14 DAY TRIAL // YouTube can't talk money just yet, but it can talk about size and there's plenty to boast about that. The site is the biggest online avenue for video and enjoys a huge lead over any other video site. It can put forward impressive numbers like one billion views per day, but now it's sharing some stats related to the sites' social features which are becoming more fleshed out.
“Social features like commenting, rating, video responses and even just emailing or IMing a video's link have always been a part of the YouTube experience. So that's why we spend a lot of time here thinking about how to make the site an even more social place. We're especially focused on wanting to make it as easy as possible for you to find the people you know on YouTube and to follow their activity (what videos are they rating? favoriting? commenting on?) by subscribing to their channel,” Brian Glick, product manager, and James Phillips, software engineer, wrote.
Google hasn't cracked the social nut just yet, not for lack of trying, but its usual approach at solving problems doesn't exactly apply to social interactions online. It's not giving up though and YouTube in particular lends itself more easily to creating a social ecosystem around the videos. Sure, YouTube always billed itself as a social network, but there aren't that many that would compare Facebook to it.
A big aspect of any social network is connecting with your friends and making new ones. Discovery is a lot more important on YouTube, seeing that the entire site is based on this, but the discovery process is changing and we rely more and more on our friends for interesting content rather than on search engines, for example. Therefore, YouTube has been investing a lot of effort on this front, making discovering and sharing interesting videos easier.
So, how successful features like the friend suggestions, the social sharing options, and AutoShare have been for YouTube? Well, YouTube has provided some numbers to give us an idea. For instance, over one million people are using the AutoShare feature to share their YouTube activity on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Reader. YouTube doesn't break out the details on each outlet, but it's likely Google Reader is dwarfed by the other two.
However, even more interesting is the fact that each video shared on Twitter with the automatic feature brings in seven more people to watch it and possibly others. So, the hundreds of thousands presumably using AutoShare on Twitter get multiplied by seven; it's no wonder YouTube can boast the kind of audience numbers it does. The Friend Suggest feature is also proving very popular, helping one million people connect with at least one of their friends on YouTube and subscribe to their feed. In total, over one million new subscriptions are being made every day. The numbers do look promising and it seems that YouTube's social features are working as intended. Now, if it could only convert all of this new activity into revenue.