YouTube Channels For Dummies

Chapter 1

Making a Home on YouTube

In This Chapter

• Understanding the importance of being on YouTube
• Becoming a viral video star
• Making your channel unique
• Producing video for fun and profit

YouTube is the new business and entertainment frontier, which means there's as much excitement and creativity associated with creating and managing a YouTube channel these days as had been the case during the early days of television, when the sky seemed the limit. YouTube — like television before it — is caught up in the same adventure that comes from defining its target audience as well as finding out what audiences are willing to watch.

For television, the adventurous nature of their early endeavors could be traced to the fact that TV was so new that audiences really didn't know what they wanted. For YouTube, working in today's market, it's much more about meeting the diverse interests and needs of an audience that attracts more than a billion people from all over the planet.

Anyone that wants to show off their video prowess or share their vision with the world can hang a virtual shingle on YouTube by starting their own channel. Of course, when television began, we humans had more toes than the TV had channels. These days, you can multiply those stubby digits by 100 million to count the number of YouTube channels. That makes running a successful YouTube channel seem a bit more daunting.

Having more than 500 million channels can make getting noticed on your channel feel like searching ...