Page 28 - SKU-000506274_TEXT.indd

C h a p t e r 1 How YouTube Can Help You Market Your Business 7

YouTube Launches—and Gets Acquired

YouTube proved immensely popular from virtually the first day in business. Site traf-
fic that first month was three million visitors, which is pretty good for a startup. The
number of visitors tripled by the third month (February), tripled again by July (to 30
million visitors), and reached 38 million visitors by the end of the site’s first year in
business. That made YouTube one of the top 10 sites on the Web, period—and one of
the fastest growing websites in history.

That kind of growth didn’t go unnoticed, especially by competing websites. The
biggest of the competing sites, Google, set out to buy the company, and did so in
October 2006. Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube—an incredible sum for such a
young company, and one that had yet to generate significant revenues.

This put YouTube smack in the middle of the mighty Google empire. That said, YouTube
continues to operate independently of the mother ship; the site looks and acts pretty
much the same today as it did in the pre-Google days. The only big difference is volume.

YouTube Today

The number of videos and users on the site continues to grow, which is great for busi-
nesses looking to take advantage of the opportunity. In fact, the growth has been
nothing short of stratospheric; traffic to the site has doubled in just the past two
years. (Figure 1.2 shows this growth, graphically.)

Figure 1.2 YouTube visitors per month—tremendous growth through the years.

How big is YouTube today? According to the market research firm comScore, YouTube
is the number-three site on all the Web, with more than 146 million visitors per month