The Rise of YouTube
According to Pew Research Center, over 75 percent of adults in the U.S. use YouTube. Here’s an even more impressive figure- 94 percent of 18–24 year-olds’ find themselves on the site.
Some of you might be asking, “Why is YouTube so popular? Why has the younger crowd fallen in love with this platform?”
Here are a few reasons YouTube shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon:
Growth
In 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion. Fast forward 11 years later to 2017 and tech analyst Victor Anthony said YouTube, “is worth at least $75 billion.” That’s an incredible amount of growth in a decade. With parent company Google being the dominant force when it comes to online services, you can believe that this expertise has trickled its way down to YouTube.
Niche content
Users trying to find detailed, industry specific knowledge can perform a simple search and choose between hundreds of thousands of videos. It also helps that the platform isn’t exclusive to any one particular field or interest. So, while a 43 year-old suburban mother of two might be in love with YouTube because of all its DIY content, a 20 year old single male might find YouTube just as useful because of all the fishing content he can watch from his favorite vloggers. There is something on YouTube for everyone.
Comments
YouTube is an interactive platform. Users communicate with each other in a variety of ways. You can comment on videos and like other people’s comments. You can subscribe to your favorite channels and create playlists filled with whatever content you’d like. While the comment section of YouTube can be a rough and tumble area, I find the comments section to be quite helpful. Users are given a chance to ask questions to the channel about items that weren’t covered in the video, or they can ask for more clarity about the content itself. These comments help spark meaningful conversations and this is the trend that we see more platforms encouraging.
Users
YouTube has over 1 billion users — let’s take a second to think about that. These users include every day people, pro vloggers and even companies. Around 85 percent of businesses now employ internal staff just to curate video content and YouTube is a great hosting channel for any business-related content.
Innovation
With vlogging becoming the latest sensation, YouTube has taken extra steps to encourage content creators to keep publishing more high-quality content. Vloggers, contributors and influencers have monetary incentives to keep curating more content and users benefit from this because more content becomes available to them. The whole process has come full-circle. YouTube has also launched YouTube TV. This service grants users access to live streaming TV without having to sign a contract with a cable TV provider. These are just some of the things that YouTube has done recently to innovate so they can continue to reach out to their users.
