YouTube experienced 160% growth in traffic to their mobile site in 2009.

So, they’ve decided to capitalize on all that traffic and serve ads on the site, which can be reached at m.youtube.com.

The ads will be served on the American and Japanese homepages, search pages, and browse pages.

To learn more about advertising on mobile YouTube, visit youtube.com/advertise.

Here’s a sample of what an ad looks like on mobile YouTube:

Image via Official Google Blog

YouTube claims that the launch of this new ad offering automatically makes it one of the largest opportunities for mobile advertising. And they’re right.  Read more... (118 words, 1 image, estimated 28 secs reading time)

Yesterday, I posted Video Marketing Case Studies with David Meerman Scott and Me. At the end of the post, I said, “If you have any video marketing case studies that you’d like to share with us, just mention them.” Silly me.

Any journalist or blogger who invites readers to “tell me what you think” shouldn’t be surprised when they do. So, in no particular order, here are some additional video marketing case studies from leading brands.

BMW S1000 RR. Dinner for RR.  Read more... (323 words, 2 images, estimated 1:18 mins reading time)

Recently, I sat down with David Meerman Scott, the author of the bestseller The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly and the new book World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories. I’m the author of YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day, we have the same publisher, and we’re virtually neighbors.

According to comScore Video Metrix, nearly 173 million U.S. Internet users watched 32.4 billion videos in January 2010. Do the math and you’ll discover that viewers watched an average of 187 videos per viewer during the month.

If you drill down into the data, you also see that 135.4 million viewers watched 12.7 billion videos on YouTube, which is an average of 93.4 videos per viewer. It also represents an increase of 50 percent versus year ago.  Read more... (327 words, 2 images, estimated 1:18 mins reading time)

A couple of new updates from the Internet’s most popular video sharing site.

Last year, YouTube introduced auto-captions in limited availability. This week, they’ve opened them up to all videos in English. Here’s what you need to know:  Read more... (230 words, estimated 55 secs reading time)

• Videos with clear speech in them will be best for auto-captioning. Background noise will make it difficult for machine-generated translation.
• Owners can download the auto-captions to manually improve them.
• While auto-captioning is currently only available to English speech, those captions can be translated into 50 languages.

NBC takes to the airwaves to poke fun at the web’s largest video site.

Hulu has built success on being the go-to place for broadcast shows you may have missed or forgotten to DVR. It’s also a place to check out old tv shows and some movies.

As YouTube explores forays into hosted TV and movies, that’s obviously a threat to Hulu. But since Hulu was started by NBC (and Fox), they have many resources to put dents in YouTube’s pristine reputation.  Read more... (189 words, estimated 45 secs reading time)

Yesterday, I mentioned that I’m speaking on the morning roundtable at SES San Diego 2010. Later in the afternoon, I’m also speaking at the “YouTube & Video Optimization” session.

Once you decide that you need to include YouTube in your search engine optimization and social media marketing strategy, then you need to learn:  Read more... (523 words, 2 images, estimated 2:06 mins reading time)

1. How to optimize videos for YouTube so they get discovered,
2. How to create videos for YouTube that get watched, and
3. How to promote videos on YouTube so they get shared.

Online Marketing Summit 2010 gets underway in San Diego this week. And Day 3 of the event features a Search Engine Strategies Forum also known as SES San Diego 2010. Here are some sneak previews.

On Day 1, the morning keynote is entiled “Social Media Heavy Weights, Weigh In.” John Battelle, CEO and Founder of Federated Media Publishing Inc., Aaron Kahlow, CEO of Online Marketing Connect, and a special “surprise guest” will share insider insights on what tactics are working, and just as importantly, what tactics are NOT working in Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter.  Read more... (1146 words, 4 images, estimated 4:35 mins reading time)

So many Google updates. So little time.

It was another overachieving week for Google. In addition to launching their own quasi-social network and acquiring Aardvark, they were busy pushing out a bunch of updates to existing products and sharing new data. And yes, even Buzz has received its first round of updates.

Without further ado….

AdWords is now offering up Bid Ideas in the Opportunities Tab. Bid ideas are based on bid simulator data.

Google AdSense explains how they treat keywords from referral search engines as content on publisher websites in order to serve up relevant ads.  Read more... (214 words, estimated 51 secs reading time)

In abount an hour, you’ll get a chance to vote for your favorite Super Bowl 2010 commercials at YouTube’s AdBlitz Channel. But you can vote for the best pre-game YouTube videos now.

Now, most marketers are focused on the Super Bowl commercials themselves. But there’s a new category — and a new opportunity — worth checking out.

So, in no particular order, check out the two contenders — and let me know your favorite pre-game video in the comments area below.  Read more... (219 words, 2 images, estimated 53 secs reading time)