That’s a perfectly legitimate way to use the platform. Many people use YouTube as a convenient hosting platform for their videos to embed to their own websites and social feeds, and attracting viewers on YouTube isn’t a priority for them. This assumes, of course, that generating more views on your videos is a part of your strategy. This post is a primer on how YouTube tags, catalogues, and recommends videos to their users, and how you can use those features as tools to help you set your video up for success. YouTube is a search engine for video, which means that videos can be optimized to perform better by making them easier to search for. Rather, the key is to tag your content with lots of detail-rich identifying information, making it searchable in the catalogue for viewers who are already looking for videos like yours.ĭoes this sound really similar to the SEO principles that get websites to rank on Google? That’s because it is. The key to getting more views on YouTube videos isn’t to be special enough or loud enough to get noticed in the throng. But considering the sheer scale of content available on YouTube, it’s a bit more useful for our purposes to think of YouTube as the largest video library archive ever to have existed. Content creators and marketers who publish video to YouTube sometimes assume that the most interesting content is naturally selected by the algorithm and pushed to the front page, to be rewarded with millions of views by some combination of timing, luck, and merit. That doesn’t mean that it’s in a marketer’s best interest to have an “if we build it, they will come” mentality on YouTube.

It’s not a perfect analogy, because grains of sand on the beach are not individually identifiable, searchable, or able to be organized and catalogued. With content coming in at that volume, it gives a more accurate sense of scale to think of any individual video not as a person shouting amidst a crowd, but as a single grain of sand on a beach. YouTube has 2 billion active monthly users who watch over 1 billion hours of content on the platform every single day.

Five hundred hours of video footage was uploaded to YouTube every single minute in 2019 - and that figure has likely grown since. With more than 3 billion monthly searches, YouTube is not just a popular social networking platform, but the second largest search engine on the Internet.

How do you make youtube videos smaller