300+ Hours of Video are Uploaded to YouTube Every Minute [ReelSEO]

In May 2013, it was originally reported that 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. As of November 2014, despite the out-of-date statistics page on YouTube, Google confirmed that now over 300 hours, or 12.5 days, of video are uploaded every minute, triple the amount in less than two years.

The author, Carla Marshall, tackles the issue that dissenters seem to bring up about brand over-saturation in the video marketplace. Marshall believes that more videos upload to YouTube doesn’t make it “crowded,” but that it allows for brands to continue to create content that will spur engagement among their followers. Brands shouldn’t aim to go viral, but to focus on what their follows will identify with and enjoy.

Marshall goes on to discuss the benefits of earned media on YouTube. The prime example brought up in defense for earned media is the video game Minecraft. In the case of Minecraft, nearly 99 percent of all views generated about the game comes from user-generated walk-through/”Let’s Play” videos, that’s almost 31 billion views not generated by Minecraft branded videos. Fan-made videos are surging past brand videos at a staggering 19-to-1. The same can be said about cosmetic brands on YouTube, where companies are responsible for around 3 percent of video views, whereas the other 97 percent comes from review and tutorial videos.

In my opinion, web video services, such as YouTube or Vimeo, offer brands the perfect opportunity to offer visual representations of what they have to offer and the chance for fans to do the same thing in return. It’s impossible to get on to YouTube, watch a branded video and not see video-upon-video of responses, reviews, tutorials, parodies and much more. This gives brand a plethora of feedback on what they are doing right, what they aren’t achieving and what they could be doing better, more so than what a text blog could offer. As we have learned in class, more people are using YouTube for search purposes than they are Google for the fact that there is a more visually appealing aspect to the whole searching process.

In the long run, I think web video will be a medium that will continue to quickly grow and brands taking advantage of the services available will prosper in the long run.