Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Here on Search Engine People you can read articles from some the most knowledgable video and search engine marketers in the world. There are real insights which can actually help you get more views, subscribers, and better search rankings.

But how is it that Smosh, two goofy friends since high school, and the frequent creators of such 'sophisticated' videos as The Wiener Song, become so popular? What could these idiots possibly know that dozens of professionals don't?!?

You'd be surprised. Read on to find out just what they know about YouTube marketing....

YouTube has just passed Facebook and is bigger - Now the largest social media site in the U.S. Yes, that's right - the largest social media site.

I was among the first to show that YouTube was the third largest search engine in a presentation entitled, “Getting Found in All the Right Places,” at a SEMNE event on Nov. 7, 2007. And I may have been the first to observe that YouTube was about to pass Yahoo! in expanded searches in a story that was published in Search Engine Watch on July 20, 2008. So, I suspect that the second part of the line, “YouTube has grown to become … the second most-used platform for searching,” is old news.

If anyone wants an update, here’s the U.S. data from comScore qSearch for May 2014: Google had 12.5 billion explicit core searches, YouTube had 4.0 billion search queries, Microsoft had 3.5 billion searches, and Yahoo! had 1.8 billion....

It all started when some YouTubers posted a 'Lick Race' Challenge video in June. These videos consisted of them trying to lick the middle part of Oreos as quickly as they could. Quite a light-hearted and fun video to make. However, no one realized this video had actually been paid for by Mondelez UK, who own Oreos.

It was only after BBC Newsround launched an investigation that they realised these Vloggers had been paid to say good things about Oreos, not having made it clear in the title and description of their video. The BBC journalist complained to the Advertisement Standards Authority (ASA) and they listened.

While some of the videos do 'thank Oreos for making this video possible' or state in the description that it is an 'advertisement', the ASA did not think they they had made it clear enough, and suggested the famous YouTubers were misleading their audience....