YouTube Video Upload Rate Tops 24 Hours/Minute

Legend has it that St. Patrick performed a miracle by driving all the snakes out of Ireland.  Now, it seems that YouTube's accomplishing an amazing feat of its own just by functioning.  A director of product management revealed this afternoon that a whopping 24 hours of video are now uploaded to the site every minute.

Hunter Walk (who, we must note, once worked for Conan O'Brien) wrote on the YouTube Blog, "Today, we're announcing that you've done it!  In just 60 quick ticks of the second hand, more than a full, action-packed day in Jack Bauer's life is now uploaded to YouTube."

Walk then put this fact into perspective by listing a number of other things that occur in 24 hours: "The earth rotates 360 degrees as it orbits the sun," "[t]he second hand on your bedside clock ticks 86,400 times," "[t]he earth's fastest rocket can reach Saturn," "[t]he most skilled climber reaches Mount Everest's summit," and "2.5 days go by on Jupiter."

Impressed?  Well, here's something else to think about: the last time we heard about the rate at which videos are uploaded to YouTube was May of 2009, and at that point, the pace was 20 hours per minute.  So an increase of 20 percent has taken place in less than a year.

At that rate, we might be hearing how 30 hours' worth of video is uploaded every minute by St. Patrick's Day 2011.

YouTube Looking For Indie Bands

YouTube has expanded its partner program and has introduced "Musicians Wanted" aimed at getting independent bands or artists to submit music videos to the site.

Interested independent bands or artist can apply for Musicians Wanted through YouTube's Partner Program. Those who are accepted will have their own page where they can add details about where they will be playing, provide links to buying music and showcase their music videos.

Independent artists will also share YouTube's advertising revenue generated by their music video plays as well as when videos are embedded on other websites, such as music blogs.

The YouTube Blog offers more details. "So whether you make hip-hop, folk, noise-rock, jazz or a genre of your own invention, we are looking for all types of original music video content."

"One thing to keep in mind is that right now this program only supports video content by U.S.-based artists, though there are plans to roll out the program more widely in the future."
 

Google Gives Advertisers Another “In” On YouTube

In a move that investors and marketers alike should applaud, Google's figured out another way to make money off the site it bought for $1.65 billion three and a half years ago.  Today, Google explained that it's come up with a tool to help small organizations advertise on YouTube.

Emily Williams, a member of the Inside AdWords team, explained on the corporate blog, "[W]e're announcing another new feature in Display Ad Builder that lets advertisers use simple templates to create InVideo overlays and companion ads on YouTube."  (FYI: "An InVideo ad is an animated flash overlay that appears at the bottom part of a video that a user is watching.")

Williams later continued, "Now, any advertiser can use Display Ad Builder to turn their image ads into overlays and run a campaign on YouTube in minutes.  Depending on the type of campaign an advertiser wants to run, overlays can be bought on a CPC (Cost Per Click) or CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) basis, and can be matched to YouTube videos based on numerous criteria (like demographics or content categories), or even on a video by video level."

This could prove to be a very popular option, considering that takeover ads on the YouTube homepage are said to be sold far in advance for hundreds of thousands of dollars.  And the move also earns points for being low risk, since it probably didn't take much in the way of resources to execute and doesn't cut any privacy corners.

Now we just get to guess how much Google will actually make from the new feature.  One slightly relevant note: earlier this month, a Citigroup analyst estimated that YouTube will pull in about $1 billion in gross revenue this year.

Twitter Announces @anywhere Platform

Twitter should soon become more ubiquitous across the Web.  Today, the company's cofounders announced something called @anywhere that should help integrate the Twitter experience into standard sites, and a number of impressive organizations have agreed to take part in the initial rollout.

Evan Williams essentially handled the SXSW side of things this afternoon, discussing @anywhere during his keynote address.  You can read our liveblogged coverage of that talk here.

As for what Biz Stone was up to, he explained on the official Twitter Blog, "We've developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web.  Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com."

Stone then continued, "Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we've created something incredibly simple.  Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript."

Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, MSNBC, The New York Times, Yahoo, and YouTube are among Twitter's first partners in this effort.  Target dates and many other details remain unknown, but it looks like Twitter's set to give its own version of Facebook Connect a solid start.

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