YouTube Reports Exponential Growth: Issues Viral Video Challenge

YouTube had been seeing astronomical growth of video uploads from mobile devices, up 1700 percent - yes, 1,700 - over the past six months. But since the launch of the iPhone 3GS last week, mobile video uploads increased by 400 percent a day, according to a post on You Tube’s blog.

So what’s driving this growth? Aside from the fact the more video-enabled phones are on the market today, YouTube also points to improvements to the “uploads flow” from a phone as well as the ability to upload and then instantly share among your social networks.

To promote the ease of sharing a video from a mobile device and having it go viral, YouTube has issued a challenge on its blog. (Get this language in the instructions. Five years ago, this would have made no sense):

Can you make your test video go viral through your social networks? If you can, we’re willing to feature that video on our homepage. Upload a video from your phone, tag it with “mobiletest,” share it with your social network, and Tweet us the link (so be sure to put “@youtube” and “mobiletest” in your message). We’ll give you one week to spread your test video far and wide, after which we’ll take a look at the most popular clips and feature a few on our homepage in a special “mobile upload” edition of our Spotlight Video.

Comments

[The Lost Ag...:]

I do like the ability of the new iPhone 3Gs that enables you to record a video, edit and upload direct to your YouTube account. This feature has some great potential for video bloggers and breaking news stories.

This simple feature is going to be useful to bloggers such as Perez Hilton, who can beat traditional media outlets. I hope that it is going to be used by more than just drunken friends but can see some great viral video campaigns being started by this new iPhone feature.

Jun 27 09:33 AM