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New Media News Every Morning

YouTube Turns 5, Exceeds 2 Billion Views Per Day

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May is YouTube’s month. It was on this month when the first beta version of YouTube.com come out into the open. That was five years ago when YouTube was launched with an aim of giving all of us a place to easily upload videos and share them with the world. Did YouTube achieved this? Obviously yes – and with a resounding success. In fact, as YouTube celebrates its five years of existence, the premiere video uploading site has achieved a remarkable feat – 5 billion views per day.

If 5 million views per day does not sound interesting or applaudable to you, I don’t know what is.  The fact still remains though that YouTube is a phenomenon. In fact, its current achievement can be compared to a double prime-time audience of perhaps all three major U.S. television netbworks.

After five years, YouTube has indeed transformed into a global platform that supports HD and 3D, live feeds of an entire sports season, top Holywood feature films, and even documentatries from activitists who want change.

What could be a better way of celebrating its fifth year anniversary but to launch a new YouTube channel that showcase how YouTube has helped changed people’s lives. The YouTube Five Year channel also lets you get into the mix by letting you upload your own video into the channel. But of course, you can’t just upload any videos there. It has to be something that tells about how YouTube has changed your life.

The new YouTube Five Year channel also features an interactive timeline that contains important moments and memes in the short history of YouTube.

Ready with your videos? Take part in this exercise and be part of YouTube’s history.

Originally posted on May 17, 2010 @ 10:43 am

YouTube Rolls Out Seven New Features, Google Buzz Sharing Included

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YouTube wants us to have them in our minds as we spend our weekends at home as it rolls out new features, seven of them to be exact that aims to improve our YouTube experience.  These new features are – five new languages, email alerts, new look for search results page, new sharing options, new upload interface, new player changes and enhance YouTube-for-iPad.

Let’s take a quick look at each of these enhancements.

YouTube has added five new languages – Greek, Hungarian, Finnish, Danish and Norwegian. If you want o view YouTube in any of those languages simply scroll down to the bottom of any page on YouTube, select “language” and click on any language and you’re good to go.

The YouTube email alerts feature has been made more useful Now, you can choose to receive an email alert whenever a new video was uploaded to the channel you subscribed to. Say goodbye to checking your email from time to time just to check whether new video has been uploaded. [Read more…]

Originally posted on April 30, 2010 @ 8:22 pm

Once Upon a Time, StumbleUpon Beats Facebook In Generating Site Traffic

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We all know how formidable Facebook is,  as a social media site capable of generating traffic to websites and in terms of userbase as well. Next to Facebook, we always think of Twitter.  We never really thought about other sites, such as StumbleUpon perhaps? Now here’s an interesting statistics published by StatCounter covering the amount of traffic generated by social media sites that leads to website page views. The statistics cover Mar 2009 to Mar 2010. And guess what in 2009?  StumbleUpon use to bring more traffic to websites than Facebook does.

From March 2009 to July 2009, StumbleUpon was actually the number one social media sites that drives the most traffic to websites. Overall, from Mar 09 to Mar 10, StumbleUpon was second to Facebook in generating traffic to websites with 25% of social media hits, while Facebook had 48%. Twitter had 10% of social media hits.  The rest include – YouTube (6%), reddit (4%), Digg (2%) and MySpace (2%).

So, what’s the importance of these statistics? From a business perspective this only goes to show that social media sites could be a good tool for driving traffic to business sites. Hence, we now see more brands having their Facebook pages linked to their individual corporate websites.

Mr. Aodhan Cullen, CEO of Statcounter remarks:

“Social Media market share fluctuates a lot more than browser or search statistics. For example, Facebook peaked over Christmas and the New Year with almost three quarters of the total, perhaps reflecting its important role in communications between families and friends.”

In case you’re wondering StatCounter’s data was based on 13 billion page views across the globel StatCounter network of member sites.

So there, if your  company does not have a social media presence yet, you might want to start creating one on Facebook, especially now that there are many things happening with Facebook in terms of features and functionality.

Originally posted on April 22, 2010 @ 9:58 am

Your Chance to Become Famous, Musicians Wanted at YouTube

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We all know that there’s a great pool of musical talents awaiting to be discovered on YouTube. In fact, we’ve seen several of them got famous already.  To push its continual expansion and to help more YouTube users who got what it takes to become famous, YouTube  has launched its Partner Program for musicians dubbed – Musicians Wanted.

If you believe that you have the talent to enthrall the billions of YouTube users globally with your musical talent then if I were you I’d sign up for the YouTube Partner Program for musicians right now. As in right now, before somebody else gets discovered instead of you.

If you’ve been uploading videos of you singing out Rihanna’s “Umbrella” or Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” for your friends to see and watch, why not let those videos earn some extra bucks for yourself. Who knows, you might become the next OK Go, a little band who uploaded a couple of videos that went viral on YouTube. This lead the group to start their own indie label as a result of their 30-seconds-to-fame video on YouTube.

Take it from the group’s Damien Kulas explaining how YouTube can propel your budding music carrer into new heights.

“YouTube has always been a great match for OK Go – creativity flourishes and we can connect directly with our fans. So when we heard about Musicians Wanted, it was a no-brainer: it sounds great for us. We’re honored and excited to be the first applicants. We can’t wait to get new videos up on our channel.”

Alright, what are you waiting for? Apply now for the YouTube Partner Program Musician’s Wanted gig.

Originally posted on March 17, 2010 @ 11:30 am

YouTube Overhauls its Video Page, Hoping We Will All Like It

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YouTube is currently overhauling its standard video page view into something that it considers as one of the site’s biggest redesigns ever. Basically once the redesign is finished, you will noticed two major changes – new playlist interface, search queue and integrated comments.

The new playlist interface will now include an option for autoplay mode which if turned on will automatically bring you to the next video once the current video has finished playing. If you don’t want like this feature, you can always turn it off anytime. But if the search results consist of robusts set of videos You Tube will automaticall play these videos one after the other. This will now become a standard in all of the YouTube videos.

As for the search queue, this feature will let you add videos to your queue. While the integrated comments will now lists both text and video responses to trigger conversation around a video.

The new video page view is currently being tested by selected individuals. Once testing is done, expect the new video page view to appear the next time you check out YouTube.

Or, if you can’t wait that long, check out this preview site to prepared yourself for the coming changes in the way you watch video on YouTube.

Hope you like the new page view. Honestly, it’s way cleaner and more organized than the current interface.

Via Business Insider

 

Originally posted on February 26, 2010 @ 1:24 pm