It’s 2021. There is a very low possibility that people around the globe are not familiar with social media, online video streaming apps, and OTT platforms. Especially in these hard times, where there are multiple lockdowns and curfews due to the pandemic all over the globe when people are sitting inside their homes all day long, these platforms becomes a main source of entertainment, because let’s face it, you cannot find stuff to do all day every hour now, can you? When one option is unavailable, we generally tend to create new options for ourselves. Let’s take our own country, India.
A couple of months ago, a viral app called TikTok got banned here. Looking at the statistics, tiktok was so famous that thousands of people uploaded thousands of videos every day and gained millions of followers. People were addicted to the app. But due to the ban imposed on it, another very famous social media app, Instagram, came up with a similar idea called Instagram reels.
It had the same features as Tiktok, and again, people got glued to the thing. I am trying to say that free time leads to productivity and somewhat passing the time just by scrolling videos, not only on Instagram or tiktok but also hundreds of other platforms where you can access thousands of short video clips for absolutely no charge at all.
One such globally recognized and used online video streaming platform is Youtube. Youtube was founded on February 14, 2005, and since then, billions of people have been using it, some as entertainers, some as audiences. Hundreds and thousands of hours of video content get uploaded on Youtube every minute. Can you believe that? That’s just crazy.
Well, I am sure almost every one of you who is reading this article is aware of what Youtube is and how to use it. But there is always someone out there who is unaware of what the hype is all about and needs proper guidance. Every day, lots of new people get introduced to youtube and need assistance.
Using Youtube is as simple as learning a new word. Oh no, I am not joking. It is that easy. Trust me; you don’t even need to practice anything. Here’s how it goes :
Steps to use youtube and how to search a video
- Open your browser on your laptop or your mobile phone or tablet. Or you can download the Youtube app and operate it directly.
- Type “www.Youtube.com” in the URL (search bar), or search “Youtube.”
- As the page comes up, you’ll see many videos in front of you in a vertical manner.
- On the top, you will see a keyword search bar. This is your genie. You type in whatever kind of videos you want to see, whether sports or games or cartoons or even short films. For example, you wish to see the “Top 10 Moments of the NBA 2019 finals and semifinals.” You enter exactly that, and you will get your desired video in front of you. It doesn’t matter if you don’t type in the whole thing. You can be flexible with words. You can type “2019 NBA moments” and still get your video.
That’s it. Yes, that’s all you have to do to watch a video on youtube. Told you it’s very simple. Even if you are technically challenged, or you aren’t tech-savvy at all, it’s not a problem. Youtube’s interface is very user-friendly and is made so that anyone and everyone can access and fully use it. That’s it. You can now watch your favorite cartoon series or web series or any TV series you like, and even plays and movies.
Now let’s come to the next step. Let’s say you saw a video somewhere, around five years ago, and suddenly after five years, you have flashbacks of that particular video, and you get an urge to watch it right now. You excitedly switch on your device and open youtube, and there it is. You don’t remember what the video was called or by who it was. Now what? Frustration all around, right? What to do? Again, there is nothing to worry about.
Youtube has an amazing feature to offer to its audience. Whenever something like this happens, you can enter keywords that you remember about the video. For example, you wish to see a Coldplay song’s video. But you don’t remember the name of the song. By just entering Coldplay in the search bar, Youtube itself suggests keywords for you so that you can find your videos more easily. This amazing feature is called Autocomplete.
Next comes the part where, if you are a video content creator who puts out videos on youtube, it can help you give some ideas. You don’t want aimless traffic at your videos. You want to reach the correct traffic. This auto-complete feature shows you lots and lots of video titles that are there to make your unique title different from all those out there.
Not only that, you can see videos that have views in millions and billions and likes in thousands and millions, and you can see what keywords are used in the title of the video and its description. This gives you an idea for your video and what you should use as keywords as the title and description.
It’s also advisable to see what your competitors (if you have any) use as keywords. Accounts with a very big following tend to use bigger keywords, and their videos are ranked at the top. You can open their account and search for the “Most popular” videos in the “videos” section. That’s another way of seeing the keywords used in those videos, which made them popular.
Final Thoughts
Lastly, Youtube is one of a kind. It was the first online video streaming platform which, by the way, is the second most popular search engine, after Google. It is very easy to use, as you saw above, and once you get the hang of it, I am sure it will be pretty hard to leave the habit of it.
Of course, when you get so much for no price at all, there has to be an irritating component, right? The same is with youtube. Earlier, there used to be no advertisements before any videos. As time passed by and more and more people started using youtube, as the traffic started increasing, and videos had significantly higher engagement, people thought it is a good idea to promote their business on youtube.
So now, the videos with really good engagement have multiple ads popping up before and in between the videos. So let’s say you are watching a video on cooking a curry, and suddenly two ads pop up that cannot even be skipped. Frustrating right? I am sure it is. But that’s the beauty about youtube. Even with so many ads and interruptions during videos, people aren’t bored of youtube.
The number of people watching and uploading videos on youtube is only increasing daily. Fascinating, isn’t it? To get so much engagement on your platform. Just imagine what if you owned youtube? What if you were the one to create it? Well, guess what? You too can create something like it, and not only something like it, maybe something better than youtube. Who knows?
