YouTube has been important in promoting the credit union cause, also in sharing ideas…in Australia a credit union has utilised the concept ‘Ilove you’ and recreated it using Aussie Actors. The orginal creators will be happy to know their original version is still the best! http://www.communityfirst.com.au

It’s hard to believe how much YouTube has changed the Internet in such a short period of time.

We had a microsite for our agency in 1999 called afewseconds.com. My two web developers at the time, Josh and Peter, would do a 3-minute weekly show. A couple of cool young guys riffing on whatever. It was essentially a video podcast 8 years before that term even existed.

We put the videos out in Windows Media and Quicktime format and served it off a development server in our shop. One episode went “viral” when a writer linked to it from MSN.com. We had 25,000 views in 24 hours and it crashed our little server and even though we had a T1 line at the time that we paid $2,000 per month for, we received a bill from our Telco for $28,000 for extra bandwidth!

I managed to wiggle my way out of the bill, but we had to take the site down due to its popularity. Fast forward ten years and you can do this for no cost! It’s amazing and credit unions should be taking advantage of this service.

(P.S. I sold afewseconds.com for peanuts 4 years ago through a broker. I had no idea at the time, but the buyer was Pfizer and they ended up using the domain to promote Viagra!)

When I started tracking this back in 2007, I only monitored YouTube, so I was just going along with the data stream I had.

Our favorite service is blip.tv simply for the fact that the integrated player works a lot better from a design perspective. In addition, the player has a built in viral sharing tool (mail to a friend). Plus there are no limitations to the length of the video (see thoughts below on this).

We have also experimented with Vimeo but there are some limitations such as you can only upload a certain amount each week and then it caps you. So this is not a good option if you are uploading a lot of videos.

More thoughts on video length… we have found that the time users spend on sites with videos is longer than users spend of sites without video. On average, sites we have done with video have a 25% – 35% view to visit ratio.

But when looking at the times compared to the video run time, we found that the attention span is around 1.5 – 2.5 minutes max. 3 minutes is pushing it.

So unless you have really compelling content, anything after three minutes may not be viewed.

We are finding it’s all about short, sweet, funny, relevant edumentainment.