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C h a p t e r 1 How YouTube Can Help You Market Your Business 9

numbers shown in Figure 1.4. Music is the big category, at 31% of all videos viewed,
but after that it breaks down a lot more evenly.

Figure 1.4 What people watch on YouTube, by category.

Is Video Right for Your Business?

I’ll give you the bottom line up front: If done right, YouTube can provide a huge
bang for your marketing buck. That’s because YouTube delivers a huge audience for
very little investment. It’s a marketer’s dream channel.

That said, YouTube isn’t right for all businesses. And there’s a lot of competition for
eyeballs on the YouTube site. You have to do a lot of things right to get the payback you
desire.

Low-Cost Online Marketing

Let’s look at the cost thing first. Large businesses have long embraced video market-
ing, in the form of traditional television advertising. But television ads are expen-
sive, and typically outside the purview of smaller businesses—except, perhaps, for
little-seen late night spots on local channels.

Thanks to YouTube, however, businesses both large and small can afford to market
themselves via online videos. The cost of posting a video to the YouTube site is
zero; YouTube doesn’t charge anything to upload, host, or stream videos. The only
cost you have is the expense of shooting and editing the video, which can be as low
as you want it to be; not a lot of YouTube videos are high-priced professional
affairs. This makes YouTube marketing affordable for virtually any business.