Does anyone know what youtube did to get so "successful"? I'm on the internet often and have never seen an advertisement for youtube. I heard from word of mouth, which is a marketing solution in itself... but what set them apart? Is it just the massive amounts of money they pumped into it?
Part of it is because they were one of [if not] the first of their kind. Also, once they reached a critical mass, there were so many more videos there so more people would go there.
Here's the formula to make it big like YouTube: Fulfills a real need, Easy to use, Reliable, Fits-anyone marketshare, Instant gratification, built-in viral marketing
I think you would also have to have LOTS of money to start a website like YouTube, which is why the average joe like you and I wouldn't be able to afford the expenses a site like that requires. The founders of YouTube used to work for PayPal. They also had help from other organizations: Quote: "November of 2005, venture capital firm Sequoia Capital invested an initial $3.5 million; additionally, Roelof Botha, partner of the firm and former CFO of PayPal, joined the YouTube board of directors. In April 2006, Sequoia put an additional $8 million into the company, which had experienced a boom of popularity and growth in just its first few months."
word of mouth.. i didn't know about youtube until i see my 10 years old cousin watching naruto using youtube, and she got it from her 10 years old friend....
Because they offer something that is never been offered before. Something that is very useful to mankind. They offer very unique technology at that time they've launched the site.
I know the question has been answered already but i'm going to go into a bit more detail about the viral element of the site. Around the time that youtube started myspace.com was really taking off in a big way. It started to become the "cool thing" to add music videos to your myspace profile. (so i'm told, i don't have a myspace account... honest!) Lots of websites started popping up that allowed users to grab a bit of code which they could include in their myspace profile that displayed an embedded music video that played every time someone visited their website. Most, if not all of these websites stole content from yahoo music, they never hosted the files themselves cos that would be way to expensive; they just linked directly to the files on yahoo servers. Obviously when yahoo found out about this they weren't exactly happy about it so they started closing these websites down. Myspace users were at a loss, they wanted to embed video on their profiles but all of the popular sites that allowed you to do this started dropping like flys. Cue youtube. It was an easy way of adding video to your myspace profile. People jumped on it. That, coupled with all the viral elements of the site is what made the site a success.
I'd say darren hit the nail, it was the massive amount of financial backing they had. Youtube is a nice site, but video hosting wasnt introduced by them and its neither such a crucial service, something which would make things easier and was necessary - its rather a nice to have. It also became famous due to all the copyrighted material uploaded by users (kind of file-sharing).