YouTube Gives Options For YouTube Channel Layouts

This week our look at the Reel Web includes several news stories about online video, including the new channel layout that YouTube is playing it. There’s several options to layout your channel as a Creator, Network, Blogger, or Everything. There’s also changes to YouTube’s Analytics page to streamline some of your videos’ statistics and metrics, as well as several other updates.

With online video projected to account for 90% of all Internet traffic by 2013, there are some serious implications for online retailers and businesses. Basically, if you’re not creating online video content now, start before it’s too late. Customers already expect to find video about products and services before they buy something.

But just having video isn’t enough anymore. Now, for your videos to rank well in search engines and for SEO, your videos must be very sociable and invite engagement like comments, video responses, thumbs-ups, and more. The social engagement around videos is becoming more and more important for SEO and optimizing the videos for search.

We cover a story of a company that is doing it well: Orabrush. They went from having no luck with their product to becoming a multi-million dollar company all thanks to their efforts on YouTube.

A couple people are using Kickstarter to try to address some of the stabilization issues that DSLRs have, and we also mention YouTube’s new medals that they award to special videos, as well as some research that shows that tablet users watch 30% more online video than desktop users.

QUESTION: What companies do you see who are utilizing online video well?

This week on the Reel Web, I show you guys some of the upcoming changes that are coming to YouTube’s channels. Also, the really cool story about a business that just exploded and took off using YouTube and averages Joes just like you and me, some of us are making some really cool products for our DLSR videography stuff so that’s all coming up.

Hey guys, my name is Tim Schmoyer and welcome to another week of the Reel Web where every week we just kind of take a look at some of the highlights from the online video world in the past week. Let’s start off with YouTube, they’re doing a lot of different things to the channels now, there is a lot of different features, different designs, and none of them are actually rolled out yet but for those of us who kind of want to get an early start in checking out some of these things, there’s a link in the description below this video on YouTube or here are ReelSEO.com, wherever you’re watching this or you can just kind of opt in and check some of these things out.

Some of the main changes included like the template and the layout of how you arrange content on your channel or you can have like the template theme that kind of has like a featured video up top or you can have like a network theme if you have several other channels you want to promote or there’s lots of different options there. You can also now feature your activity stream on YouTube which includes things like your likes, your favorites, thumbs ups, you know, comments you leave or uploads or anything else you can control what exactly goes on that page.

But it lets you highlight some of the things that you’ve been engaging with on YouTube and lets your audience kind of follow along with that. So even if you haven’t uploaded a video for awhile, there’s still some new stuff there, there’s some new activity for your users and subscribers and your fans to come and check out.

Also, interestingly enough, from what I could understand, it appears that YouTube now tracks users who visit your channel page first and as they go into your video pages, now it actually shows some of your other videos more prominently alongside of your video that they’re watching. So hopefully it keeps them engaged with your content.

There’s also a whole new look to the Google Analytics and whole bunch of other little stuff scattered here and there throughout. I was playing with it, you know, I felt like it really wasn’t that major of an update. I thought it was kind of slick, it was cool, some of the stuff, like being able to have my Facebook and Twitter and different social profiles linked really nicely in the sidebar there. it’s really cool but overall, it didn’t really impress me that much.

It seems like every week, there’s more and more statistics coming out about online video usage and this week was no exception. Mediapost.com pointed out that last year, 2010, over 30% of all internet traffic was related to online video and that is projected by 2013 to be up to 90% of all internet traffic is online video viewing. They also pointed out that a lot of online retailers are using more and more video and that us consumers are becoming more and more like, expecting people to have video content before we make a purchase.

If you’re a company or a brand, you need to get in online video now before it’s too late and it evolves like, way past you and it’s just too hard to catch up. Just creating videos isn’t really enough anymore, your content really has to be solid and even more importantly, it has to be social proof, there has to be engagement, there has to be people interacting in order for it to really rank in search engines the way we want it to.

Brafton.com has a really interesting infographic that shows why sociability is just so important for the search engine optimization of our videos. More and more, search engines aren’t just looking for good metadata, they’re actually looking for how many people are engaging with this content, how many people are sharing it, how many people are liking it, how many people are watching it. Like, those things are becoming more and more important just as much as the metadata is. And if you want see some examples why and how, the infographic is linked up below.

When I was at BigCon last summer, there was a very prominent booth there from Orabrush and for good reason. A couple years ago, these guys, like no one had even heard of them. They had tried all the different traditional marketing stuff that they could do, infomercials, and every single form of marketing they could try and none of it worked. They weren’t even selling anything.

But at one last effort to save their company based on the advice of a friend, they made a YouTube video and it just took off getting about 6 million views. From there, they launched a mini web series for their brand and product and now it is in Wal-Mart, CVS Pharmacies and places all over the country. If you’re a brand, a company or organization who’s really trying to promote your business using online video, this story is one you’re going to want to read, I’ll link up to it below.

The DSLR video industry is still relatively new, new enough that I still don’t have one, I want one so bad. And a lot of people are noticing a lot of weaknesses, areas that really need to be tweaked and fine tuned. Some people, even, are just taking their own initiative to just build products that will hopefully solve problems for a lot of DSLR videographers. And what better place to turn to, to get some initial funds to get your product launched than kickstarter.com.

One of the main difficulties of DSLR cameras is that they’re so heavy and trying to hold them still for sustained periods of time is very difficult. I mean, you could have like, a beautiful shot but it’s all shaky and the whole thing’s just ruined. So two different people are taking a crack at solving this problem in ways that don’t cost you like, $1500, and they look a little something like this.

(Video playback) “With this, you don’t need dolly tracks, you don’t need, I mean, you just have this and the camera and it just, the moves that we had on Unspoken were amazing. I mean, you could still use it like a monopod but then you could roll on the ground without tracks. If either one of these strikes your fancy, links to both of them are in the description below. Personally, I favor the first one and it’s already about 10 grand over what they were trying to raise so that’s definitely going to be a thing.

A couple of other interesting things came out last week as well, including, I guess, people who watch online video using a tablet watched it for about 30% longer than those on a desktop. Now you know, you’re welcome. And YouTube came out with this thing called Medals, which they award to videos that get a certain number of views in a certain amount of time. I personally don’t see what the point of it is, I don’t see how it benefits or helps us at all.

I want to hear from you guys, do you know of any other brands or products or organizations or services or companies or anybody who’s using online video effectively to promote their product? Let us know in the comments below, we’d love to check them out. For our creator’s tip video on Wednesday, I’m going to show you guys a little behind the scenes look at this video right here, specifically how to make good jump cuts. There’s a lot more science and art that goes into them than just bumping up two clips side by side so we’re going to look at that.

And if you’re not already subscribed to our channel to get that content and much more stuff about online video, you’re going to want to click subscribe up there, you can click right there to do that as well. And it will give you guys notification in your subscription box here on YouTube every time we upload a new video, that’d be great, we’d love to have you follow along. And I will see you guys Wednesday for a creator’s tip and then next Monday again for another look at The Reel Web. Bye.

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