Happy 10th Birthday, YouTube!

You have come a long way since this first video shot at the San Diego Zoo.

Now, YouTube has more than 300 hours of video uploads per minute, and attracts more than 1 billion users each month from around the world.

Many businesses, including many 7G clients, take advantage of YouTube’s free hosting for their videos so this post provide you with an update of the major changes on YouTUbe platform so far in 2015.

YouTube isn’t unlike the rest of us. With each milestone birthday, the platform tends to do a bit of self-reflection and typically announces one or more significant changes.

Already, the LifeHacker website is revealing that YouTube is close to making a UI change that would make their player turn transparent while the video is being played.

And it was on the platform’s fifth birthday that it rolled out TrueView in-stream ads. Now, all top 100 brands have run TrueView video ads over the past year. And 95 percent of TrueView advertisers are including mobile in their campaigns.

YouTube Cards

Speaking of mobile, one of the biggest changes so far in 2015 has been the new Cards feature that will eventually replace annotations, which are flash-based and can’t been seen on many mobile devices.

We recommend businesses utilize YouTube Cards for their videos. You can choose from six options: highlighting a video, playlist, associated website, merchandise, fundraising, and fan funding. They can also be used for live-streaming events.

YouTube doesn’t give you too many options for customizing your card. For instance, they all appear on the right side of the screen. But you can upload an image, and you write your own headline and Call To Action copy.

YouTube Cards

 

Add Card

Capture

The cards have also been rolled out for TrueView in-stream ads, which will allow brands to share more information about their brand, related videos, and playlists, and soon link to their website directly from their TrueView video ad. The Cards also benefit YouTube because they will also count a view (for payment purposes) when someone watches an ad, click on a Card or other elements of in-stream creative.

You can read more at the YouTube help desk about how to incorporate Cards in your video ad campaigns.

AutoPlay

And likely in response to increased competition from Facebook, YouTube  has made autoplay the default feature on the platform so that after you watch a YouTube video on your computer, it will automatically play another related video based on your viewing history. At the end of each video, you’ll see a 10 second countdown that tells you what’s going to play next

Users can opt to turn this off. Our tip for businesses is to spend a few extra minutes when you are uploading your video to make sure you have a complete description, and that you are using all the tags (keywords) that apply and that are available. Similarly, you should make sure that the second or third tag is brand-centric, which can help stock the related videos with your brand.

Here is an overview of autoplay videos.

One of the reasons Facebook has been reporting success with videos in 2014 was because the default was for them to autoplay. Recognizing the threat, YouTube also has removed the ability for you to include Facebook in the list of connected accounts when you upload a video and want it automatically shared on other platforms. However, viewers can still share to their Facebook accounts, and you can use services like Buffer to share.

Channel Transfer

This may just be a big change for us at 7G, where we have helped create dozens of YouTube channels for clients and in some cases are still managing them.

Google now allows YouTube Channel owners to transfer the account to a different Google+ account. So, say you have an employ leaving the company, you can have him or her transfer ownership of your YouTube account to someone else in the business.

Here is a video from YouTube that explains how to transfer channels in more detail.

If you have any questions, please email us or give us a call.

You may also want to consider our current Spring discount for a complete YouTube channel audit for your business. We review your channel looking to ensure you are wringing all the value you can from it and all the videos you have uploaded to it. This is a $250 value that is on sale for $125. Email us to learn more.