The Milestone
YouTube has good reason for celebration. Since being founded in February 2005, they have grown from a small startup sandwiched between a pizzeria and a Japanese restaurant, to a web powerhouse of a Billion users. Along with YouTube’s incredible growth, the Internet had been changed forever.
Time for a little background information
In the early days of the Internet, users for the most part, could only consume content via the Internet. The concept of somebody who wasn’t particularly tech savvy, uploading content such as photos, videos, and their experiences to the web was almost unheard of. This was known as the Web 1.0 era; in other words, during that time, the majority of web users were only able to consume content, but not create it themselves.
With the introduction of services such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, the Web 2.0 era was ushered in. Instead of merely consuming content through these services, web users have become the source of the content, by uploading their personal insights, thoughts, photos and videos.
Advertising campaigning in the Web 2.0 era…
Websites such as YouTube provide a medium for people and organizations to upload videos, without requiring much, if any technical background. When any individual user watches one of these videos, YouTube starts building a specific profile of that user’s interests. The more that the user takes advantage of YouTube’s services, the better YouTube is able to refine their profile of that user. This profile is used to determine which videos would be best to recommend, while advertising products and services that are most relevant to the user. This is essentially what makes Web 2.0 services extremely powerful, especially for marketing.
With Web 2.0, marketers have found their heaven on earth. The unique user profiles that are generated by services such as YouTube are extremely useful. When you know exactly what an individual’s interests are, you gain the ability to perform extremely targeted advertising, and with a user base of a Billion people, can you really afford not to consider this new medium of advertising?
Commercial placement within YouTube:
