online bloggers, it would take a reader several articles or blogs for them to build an idea of the writer’s character or ideas. In a video blog, a viewer is essentially watching a blogger perform, and this can be quite authoritative. This notion is especially useful for actors or online personalities who are attempting to get a foot in the door because they can essentially build an online portfolio through a YouTube channel.
This article was written by Chloe Hashemi. Chloe is a recent English Literature graduate from the University of East Anglia. She enjoys writing about film and social media.
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