It’s mind-boggling to think what this might be able to do for retailers who have some kind of video to help them sell their wares. While you can sometimes swing a herd of cats and not hit a shopper in the malls these days, more than 90 million people are wandering around YouTube every month. Matching retailers who have lots of stuff but no traffic with a website that has lots of traffic but nothing to sell seems so logical that you have to wonder why it took the highly inventive Googlers two years to come up with it. It’s the simple and obvious answers that elude us sometimes.
An examination of some of the latest statistics reveals how explosive these pay-per-click sponsored videos could be. Ninety-two million people watch an average of 54.8 videos for a total of five billion video views, give or take a few hundred thousand. 75% of all Americans view at least one online video each month, and the average viewer spends almost six hours per month watching videos.
I have been involved in more than one discussion among baby boomers wondering who amongst us has 6 hours to spend trolling through home made video productions looking for… What exactly are these videophiles looking for? According to web analytics site Compete DataHub, YouTubers are looking for entertainment, laughs, diversion, and sex, not necessarily in that order.
This is good for retailers to know. If you want to try this YouTube sponsored video service to advertise your products via video, it might serve you best to have a video that is entertaining, funny, or sexy because that’s what YouTube viewers are conditioned to expect.
Will YouTube viewers buy your product if they like your video? If not, then there’s a whole bunch of people who have been wasting a whole bunch of time and money on SuperBowl advertising for a whole lot of years.
For retailers who have been meaning to get around to thinking about the possibility of maybe making a video some day, consider hiring a 19 year-old to do it rather than a big-time Madison Avenue advertising agency. If the Numa Numa guy, "Daft Hands," Paris Hilton XXX tape, and the Diet Coke-Mentos experiment have taught us anything, it’s that entertainment value and “keeping it real” trumps slick production in the wide world of online videos.
Since the sponsored video paid search offering became available, Google has not gone out of its way to brag about its results. It can be assumed that if the service was wildly successful that Google would have been eager to communicate that to its investors. Credit Suisse analysts estimate that overall Google will generate $240 million in revenue in 2009. While that is still one half billion dollars shy of what YouTube will need to operate its site, it’s still a 20% increase in revenue over 2008. At least that’s progress.
Whether you love Google, or fear its power and dominance, the retail industry can’t help but root for the success in its pay-per-click sponsored videos or any other kind of advertising scheme. When YouTube gets the formula right, it will create a lot of opportunity for retailers to get it right too. Somebody over the age of 14 is going to figure it all out one of these days.
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