The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
With more than 3 billion monthly searches[1], YouTube is not just a popular social networking platform, but the second largest search engine on the Internet. Five hundred hours of video footage was uploaded to YouTube every single minute in 2019 — and that figure has likely grown since.
YouTube has 2 billion active monthly users who watch over 1 billion hours of content on the platform every single day. With content coming in at that volume, it gives a more accurate sense of scale to think of any individual video not as a person shouting amidst a crowd, but as a single grain of sand on a beach. It’s not a perfect analogy, because grains of sand on the beach are not individually identifiable, searchable, or able to be organized and catalogued. YouTube videos are.
That doesn’t mean that it’s in a marketer’s best interest to have an “if we build it, they will come” mentality on YouTube. Content creators and marketers who publish video to YouTube sometimes assume that the most interesting content is naturally selected by the algorithm and pushed to the front page, to be rewarded with millions of views by some combination of timing, luck, and merit. But considering the sheer scale of content available on YouTube, it’s a bit more useful for our purposes to think of YouTube as the largest video library archive ever to have existed. The key to getting more views on YouTube videos isn’t to be special enough or loud enough to get noticed in the throng. Rather, the key is to tag your content with lots of detail-rich identifying information, making