How to Make Money on YouTube Videos.

Believe it or not, but the first video that ever got uploaded to YouTube was uploaded on valentine’s day – five years ago. It is hard to believe that YouTube is that young, but it is! It was founded back in 2005 by three former PayPal workers that go by the names of Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim.

It’s actually a pretty interesting story. These three young men wanted to share a video of their own dinner party with a few friends. When attaching the video(s) to the e-mail message – they encountered an error. The file was too large to be sent. That’s where they decided to design a simple video-sharing website which later became the biggest website on the Internet.

Today, YouTube has about 1 billion visitors each month. In other words, YouTube is enormous. There is no other website that can compete with it. Google used to, but YouTube surpassed Google in terms of pageview a few months ago – making YouTube the most visited website on the web.

Here are some important moments of YouTube’s five-year history:

Clip 1: This clip is from the old days when the guys hosted YouTube in a garage. Yes, believe it or not – but YouTube was actually started in a garage. They came from nothing and made it to something!

As you can see, they’re having a pretty good time. Today, these guys are billionaire’s.

Clip 2: Chad and Hurley talk to the users of YouTube, telling them that they’ve been bought by YouTube.

Clip 3: The clip you’ve been waiting for! This is the first video that ever got uploaded to YouTube. The clip was uploaded by the third founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim. He’s now an employee of Google, and runs the unofficial Utube Blog.

These guys are my role models. They started out in a garage, and then got an offer from Google. Today, they live like billionaire’s. I love them!

As I told you in the blog post I wrote yesterday, you should totally consider using YouTube as a part of your marketing strategy. Believe it or not, but using YouTube can be really rewarding. Instead of having to fish for users, you could just upload a video and attract users naturally. It’s easier than you think.

There’s no number to tell you how many views “the average YouTube video” gets. I once uploaded a video that I had recorded at my daughters birthday. In five weeks, it had over one thousand views! What did I do to deserve this? Nothing. I just uploaded a random video about a completely random subject.

I did not tell my friends about the video. I did not talk about it in real life. I didn’t do anything in order for the video to get views. I didn’t promote it at all! I just uploaded the video and let it live its own life on YouTube.

To my surprise, it got over one thousand views after a week. That’s insane! Too bad I wasn’t marketing a product. If I did, I’m pretty sure I would’ve made at least a sale or two. How about you, do you have a product to promote? If so, my tip to you is to start using YouTube. It’s actually easier than you think, and the results YouTube yield are amazing.

Imagine making 10 sales, without even having to promote your product. That’s like a dream coming true for the average marketer. Today, I’m making thousands of dollars online – by doing nothing. I find a product I would like to promote, market it on YouTube – and people buy that product. It doesn’t get simpler than that! You should totally check it out.

It may sound complicated and dumb, I know, but YouTube is actually a great start if you’re looking forward to marketing your company on the Internet. A lot of companies are interested in marketing their business online, but some just don’t know how to.

If you’re interested in marketing your company online, you have two choices: Either by creating a website for your comapny and performing SEO on it, or by promoting it on YouTube. There may be a few more options to marketing your website online, but these are without doubt the best ones in my opinion.

The first option that I mentioned, about creating a website, is the option I would’ve chosen. I’m familiar with creating websites, and performing SEO on them. A lot of people aren’t though, and those who are charge a fortune for helping you out.

The second option is a bit easier and takes less time, but it won’t work if you don’t do it correctly. Gather everyone that’s working for your company and simply create a video about your company.

In that video, tell your customers what they need to know. Tell them everything, and be as honest as possible. Try to add a few jokes in it too. People love “commercials” that make them laugh.

If you start promoting your business on YouTube – you won’t be needing to waste any money on SEO, websites, Google or any other type of marketing. All you need to do is to record a video about your company, and upload it.

If you create a funny video, it may go viral and attract millions, if not billions, of users worldwide. Do you have any idea of how many sales your company would make?

In my eyes, it looks like Google Chrome is becoming a really good browser. Even though Firefox and Opera are really good browsers, I really like Google Chrome. It’s fast, lightweight and doesn’t use a lot of resources.

Anyways, a few months ago, Google Chrome was really fast, but then users decided to start creating extension for it. Extensions make browser slower. A fresh install of Google Chrome is way faster than a Google Chrome installation with 10 different extensions. The extensions the users created did everything from showing a website’s pagerank to downloading pictures automatically. The sky was the limit.

One extension Google didn’t like though, was the extension that allowed users to download media from media-hosting portals such as YouTube. Google clearly states that those types of extensions are not allowed to be shared in the extension gallery.

Even so, there seems to be a plugin that actually made it past the Google Team. The extension I’m talking about is called “the S-YouTube Downloader” which, as the name implies, is a Google Chrome extension to download Youtube videos.

This is what YouTube looks like when the plugin has been activated. Nice, huh?

This plugin is very good. It adds a bunch of links underneath all the videos you watch on YouTube. A click on the link will show you a list of download options. All different formats will be displayed.

According to me and my friends, this plugin is excellent, wonderful and amazing at the same time. We, and especially I, love it! It has made my browsing experience with Google Chrome even better.

S-Youtube Downloader can currently be downloaded from the Google Chrome extension gallery. The extension is currently only capable of downloading Youtube videos. The developer may, or may not, integrate the plugin into other websites in the future. I guess we’ll just have to wait…

Many people often doubt that there is no point in trying to become famous on YouTube or even trying to advertise because they chances of that actually happening and being successful are slim, but the article will make you feel different about giving up before the first hurdle, as I will explain.

The advantages of advertising your own product of becoming famous are immense as you and/or your product could become known through out the whole world, which has many of you know, its one of the greatest things ever.

All it takes is time and effort as you may know that not everything in life is for free, unless you live in the underground tube with all the free newspapers. But look at them, free newspapers. They marketed their papers well and found a place that would exploit the information within them. It’s all about where to advertise.

The negatives with trying to promote a product on YouTube or even trying to become famous on YouTube is the mass amount of people who are all trying the thing as you. This will put some if not many of you off advertising via YouTube. The time needed to become well known will be roughly two to three months so don’t be put off if you don’t see results the next day.

This is where knowing you opposition comes in to play, knowing their strengths and weaknesses as it will help massively. Finding the highest viewed videos and posting your website and YouTube link to them. It will always make someone click on them. If you post it two or three times a week on a popular commented video, it wouldn’t look like spam and it will be your first step of advertising your video/videos.

The next step is to post on other popular websites with are viewed massively from all around the world, such as Yahoo answers, post you and get people to comment and rate it, that’s also views and creates your YouTube back links. This goes well with SEO.

It’s up to you to make this work successfully. Only you can make the dream into reality.

This post may be seen as old by a handful of people out there – but it’s not new for me. Not at all. Two hours ago I was surfing the web as usual. I then stumbled upon something called “the YouTube Blog”. It’s a blog YouTube updates. I read through a few posts and then stumbled upon something that made my jaw drop. YouTube has 24 hours of video uploaded every minute.

YouTube, the website I, you and all our friends visit a few times a day according to the statistics – has reached their goal. Every single minute, they get 24 hours of video uploaded to their website. That’s a mind-boggling statistic when you bear in mind this site is just five years old.

Last May, YouTube, which is owned by the search giant Google, revealed that about 20 hours of video was uploaded every minute. Today, it’s 24. YouTube is clearly growing.

This was the picture the YouTube team posted. As you can see, YouTube has clearly started to grow. I mean, 24 hours is a lot of time for a normal human being. During 24 hours, you could live in Jupiter for 2.5 days. You could sleep. You could build a house. You could… well, you could do just about anything while 24 hours passes by.

Some people may not find this blog post interesting, I understand that – but this is a blog about YouTube, from a fellow YouTuber. I mean, you gotta love YouTube! I don’t really know how many videos I upload to YouTube, but if I’m lucky I may upload a video or two during the weekends. Today I haven’t uploaded any videos. Yesterday I won’t. I never upload videos to YouTube. That is exactly why I’m going to ask you the following question: How often do you upload videos to YouTube?

This post is pretty funny. My whole website is about how to make money on YouTube, but this post will be about the opposite thing – about how YouTube makes money. It’s a tad bit complicated, I tell you that, but it’s actually relatively easy once you figure it out. It’s a simple, yet weird process that makes YouTube richer. In this blog post I will tell you all about it.

As you may know, YouTube does not belong to its original owners anymore. Back in 2005, it got sold to Google for a huge amount of money. The owners of YouTube sold the website and all its rights to Google for $1.65 billion. YouTube then became even bigger due to the fact that it was owned by Google.

Google is not just a search engine. It’s a company that serves ads. Publishers apply for their program in order to get some exposure for their websites, and advertisers, people like me – place the ads on their website. By doing this, I, as an advertiser, get paid. The publisher gets visitors. What about Google, the middleman? Well, they get a piece of the cake too.

That’s exactly what happens while you’re watching videos on YouTube. While watching videos, you may have noticed that there are some ads showing near your video. Those are Google ads. When people click on those ads – Google gets paid. It’s not harder than that. You click Google Ads on YouTube and YouTube makes money. It’s pretty easy to understand if you’ve been into the internet marketing niche before. Well, I hope this post helped you out. Now, you hopefully know how YouTube makes money.

Most of the people, if any, that read this blog knows that it does not get updated very often. It gets updated once a month if I find the time to doing it. I’m terribly sorry, but that does not really work in the world of SEO. In order for the blog to get more visitors and rank higher in Google – I need content. Lots of content.

I may not be the best writer, but I have lots of things to write about… the web is literally filled with information, blog posts and articles about YouTube!

The latest thing I found on the net surrounding the topic YouTube is an article written by Cody Barbierri. The article is called “Google launches advertising on YouTube mobile sites“.

In short, the article tells us that YouTube will start serving ads on mobile websites. It sounds pretty bad, I know, but it’s actually pretty smart of them to do such a thing. During 2009, the use of the mobile version of YouTube increased by 160 percent! Do you have any idea of how much that is? That’s about 10 million videos each day! On mobile devices, and on mobile devices only.

I predict YouTube to make lots of money by doing this. They’re already making millions, if not billions, by serving ads on their main website. Watching them do the same thing on mobile devices is pretty interesting. I personally think they’re going to earn lots of money – but at the same time, I ask myself, who the hell clicks on ads while on an iPhone?

For those of you that don’t know me – I’m a person that likes to dream. Not only do I dream when I sleep – I also dream when listening to music, when riding my skateboard, when playing games… I always dream! I don’t know why I do it, but I simply dream no matter what I do or how I feel.

Earlier today I was browsing YouTube (as usual) and I, as usual, started dreaming. Since YouTube recently introduced their HTML 5 version – I started to think about how YouTube would look like in 15 years. I don’t know why I did it – but I simply started thinking about what YouTube would look like in 15 years, and this is what I came up with…

1. YouTube Super Zoom.

What is is: When watching a video, you can press the pause button and zoom in on smaller stuff you see in the background. For example, we see a mayor walking through a museum, and there’s a painting by Vermeer in the background. Hit pause and the zoom icon, and click on the Vermeer painting, which is highlighted with a “zoomable” color (as are some other objects in the scene). It will be enlarged up to the point where you can see individual paint strokes.

How it works: Google’s image comparison engine will run in the background as soon as you select the zoom tool. For instance, the comparison engine will notice that images of the region containing Vermeer’s Milkmaid are available in many other places all over the web, like museum sites which have super large imagery. Google will merge those images to create an authoritative larger image, making user zooms feasible.

2. YouTube Speech Dubbing.

What it is: When you watch a foreign language short film on YouTube, the voices will automatically be dubbed into the language of your current content preference. You won’t even notice people aren’t speaking your mother tongue.

How it works: Behind the scenes, Google’s YouTube runs a speech-to-text program, followed by machine translation, followed by text-to-speech. To make the outcome more seamless, face recognition understands who is speaking and slightly adjusts the lip movements of the speaker so that it looks like the person really says the translated tone.

3. YouTube Music Composer.

What it is: You’re an amateur film maker. You created a thrilling, low-budget short film, but you don’t have any money (or the needed talent) to add a great music score. You click “Compose music”, and YouTube suggests a complete, copyright-free soundtrack to you. You check the score and possibly tweak the results where needed, and go live with your short film.

How it works: By analyzing light, pace, speech patterns – does the speaker sound nervous, happy, stressed, relaxed? – and more, YouTube’s AI music composer engine automatically creates a score. Most of the “smartness” of the algorithm is actually brute force: YouTube analyzes millions of movies and their respective scores, and compares what the visuals of your clip at a specific time most likely resembles. It then merges and distorts music from the scores found, adjust harmonies and rythm, and attaches it to your clip. The music distortion is just substantial enough so that no music composer can sue Google for ripping off their piece.

4. YouTube 3D Rotation.

What it is: You’re viewing a clip with an interesting building in the background. You can hit the pause button and then rotate the building, showing it from different sides.

How it works: Google’s all-encompassing Street View cameras collect 3D data from all kinds of scenery. They also match objects from photos snapped from different angles found all over the web. When a matching image is found in the video, it’s connected to its 3D counterpart to allow you to rotate it.

5. YouTube’s I’m A Star.

What it is: You send a film clip of a famous Hitchcock movie scene to a friend. Your friend sees you being attacked by a bunch of scary birds, with Tippi Hedren screaming for your life!

How it works: You can pick any movie available at YouTube. Many full-length movies, like all of Hitchcock’s work, have passed into the public domain by now, allowing creative remixing and more. You click the “I’m A Star” button, and let your webcam snap a few portraits of you. Google’s face recognition will then show you a selection of actors of the movie. You click on Rod Taylor, and instantly have his face be replaced with yours across all of the movie.

6. YouTube’s Clipteller.

What it is: Atop every video there’s a “Clipteller” tab. Click it, and the contents of the clip will be explained to you in story form – both in plain text, as well as a voice reading the text – complete with descriptions of what’s happening in every scene, dialogue and so on. This creates very accessible videos, and it’s also content which in turn gets indexed by Google, ready for full-text searching.

How it works: Google’s film analysis algorithms have become so smart, they know what’s happening. If a train is driving by in a scene, the algos will understand the object “train”, the action “passing by”, they will be able to categorize the sound into “train sounds” and so on. From that information, an AI creates a textual description, which is then “beautified” by comparing it with typical story writing patterns, found in the millions of books which Google scanned.

7. YouTube’s Filmmaker.

What it is: Filmmaker lets you edit a video, apply filters, crop, tweak and mash videos at your pleasure. You can add titles and special effects, like an explosion. You can even choose from a variety of famous actors to play along in your video.

How it works: Filmmaker is an app sitting in the browser, with no further downloads necessary, thanks to the power of HTML9. It integrates with mobile phone cameras and so on so that making short movies becomes very casual. Based on old films, which Google all digitized, Filmmaker allows you to pick from a vast range of classic actors, which are all available as smart 3D avatars. This way you can tell Arnold Schwarzenegger to jump off a balcony and then let the house behind him explode. (Arnold will get a share of your ad revenues from movie displays.)

8. YouTube’s GeoFilter.

What it is: Depending on the location of the video viewer, you’ll only see scenes which are legal per your government’s rules. For instance, if violent movies are illegal in your country, then the scene which would contain a sword fight will be replaced with a ballet scene. Similarly, if demonstrating for free speech rights is illegal in your country, then a news report showing a demonstration will turn into coverage of a baseball game.

How it works: Google’s YouTube offers all governments an API to feed them their legalese and religious preferences in simple terms, like “May contain violence”, “May not contain demonstrations” and so on. When a user visits YouTube, their location is known by their IP, and YouTube – the AI of which understands the actual content of a clip – compares with the legalese API data to understand which scenes should be replaced. Replaced scenes are either taken from other, copyright-free videos, or re-enacted using YouTube’s smart 3D objects and avatars.

9. YouTube Change the Cam.

What it is: When watching an archived news report on YouTube – say, a press conference by the president – a camera symbol shows up in the bottom of the video. Click it, and the same press conference will be displayed from another camera angle.

How it works: YouTube checks, rather fuzzily, if the specific audio track of a clip has matches in other clips. If it finds other clips, it checks if the video differs substantially. If that’s the case then YouTube figures it’s the same scene shown from a different angle.

10. YouTube Shut Out the Kids.

What it is: YouTube allows you to switch on a setting so that kids won’t be able to see certain content, like brutal kung fu movies.

How it works: It doesn’t really work, because kids end up outsmarting their parents and blocking them from seeing anything. YouTube cancels this feature after a two week trial and creates a support hotline for confused parents.

11. YouTube AutoRatings.

What it is: Every clip is assigned a rating expressing how funny it is, how dramatic, how brutal, how sad, how romantic and so on. Nobody manually sets these ratings, though. You can then search, for instance, for a movie that’s funny but thrilling, and get back a comedy action buddy movie.

How it works: A great number of voluntarily participating YouTube users have their webcam turned on whenever they surf the web, including YouTube. A small program implemented in Google’s browser recognizes the face and parses the facial emotion, and also listens to the user voice. If you smile, the cam will know, and attach that emotion (happiness/ funny/ good) to the individual video clip or other page you’re on. This in turn helps them identify the emotions a particular clip or web page triggers, which then helps them deliver better web search and YouTube clip search results. (SEO spammers quickly learn to abuse this feature by paying large crowds of people to visit their websites with a forced smile.)

12. YouTube Social Network.

What it is: Google turns YouTube into a giant social network, based on videos you viewed.

How it works: Similar to the Gmail Buzz program, Google connects everybody to everybody else, ignoring certain privacy details for a while. People will be shocked and complain about how their viewing habits are suddenly connected to their web search history and email address book, so Google will refine their opt-out setting, but at that point millions of users have already been connected, and Facebook is dead.

13. YouTube FindYourProduct.

What it is: A company, like the Coca Cola Company, can enter their product – “bottle of coke” – and find videos of people happily consuming their product. They can then add their banners to the side of that video, or create lotteries where everyone consuming their product has a chance to win big money, or they can simply analyze consumer behavior.

How it works: A straightforward image recognition is the basis of FindYourProduct. YouTube content creators later understand that they can make more money by strategically placing products inside their videos – because this will get them better ads, and a chance to win in the product lotteries – so YouTube is flooded with lots of grassroots product placement.

14. YouTube 3D.

What it is: You can view any film on YouTube in 3D. Even without special glasses, and without the respective film being shot in 3D.

How it works: Based on a patent by Matt Cutts, Google’s algos analyze depth layers in clips by checking movements and generating a pseudo-3D scenery out of it, extrapolating existing visuals with a lot of guess work. Using a very complicated Subpixel Rendering Blinking Effect built into the Google Chrome OS for that purpose – lucky Google, as their major OS market share allows them to roll out whatever browser feature they need for their web sites – the movie transform into 3D.

15. YouTube Smell the Vid.

What it is: Once activated, a scene in a movie will smell just like it would if you were there. If the movie protagonist is on a fishing hunt on his boat then you’ll smell the salt water and the fish. If the protagonist of a romantic movie puts on perfume, you will know its brand without seeing.

How it works: The Google Chrome Pad computer will have an odor emitter. Just like speakers emit sounds, this piece of hardware emits smell, by mixing different base fragrances to create e.g. cinnamon, strawberry, salt water and so on. Websites can define these fragrances in their stylesheets. YouTube on the other hand automatically analyzes video clip content semantics, and emits the needed fragrances, outputting them in real-time.

16. YouTube’s Just Let Me Watch the Movie, OK?

What it is: The “Just Let Me Watch the Movie, OK?” setting (JLMWMovie-OK), once activated, will show a movie as it was actually intended to be seen by its director.

How it works: JLMWMovie-OK is rather simple: activate it, and the killer features 1 to 15 as mentioned above will be deactivated. The artistic integrity of the movie is preserved, and you can lean back with a pack of popcorn and actually just enjoy the video.

One thing that I’ve seen that people often wonder about is how to create a YouTube account without having to verify it by using a cellphone. As you may already know, when creating a YouTube account – you have to verify it by receiving a text message (SMS) to your cellphone. That text message is a bit special. That text message contains your secret code that you need to enter on the website in order to verify your account.

I think it’s pretty good of YouTube to fix something like this. By doing so, they do not only prevent spam – they also make the members feel a bit special. When a friend of mine registered for a YouTube account a few months ago, he got a message telling him that he needed to verify his account by entering his phone number.

He did so, and ten seconds later the cellphone started vibrating like never before. Ta-da, he received the message from YouTube!

This is where the problem occurs. A lot of people, if not all, owns a cellphone. But still, some don’t. That’s where the problem occurs – with people that don’t own any cellphones. It’s different from culture to culture. In Europe, everybody owns a cellphone. In Africa or Asia, it may not be the same. That is exactly why we need a solution to this problem.

The solution to the problem is to either register by using a Yahoo! mail, or to just skip that part. Oh wow, I just realized that I wrote a whole blog post about how to register on YouTube without having to verify your account via a cellphone.