By Chris Lee

This month online video platform YouTube passed the two billion visitors a day mark. The site, registered in February 2005, was bought by Google in late 2006 for $1.65 billion. 24 hours-worth of video is uploaded every single minute and its most-watched music video is Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”, watched more than 200 million times.

So, with two billion hits a day, how can digital professionals make the most of YouTube? NMK caught up with some leading UK digital marketing specialists to gauge their views on why YouTube has been such a success and how firms can best utilise it.

A level playing field

For Roger Warner of online PR agency Content and Motion, marketers are only now beginning to see that the way people consume content is changing in very concrete ways and that the message of the content is more important than the presentation.

“Gone is the media (TV) schedule and who cares about the publisher? Content is king again and the best stuff wins out,” Warner told NMK. “This has always been intrinsic to the YouTube ethic for publishers and consumers. It was the first social platform to show us that not everything needs to be polished and that it's the message that's most important.  It also showed us the value of social media in terms of ease of publishing and low cost, low friction distribution. It's a universal platform - the audience is there hence it's easy to do business on”

For Warner, YouTube has demonstrated how easy it is for anyone to be a publisher and up the ante in terms of the value of the content that they produce to support other marketing and communications processes. The company used YouTube extensively as part of its work for computer graphics firm Escape Studios to help increase communications, which prior to YouTube would have required more investment for tactics such as direct mail, Warner said.

Go for growth

For Steve Parker, digital director at public relations firm Cohn & Wolfe, YouTube has both the scale and diversity of audience to appeal to both global and local businesses. But Parker believes that numbers only tell half the story.

“The challenge for marketers is to identify and engage their target audience in a sustainable way that drives measurable business results,” he said. “The big challenge for YouTube is how to commercialise this huge audience and make it easily accessible to potential brand and advertisers. There is a lot riding on the new Video Targeting Tool which is tied to Google AdWords and makes it easier to run integrated, targeted and measurable campaigns across the web. The world will be watching the take up closely to see if the revenue follows the numbers.”

Channel of choice

For Will Sturgeon of The Media Blog, YouTube’s enduring appeal lays in the way it has democratised broadcast, expanding the choice for consumers beyond traditional television channels, even if the content is often completely random.

“And ultimately that's the greatest lesson we've learned from YouTube's unceasing rise,” Sturgeon concludes. “No matter how silly or surreal - and the odds still seem stacked in favour of the bizarre - anything can now get the audience it deserves, however you choose to interpret that.”