A Birthday Present for the Small Guys

On Monday YouTube celebrated its 7th birthday. Social media age must be similar to dog years because it seems like the site has been around for much longer than 7 years. It is hard to remember a time living without "Chocolate Rain" or "Evolution of Dance." To celebrate, YouTube announced it will offer small-business video advertising.

YouTube has a rich history that started at a zoo and has only advertised to larger companies in the past. This new program is very appealing to small companies because it presents them with a large, captive audience.

The company launch its first video on April 23, 2005. The clip that started it all, titled "Me at the Zoo," features co-founder Jawed Karim at, you guessed it, a zoo. The video is only 18 seconds long, and features Karim telling the viewer why elephants are cool. The simple video has been viewed over 7.7 million times. Watch it below, whether you think elephants are cool or not, it's a part of social media history!

YouTube starting placing advertisements before videos in March 2006, less than a year after its launch. Prior to this new venture, ads on the site were primarily bought by large corporations like Lionsgate, Coca-Cola and Progressive.

The New York Times reports that many smaller businesses already participate in search advertising on Google, (who owns YouTube) were they are able to bid on certain keywords. The program, AdWords for video, will be similar to the search engine advertising for small companies. They will still bid on keywords, and will only pay if their commercial is watched.

The New York Times article presents a clear example of how the program will work.

"A baker who makes a video ad about his bakery, for example, can buy words like “baking,” “cookies” and “cake,” and his video ad will show up when someone does a search for those terms on YouTube." - Tanzina Vega

Mashable broke down YouTube's most recent statistics for marketers.

• 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute
• More than 4 billion videos are viewed every day.
• More than 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube.
• In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or almost 140 views for every person on earth.

 As much as these numbers are exciting for large companies, they should make smaller companies salivate even more.

I think that this is a great idea for both YouTube and small businesses. YouTube presents the opportunity for a business to reach an audience that matches a Super Bowl. Also, an audience is more captive if they are going to watch a YouTube video than they are watching broadcast television or from streaming sites like Hulu.

If advertisers needed any more incentive to try out the program, YouTube and Google are giving it to them. They are offering $50 million in free ads to 500,000 companies.