Did you know that some of the most popular videos on YouTube are actually uploaded by innovative marketers? These videos are viewed -- and even better, shared -- by millions of people all around the world.

Some advertisers have had success simply uploading their television creative to the site. And while the best of these commercials can generally find a large audience, there's one thing the most popular videos on YouTube from advertisers tend to have in common: they take advantage of the fact that YouTube is a terrific place to have fun and be creative. Here are three great videos from advertisers that playfully used different YouTube features to their advantage.

Electronic Arts Engages With Video Responses
Responding to popular videos on YouTube is a great way to increase views for your own content, and one of the best examples of this we've seen on the site came from Electronic Arts. When a user uploaded a video that pointed out a glitch in their Tiger Woods PGA Tour video game, Electronic Arts responded in kind, making a web-exclusive commercial with Tiger Woods himself that jokingly implied the glitch was intentional. Their video has been viewed over 3 million times.

Samsung's Annotations Adventure
Video Annotations is one of the more popular ways uploaders generate commentary around their YouTube videos. But marketers have also been quick to adopt this interactive feature to create engaging brand experiences for consumers on the site. Growing up, many of us enjoyed "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. Samsung brought this experience into the world of online video, telling users to Follow Your Instinct on a user-controlled first-person journey through Samsung videos.

OfficeMax Keeps You Watching Related Videos
How many times does watching one great YouTube video result in your discovering and watching another related video (and another, and another...)? When OfficeMax launched their back to school campaign they took full advantage of this phenomenon by uploading a series of prank videos, creating a veritable playlist for users to watch. That way, as users discovered their first penny prank video, they could immediately -- and easily -- watch a second and third. In fact, OfficeMax was able to extend the reach of each video in their program by over 20% as a result of these videos being discovered in the related videos section.

For more information and examples, contact your YouTube representative.

Posted by Michael Rucker, Product Marketing Manager

One of the most valuable YouTube tools for advertisers is the brand channel -- a branded home for all your videos within the YouTube ecosystem. Just as our content partners create more elaborate, customized YouTube channels to host their videos, advertisers -- from Coldwell Banker to Johnson's -- also use the interactive features available in brand channels to connect with consumers.

The most successful brand channels are those with lots of videos for users to engage with, but sometimes it can be a challenge to navigate through all those videos. To help with this, more and more advertisers have been creating gadgets (simple web applications) that live on the brand channel and use YouTube's APIs to present the videos in engaging ways. We thought it would be useful to pitch in, so we've created a set of standard gadgets for advertisers to use on YouTube. We call these gadgets "engagement products," since they are designed to increase user engagement and interaction with an advertiser's brand.

Volkswagen is currently using one of our newest engagement products -- called Mosaic -- on their German brand channel www.youtube.com/myvolkswagen. Mosaic takes thumbnail images for hundreds of videos and automatically arranges them into any image an advertiser supplies. The user can then navigate around all the videos with ease and play them within the mosaic. In only a few short days, one hundred thousand users have already checked out Volkswagen's mosaic.

If you're interested in using Mosaic or another YouTube standard gadget to make your brand channel easier to navigate, please contact your YouTube representative.

Posted by Peter Sherman, Product Marketing Manager

Two years ago this month, we invited the first users to be part of the YouTube Partner Program. What started as a way for us to help about 20 of the most popular users on the site earn money from their videos -- from Lonelygirl15 to valsartdiary to LisaNova -- is now a platform by which we pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars every month to thousands of people in 10 countries around the world. From Lincoln, Neb., to Long Island, N.Y., to Dallas, Tex., from the U.K. to Australia, users in the Partner Program are some of the most successful partners on the site, earning revenue on tens of millions of video views each day.

Much of their success has come from studying the programming and promotional strategies of traditional media companies. For example, many user partners are bucketing videos into seasons and drumming up publicity in advance, like television networks do. But traditional media companies are also studying users, who in many respects were first to crack the code of building and sustaining large followings online. In fact, the three most-subscribed-to partners of all time -- Fred, nigahiga, and smosh -- are all user partners.

Here are three important lessons large partners can learn from users in the YouTube Partner Program:

• Build your audience by engaging them: The most successful user partners constantly tell us that the more they interact with the YouTube community and create videos in a dialogue with their audience, the more views and subscribers they get. Converting your viewers into subscribers is the key to wider distribution -- it's a solid base of thousands of views for any newly-released video -- which is why the most-viewed user partners on YouTube tend to be the ones with the most subscribers (and ultimately make the most money). To increase subscribers, upload responses to other popular videos, request video suggestions, comment meaningfully on other people's videos, and add annotations encouraging viewers to ask questions and subscribe.
  
  
• Use our tools to maximize exposure and learn what works: Partners can also increase view counts by using our tools to program their channels strategically. Some partners, like VenetianPrincess, have used YouTube Insight to recognize patterns in their views and decide when to upload new videos. Partners can use such waves of traffic to ride out their channel's momentum: surfacing new content to users on days when you have the largest audience accelerates your view counts at a rate more likely to qualify your video as one of the most popular that day or week. Simply uploading a bunch of videos in one day is rarely the best way to increase views; bulk uploads can turn off your audience, making them less likely to watch any of the videos you uploaded at that time.
  
  
• Partner with others and cross-promote: You're not the only channel trying to find your way on YouTube. Team up with others who have similar content and overlapping audiences, and collaborate. Create videos together, have video-to-video conversations, and direct traffic to each other's channel. It works: tens of thousands of people subscribed to both the channels mileymandy and jonmchu during the epic Miley Mandy v. ACDC Dance Off on YouTube in 2008. Users like Michael Buckley are also known to work with other partners to promote their channels.
  

If you have other tips, please comment in the thread below. For those popular users interested in joining the YouTube Partner Program, apply today.

Posted by Shenaz Zack, Product Manager

Since the early days of YouTube, tens of thousands of content partners and advertisers have used brand channels to build communities around their videos. Thanks to our large audience and the creative options available to channel owners -- such as the new mosaic feature used by Volkswagen -- YouTube brand channels are now a vital part of our platform, attracting millions of video views every day. And, as brand channels have grown in popularity, understanding channel visitors and their behavior has become increasingly important to partners and advertisers fine-tuning their promotional strategies online.

Today we are integrating Google Analytics with YouTube brand channels. This will give partners and advertisers a much richer and deeper understanding of their channel's performance by fully enabling Google Analytics reporting on their channel as if it were their own site. While all uploaders can still use YouTube Insight to learn detailed information about their video views and user engagement, now advertisers and partners with brand channels can get even more information about their audience. Brand channel owners can track metrics such as how long visitors stay, repeat visits, bounce rate, and page views per visitor. For those who want to tailor their videos to a specific audience, Google Analytics also provides data about where viewers are located geographically and what languages they speak.

YouTube is the world's largest focus group, and a brand channel with a strong following can provide tremendous insights into the consumers who interact with your content and your brand. We've been working hard to open up YouTube and give you more ways to analyze data, and we think this integration will help you further improve your brand channel's performance and understand your audience. If you own a brand channel, start experimenting with Google Analytics today -- you’ll discover many more exciting things that you can do with your data.

Posted by Zal Bilimoria, Product Manager

Welcome to the new YouTube Biz Blog. These days, we've been working extra hard to help partners and advertisers find a home on YouTube, and we've built a platform that gives our community a wide variety of business opportunities on our site. We've seen user partners embrace the YouTube Partner Program as a way to turn their homegrown videos into six figure salaries. We've helped popular media companies leverage our analytics and content management tools to build large, sustainable audiences for their content. And we've given advertisers a variety of ways to creatively reach the hundreds of millions of people around the world who come to YouTube every day to share and discover videos.

We’ve created this blog as a place for you to turn for the latest in tips, tricks, and feature launches that help you, our partners and advertisers, engage with the audiences you care about. We hope you'll consider stopping by from time to time, or you can subscribe to our RSS feed (top right corner). Please comment below on what you'd like to see here, whom you'd like to hear from, and what you'd like to get out of this blog.

The world uses YouTube. We hope you will too:



Posted by Salar Kamangar, Vice President, Product Development