YOUTUBE PARTNER SUCCESS STORY: DEMAND MEDIA
Background
Demand Media brings together writers, editors, experts and filmmakers to create informative content and develop online communities around a wide range of topics that run the gamut from healthy lifestyles to adventure travel to learning how to manage your personal finances...and much, much more. In early 2006, the same year the company was founded, Demand Media launched their first YouTube channel in hopes of driving brand awareness and revenue for their new how-to website, ExpertVillage.
“Our goals were simple: to leverage YouTube’s distribution and advertising relationships to extend our brand and open up an incremental revenue stream”, says Steven Kydd, EVP of Demand Studios, Demand Media’s content creation division.
With their high-quality, original content, and with strong growth rates from 2006 to 2007, Demand Media qualified, and was accepted into YouTube's Partner Program. "We immediately began to see the results we were hoping for, and so we decided to upload virtually our entire video library to YouTube," Kydd states. Since then, they have launched over 20 YouTube branded channels housing more than 150,000 videos to support their owned-and-operated media brands including eHow.com, LIVESTRONG.COM, and Golflink.com, as well as niche sites like Greencar.com. Their ExpertVillage channel is now currently the 3rd most-viewed YouTube channel of all time, as of March 2009.
Approach
So how was Demand Media able to achieve such success in a short period of time with niche sites, little-known talent, and few “viral” videos? The answer lies in their unique approach to production and to their video search optimization strategies, according to Kydd.
“We create content exclusively for the Internet, and our proprietary content creation process places an emphasis on optimizing each video for search and engaging passionate audiences. While many see YouTube as a destination site, we know that YouTube is also a top search engine. In fact, the largest percentage of our channel views comes from searches on YouTube. So we take that into account and utilize many of YouTube's services for increasing discoverability of long-tail content so that we do not have to rely on hits from general search engines to be successful," says Kydd.
The Insight tool available to YouTube Partners helped Demand Media gain deeper knowledge about their audience as well. When they realized that a significant portion of their channel traffic was coming from outside the USA, Demand Media created country-specific channels to engage audiences in their local language with local experts, such as eHow channels for UK, Mexico, France, India, and Japan.
Furthermore, according to Kydd, “Early on, we wondered if our evergreen content library would find an audience on a site made famous by viral videos. Thanks to YouTube’s data analysis and reporting, we were pleased to learn that the YouTube audience is large, diverse, and global. And our channels attracted users of all ages.”
Results
And that audience has certainly grown. In 2008, the number of subscribers to Demand Media's YouTube channels increased by more than 1,000%. They now have over 250,000 subscribers and their videos have developed a dedicated following of viewers who are looking to feed their passions through content and community tools on YouTube. Given the scale of its video library on YouTube, Demand Media’s channels currently generate over 2 million streams per day with viewers who are actively engaged in attaining knowledge about an area of passion or interest such as how hybrid cars work, healthy food choices, or how to grow eggplant.
This type of niche informational and instructional content lends itself to targeted advertising, which has helped them achieve their goal of earning incremental revenue. "When there are passionate audiences, there are advertisers looking to reach those audiences with relevant messaging, which has helped us monetize our vast library of videos on the site. What originally began as a marketing-driven syndication effort has now turned into a seven figure revenue stream," says Kydd.
The YouTube Partnership also helps attract new talent and provide exposure to existing talent within Demand Studios. “We have created a unique social publishing ecosystem where all of our videos are shot with high quality standards, by qualified filmmakers, including some Emmy Award winners, on a freelance basis. Our community of filmmakers and experts find interesting work through Demand Studios, gets paid, and gets its work seen by YouTube’s large and growing audience. Since our main strategy is to create and distribute high-quality video at scale, partnering with YouTube allows us to successfully further this mission,” says Kydd.