The Beneficial Gains of Video Marketing

I'm sure you have been victim to the constant barrage of ads that cut through your never-ending joy of YouTube surfing. They pop up when you least expect it, and at times you can skip through the ad if you wait for the prompt to hit that magical five-second mark. However, the majority of the time you become victimized to having to sit through a whole 30-60 second spot with no option of skipping what so ever. The times that we do get lucky enough to skip the ad and the five seconds is up, for some reason I end up getting sucked into the advertisement at it's 6 second mark, still holding my mouse ready to skip but continue to watch the whole ad. I hate when that happens. This is what we call Online Video Marketing.

According to a YouTube Audience Analysis of Q3 2012, 95% of gamers turn to YouTube for gaming information and entertainment. Not only that, but in 2012, the amount of time people spent watching gaming videos on YouTube more than doubled over the year before. Much of this growth was due to increased viewership via mobile devices, as one in three views of gaming-related videos occurred on a tablet or smartphone.

Grand Theft Auto V was released on September 17, 2013. Rockstar uploaded the game’s first trailer on November 2, 2011. The trailer earned almost 40 million YouTube views and 1.2 million social shares. A year later, Rockstar released another trailer that racked up 21.9 million YouTube views. Rockstar uploaded the first official gameplay video in July 2013, two months before Grand Theft Auto V hit stores. It generated 31.2 million YouTube views and 878,000 social shares. In this case, Grand Theft Auto V saw more engagement with its first teaser trailer, which still indicates significant excitement and anticipation around the game’s release.

Google found an extremely strong correlation between pre-launch video views and game sales within the first four months after the release. Research also revealed that as a game accumulates additional views in the months leading to launch, the correlation between views and sales not only remains intact, but grows stronger.

The millions of video views Grand Theft Auto V racked up before its release translated into $1 billion in sales within its first three days.