YouTube have recently announced their 500,000,000th promoted video view.
YouTube’s promoted videos first came on to the scene in 2008 and have seen a six fold increase in ‘clicks’ in the last year alone with advertisers using the service to promote everything from bad breath solutions to movie trailers.
The first YouTube Promoted Video campaign was “Penny Pranks” by Office Max. You can watch the case study below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhB2yux5NQo
Since that time, regular users of the site would have seen a considerable increase in promoted ads. Thousands of advertisers have used video advertising as way to engage their markets, many managed to entertain as well as engage, with some videos receiving well over a million views.
The service operates in a similar way to Google Adwords, with advertisers bidding on keywords relevant to their business, product or service. The promoted videos are displayed next to contextually relevant search results and the the advertiser is charged when the video is played.
According to YouTube, the average length of a promoted video is three minutes in length and it would take 2,853 years to watch them all.
While on the subject of statistics, YouTube currently attracts 90 million unique visitors per month, making it the fourth most popular destination online.
There are approximately 24 hours of video content uploaded to YouTube every minute and the site receives over 2 billion views per day – that’s nearly double the audience of all three major US networks combined!
