Well, I’m assuming Smosh do anyway. Considering the fact that their channel has had over 12 MILLION views and has a nice banner right at the top of the page linked to their site, which has AdSense on it and a dedicated store full of novelty / brand t-shirts.

Smosh have done extremely well. Especially considering, in my opinion that they’re not really very funny lol. But their new videos are very well made, I’ve only seen a couple but they originally shot to YouTube fame with the infamous Pokemon Theme Tune video (original has been taken down).

I don’t think that all the YouTube ‘celebrities’ maximize the advantages of their YouTube fame for business purposes like Smosh have though. A lot of these guys / gals could really launch some interesting stuff right off the bat, link and talk about it in a new video and receive Instant awareness.

There’s also endless possibilities for branding and novelty items galore. And you may think ‘I wouldn’t buy any of it’ just as I do. But there are plenty of people that are bizarre enough to want it. These guys could make some serious cash

If you haven’t even attempted at probing the YouTube fame factor yet. I’d advise you to give it a go. You don’t have to act like an idiot or an obsessive to be a YouTube celeb or more respectively, have a channel with a lot of subscribers. You can of course build up a huge channel based upon countless TV shows or music videos etc. but I wouldn’t advise this for business purposes as it’s only a matter of time before the copyright holders make a claim against you to get the videos taken down.

On that subject though, of the copyright claims issue. I actually had a large company recently allow me to keep videos up that I’ve uploaded. The videos are all songs from a certain, big music artist and the copyright holders made a claim but gave permission for me to keep the videos up providing that they could advertise on the video pages. All the videos have the URL of my related site in them. So I thought it was pretty cool of the company to let that fly.

I think this is much more sensible on their part as well. As apposed to taking the stand some copyright holders do which is to demand it all be taken down. Which I think is the equivalent of trying to fight a bear with a pillow. They’re absolutely and postively outnumbered on a mass scale. As soon as they take something down, someone else puts it back up. So I’m glad some monster companies are seeing that they pretty much can’t win and the smart thing to do is just to try and make revenue from it by allowing it.

I can understand copyright holders being annoyed about people ripping their content though. I would be annoyed. But, realistically, big, big shows and music artists etc. just need to accept that it’s going to happen and there’s not much they can do about it. Period. As soon as they think of a way to stop it, there’s already been 10 new ways to get it.

Back to the original discussion point. I think you should really have a go at using YouTube to your advantage. They supposedly reckon by 2010 that ‘the Internet will break’ given the excessive bandwidth use of things like YouTube and BBC’s iPlayer straining networks that can’t keep up. Apparently YouTube used as much bandwidth in 2007 as the entire Internet did in 2000! that’s pretty crazy. Plus, like Internet marketing, becoming big on YouTube is getting harder.

Unless you make a complete circus show video and fluke a few million views, it takes a lot of effort. Unless you’re extremely talented at something of course.

I’m not doing too bad with my magic channel. I was doing card magic before Internet marketing, I started at about 11. I have so far only done 17 half ass videos but still managed to get 622 subscribers so far. Note, I haven’t uploaded a video in over 6 months yet the subscribers keep coming.

Just shows if you’re good at something, you will naturally gain exposure. And I’m not being big headed lol but I know I’m good at card magic, a lot better naturally than I am at Internet marketing anyway.

You can check out my mentioned YouTube channel here.

Honestly, the best way to get a lot of subscribers that will keep coming back for more, is to upload something unique. Obviously. But when I say unique, I don’t mean you doing stupid faces, I mean like a talent. If you can sing… sing.

As it happens I can do a lot of card magic so I experimented with that. And found the subscribers to be very instant and I really should get back to growing that, as I’ve just let it dry up and never really put much effort into it. Which is silly as it’s the one thing I’m actually talented at and can challenge a lot in the field of yet I have done little with it.

Anyway, once you get the subscribers and are getting nice instant views when you upload new videos. You can even start placing AdSense ads next to your video. If you have an AdSense account you can now submit videos for consideration in your account, once/if approved, relevant AdSense ads will then be displayed. Pretty nice considering the height of statistical viewing power you can reach overtime.

There really is a lot of cash to be made on and in the name of YouTube. Exploit it’s social awareness, broad age and nationality range and do your best to use it for business advantages… it’s such a lucrative marketing tool if used in the right way.