Online video is a big deal and becoming bigger based on the latest from YouTube.
The website, celebrating six years online this month, reported the number of daily views it generates has moved past the three billion mark, a 50 percent increase over last year. As a release to announce the accomplishment quantified, "That's the equivalent of nearly half the world's population watching a YouTube video each day, or every U.S. resident watching at least nine videos a day."
Content on the site is also exploding, with more than two days worth of video being uploaded to the site every minute. That number represents a 37 percent jump over the last six months and 100 percent over last year.
The numbers of merchants and the views they generate on YouTube has taken off in recent years, with chains including Best Buy and Walmart creating multiple video channels.
Retailers' use of online video, in general, continues to increase with 73 percent of U.S. sites using video on company sites as well as YouTube, Facebook, etc, according to eMarketer.
Craig Wax, CEO of Invodo, told eMarketer, that retailers are using online video to improve the customer experience. "From a quantitative perspective, they're looking to increase sales conversion rates and at the same time drive more traffic to their site. They're able to do that because of video's impact on SEO. They're also looking to decrease the costs associated with product returns. When people watch videos about a product, they're typically much less likely to return it. Video can remove a lot of the uncertainty people have in buying certain items online."