It was registered on February 14th, 2005 and has grown so fast in the past 5 years. It serves more than 2 billion videos per day. That is the equivalent of every person in the world watching 10 videos per month, or according to YouTube is nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined.

YouTube turns 5

There were other competitors to YouTube, there were services such as Veoh, Vimeo and Viddler and many more. But it was YouTube that came through and 19 months after setting up the company, it was bought by Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion. Not bad for a couple of Paypal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim.

Check out YouTube’s blog for the “My YouTube Story” which has tales by people around the world describing how YouTube has changed their lives.

Anyone can broadcast yourself on YouTube, politicians, students, even brides and grooms from their wedding videos. My favourite has to be the Wedding First Dance – Baby Got Back . That has been viewed over 12 million times. They are stars in their own right. and many unknown joblogs have used YouTube to show off their talent (Justin Bieber) or show their odd family videos. YouTube was started to give bloggers an easy way to put their videos in their blogs and has expanded ever since. Apparently 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute. YouTube also has content deals with more than 10,000 partners including entertainment titan Disney, and has a fledgling online movie rental service.

It will be interesting to see how much YouTube develops in the next five years especially now that is is part of Google’s “media cloud” for people to access films, books, magazines, tv shows old and new. YouTube will go from strength to strength and who knows how much the video search landscape will have changed when we celebrate its tenth birthday?

YouTube

Here are a few tips I recommend for those wanting to optimise their videos
1. Title & Description
The title should contain a good keyword phrase , it needs to be short as YouTube limits the length.
The description can be 2-3 sentences and should contain keywords and variations of keywords.
Include a URL link at the start of the description. By default, the description is almost hidden, but the link you create
will still be visible if it is at the beginning.

2. Tags

Include at least 5-7 relevant keywords as tags for your video eg if you have a cake business and are advertising a new cake for Mother’s Day you may want to consider the following:

Mother’s day cake, bake cake for mother’s day, making cakes, cake for mum

It is important to use tags that will associate your video with other videos that use the same tags.
When people watch a different video, yours will be shown as a related video hence getting more views from people
who were originally watching other videos.

3. Provide transcripts of your videos

Write on page copy next to the video which will be indexed by the search engines and help you to rank higher. This will be in the description part. I would recommend you put this under the text

“http://www.bake-a-cake.co.uk Bake a cake shows you how easy it is to make a cake from scratch. Show your mother you care and bake the best cake for Mother’s Day.

4. Offer the option to embed your video

Links from other websites to your website or video, are very important in SEO

An embedded video is when someone puts the YouTube video into their own website. It works same way as an
inbound link. Promote your video to people who might embed it or link to it.
Use the video as a portal with links to related content on your site

5. Keep the video to under 3 minutes. Make it short and concise and exciting to watch !! Make it relevant and
interesting.

6. Allow users to rate your video

The videos that receive higher ratings from users are the ones that users tend to favourite and save.

7. Brand the video with the company logo

This way you are generating brand awareness with your site bake-a-cake.

8. Link to the videos using important keywords in the anchor text – eg bake a cake, mother’s day cake, mum’s cake. You need to make sure the keywords are the same ones you are using on your site.

So there you have it, a few simple ways to optimise your video for Universal Search.

1. Deaf viewers will now be view and understand YouTube videos
2. Better search and advertising opportunities on the site.

YouTube has allowed video creators to add captions to YouTube since 2006 but transcribing was expensive and time consuming. Creators of videos and users can now request video transcription

So what does this mean?
Having searchable text has huge potential for search capabilities in YouTube.
This is a beta launch and will continue to develop over the next few months, but it means that it will be easier to search for auto-caption videos. As you may be aware, YouTube is owned by Google and this is a step in the direction of improving its search technology.

This new feature will also mean it is more accessible to speakers of different languages. English subtitles can be added into any of the 50 languages supported by Google’s translation service.

This is great news for those hearing impaired who were previously unable to take advantage of YouTube. Now they can watch all the YouTube videos without having to download any additonal software.

The other benefit of having auto-captioning is for advertisers. it will help brands serve ads relevant to specific parts of YouTube videos.

How will it work?
When you upload a video to YouTube, you will be able to create an automatic caption of the clip’s soundtrack. You will then be able to download the subtitles file to the personal computer in a SUB or SRT file format. If you have already uploaded a video, then you will be prompted to add captions for existing content.

Interesting to see how this feature develops. Read more information about YouTube on Mashable