The boys and girls at YouTube are celebrating reaching a billion subscriptions over various channels by releasing a new widget for web masters and bloggers alike.
Early on (we’re talking ’06 here, people!), the yellow subscribe button made its debut so the latest videos from your favorite channels could make a beeline to your inbox/eager eyes. Today, the button that’s been immortalized as a throw cushion hits an important landmark: it’s been clicked over one billion times. And who was the lucky channel to get that billionth hit? It was MachinimaSports, who are, not coincidentally, on our homepage on Friday. […]
So what’s next for subscriptions? Turns out, we’ve got a spankin’ new widget that any video-maker can embed on his/her website or blog. It lets people subscribe to your YouTube channel with a single click, without having to leave your site to log into YouTube or to confirm their subscription. The entire process happens in the widget. (Official YouTube Blog)
YouTube seems to borrow a page (no pun intended) from Facebook, in which the company removes any barrier that may hinder a reader from subscribing to your videos.
Being the geeks that they are, the Google folks provided users with the raw html in order to create a widget upon one’s blog or website, although over the next few days we will hopefully see various widgets, plugins or modules created by third party developers (or perhaps even YouTube themselves).
YouTube’s billion subscriptions puts the site well ahead of Facebook (who currently boasts 500 million users), and with the social video king experimenting with live streaming we may see the day where YouTube reaches its 2 billionth subscriber in the not too distant future.
Originally posted on October 29, 2010 @ 12:45 pm