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)

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.

The Online Marketing Summit 2010 was held in San Diego February 22nd – 25th. OMS 2010 was held at the Paradise Point Resort & Spa, right on the Mission Bay shoreline. The weather during the event was typical February weather with temperatures in the low 70’s upper 60’s. While the locals know this is a bit cold, most people I spoke with that had to fly in from anywhere else were very happy to be out of the snow. It did rain during the event but it was only a brief drizzle during the evenings. Timing couldn’t have been better as there were substantial storms before and after the event.  Read more... (623 words, 1 image, estimated 2:30 mins reading time)

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)

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)

Five years ago in February 2005, according to legend, the idea of YouTube was born after Chad Hurley and Steve Chen experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment in San Francisco.

Four years ago in February 2006, according to data from Hitwise, YouTube emerged as the market leader from the scrum of online video sites — and six months later I was part of a team that uploaded our first video to YouTube to promote “Hostage: The Jill Carroll Story” for The Christian Science Monitor.  Read more... (803 words, 2 images, estimated 3:13 mins reading time)

Tonight, at 9pm EST, President Obama will give his second State of the Union address. For those unfamiliar with American politics, this is an annual speech given by the sitting President addressing the current state of U.S. affairs and his plan for the future.

You can catch the speech online at many sites. Here’s a list:

WhiteHouse.gov
Hulu
YouTube
Ustream (CBS coverage)
CNN
C-SPAN

What other sites are streaming the State of the Union live tonight? Leave the links in the comments section below.

YouTube has given a makeover to the individual video pages that reside on their site. The new look is available to those who opt-in to the new design, which you can do here. (If you wish to go back to the old look, just look for the option along the top of the page.)

Here are before and after shots of an individual video page (click an image to view larger graphic):

Before:

After:

The biggest change is along the right sidebar, where the related videos section is more fluid and less boxy.  Read more... (158 words, 3 images, estimated 38 secs reading time)