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For many marketers on the web YouTube video is the main – if not sole – breadwinner. The reason…rather reasons are not far too seek.
The first that comes to mind is YouTube’s dominance as the second-most popular search engine. That’s right. Way back in Nov 2008 YouTube surpassed Yahoo for total search queries in the US, and represented 25.4% of U.S. Google site searches.
Coming to online video rankings in the US, the March 8 comScore release for January 2010 informs that YouTube videos accounted for nearly 99% of all videos viewed. Hulu, the second ranked, had the 2.8% share of all videos viewed, followed by Microsoft sites’ 1.5% and Yahoo sites’ 1.3%.
The second important reason for having your videos on YouTube is simply that it’s easy and free to do. It’s not that other video sharing sites are difficult or are not free, but I have come across many people who happen to believe and stress that (only) YouTube is free and easy. Is that why traffic to YouTube is so heavy!
It is tempting to believe so, but the fact is perhaps something different. A large number of YouTube video viewers watch entertainment movies which in many cases are none else than feature films or trailers or news videos.
However, despite the tilting opinion in favor of YouTube, there are a few irritations as well. Take the appearance of educational or informational YouTube videos for example. In many cases these videos appear hazy and difficult to follow.
Normally you don’t see poor viewing quality with camera-only videos. But if your video has various types combined together, especially the screencasting and animated images, the end video can go awry if not planned well.
What YouTube Suggests
In the following screenshot you can see that YouTube recommends original resolution of your video as 1920×1080 or 1280 x 720 for HD (high-definition) display, both translating to the 16:9 aspect ratio.
YouTube recommends 1920x1080 or 1280 x 720 video resolution
YouTube’s recommendation reflects the switching over to digital television transmission as per ATSC standards (Advanced Television Systems Committee) in the US on June 12, 2009. ATSC promotes high definition television with wide screen 16:9 images up to 1920×1080 pixels in size — more than 6 times the display resolution of the earlier standard.
However, many web video makers may not yet have HD screen display in their computers, which is why when they make videos for YouTube, they cannot produce what YouTube wants.
What You Can Do
From our experience we have seen that it is always a good idea to make a YouTube video adhering to 16:9 aspect ratio subject to the maximum resolution possible in your computer.
To give an example if your computer has maximum resolution of 1024×768 pixels, then try to make web video meant for YouTube of 1024×576 pixels, sticking to the 16:9 aspect ratio.
This may not perhaps ensure the cleanest YouTube video you’ve ever made, but it will surely be having much better, much cleaner display than if you persist with say 4:3 video resolution like 800×600 or 640×480 pixels.
The following video is made with 1200×675 resolution, which though less than YouTube’s recommendation has come reasonably well. The video display dimension below is 640×385 pixels including 25 pixels of the video control bar.
This article of March 20th, 2010 is authored by Partha Bhattacharya, who runs this website. Partha also creates video-based e-learning course for clients, and when time permits, writes guest articles for selected sites.
I love watching videos online specially on Youtube. There are lots of music clips, movie clips and instructional videos on Youtube. I love em all.