Growing Demand Blog

In January, YouTube.com had 100 million visitors viewing more than 6 billion videos– almost doubling traffic year over year (ComScore).  As YouTube’s largest contributor of video content, this news makes us all VERY happy for a couple reasons:

1) These numbers continue to demonstrate the growth, opportunity and demand for online video.

 2) The YouTube audience is moving beyond viral videos and are consuming more high-quality, professionally-created content across a wide variety of categories.

In my introductory blog post I talked about Demand Studios now regularly serving more than 2 million video streams PER DAY on our various branded YouTube channels. These channels provide valuable brand extension and audience engagement opportunities for our owned and operated properties like eHow.com, LIVESTRONG.COM, Golflink.com, Funny Videos on Cracked.com, and even for our niche sites like Greencar.com

For this post, I want to share what we learned about partnering and leveraging the powerhouse that is YouTube to create and distribute content to our passionate audiences.

Two years ago, when it was hot to be the “next YouTube,” our online video strategy was instead to build a unique and scale-able production model and partner with YouTube, not compete with it.  Fueled by our acquisition of Expert Village in July ‘07, we then owned the largest how-to video library (17,000 videos), a network of qualified freelance filmmakers, and one of the largest video libraries on YouTube (2,700 videos). 

From there we invested heavily in our infrastructure to operate at a higher scale – meaning, we went BIG.  Using our proprietary content creation process and building out a network of talented content creators, we produced and uploaded more than 150,000 videos to YouTube in the last two years.  We now have more than 20 active YouTube channels with over 250,000 loyal subscribers, and we upload hundreds of new HD videos each day (with rich meta-data) filling the head, torso, and long tail of search on YouTube.

For example, in a search on YouTube for “how do hybrid cars work” our Greencar.com & eHow.com “How To videos” rank highly

 Furthermore, a search on a longer tail topic like “winterizing your garden,” our eHow and Expert Village videos are top results

…and in a super long tail search like “pigeon yoga pose”, LIVESTRONG and Expert Village videos are comprise the majority of the results

Over time, these searches lead to channel and brand exposure; YouTubers subscribe to our branded channels and they return again and again to see the latest videos – resulting in ENGAGED audiences -- who advertisers covet.  In addition, we receive hundreds of emails every day in our YouTube account and garner valuable feedback from the YouTube community to help us to fine-tune video production and stay connected to our end users.

This is just the beginning.  We believe that Demand Studios is reinventing how text and video content is produced and distributed in a search-driven world, and working together with YouTube, (now the second-largest search engine, according to comScore) we are just hitting our stride.