The Rise of YouTube Marketing in Its Early Months
A small site called YouTube, started by three former PayPal employees this past February, is quietly becoming the video destination the web was waiting for.
Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, three former PayPal employees, registered the domain YouTube.com in February. By April they had a working prototype and uploaded a short eighteen-second clip of one of them at the San Diego Zoo. In the months since, the site has moved from a private beta among friends to something people outside their immediate circle are starting to talk about. It’s still early, invite-heavy and far from a household name, but the shape of what it’s building is already visible.
What YouTube is doing differently
Google Video launched earlier this year and hasn’t caught fire the way its backing might suggest. YouTube, with none of that backing, is gaining traction anyway, and the difference seems to come down to one thing: it made embedding video on other sites and blogs effortless. A clip doesn’t have to live only on YouTube’s own pages, it can show up anywhere, with the player carried along. That single decision is turning YouTube into infrastructure for other people’s pages, not just a destination of its own.
Why the timing works
Broadband adoption crossed the halfway mark of US households last year, and the cost of producing and hosting video has kept falling. What was missing wasn’t demand for video, it was a place simple enough that uploading a clip took less effort than writing a blog post. YouTube’s stripped-down interface, upload, wait, get a link, solved exactly that problem at the exact moment enough people had the bandwidth to watch what got uploaded.
The early adopters aren’t brands
Right now the videos getting attention are personal, funny or strange, posted by individuals with no marketing intent at all. That’s the healthiest possible sign for what this becomes. A platform that builds a real audience habit around genuine, unpolished content is a far better foundation for advertising and brand use later than one that launches already stuffed with commercials nobody asked to watch.
What businesses should do while it’s still small
There’s no rush to have a fully formed YouTube strategy this month. What’s worth doing now is watching how the platform’s culture forms, informal, embeddable, comment-driven, and starting to experiment with short, unpolished video on your own site so the muscle is built before the audience arrives in force. The businesses that show up authentically once this platform matures will have a real advantage over the ones still uploading straight television ads.
Where this is likely heading
A site built around effortless uploading and embedding, growing during exactly the window when broadband and cheap cameras finally converged, has the ingredients to become the default home for online video. It’s not there yet. But watching it now, before it’s obvious, is worth the hour it takes.
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