Silicon Valley Musings

Very interesting case study on YouTube’s success, YouTube Case Study: Widget marketing comes of age

Excerpts that are relevant to Widget-based embeddable video players:

Viral customer growth due to widget marketing

YouTube allowed users to easily embed any hosted videos on web pages or blogs. This turned out to be particularly popular with social-networking websites, especially MySpace. The inbound links from these ‘widgets’ also helped YouTube increase its page rank on Google, thereby driving traffic via natural search..

Chose the right technology platform for the desired user experience

While the technology platform used by YouTube was not particularly remarkable, it was designed to solve the problem at hand. The technology concept was to encode videos in the Macromedia Flash format and take advantage of the millions of computers which already had the Flash player installed on it. When Macromedia launched Flash 7 with video playback capability, YouTube was among the first to exploit this feature. Further, based on the team’s past experience working for PayPal, they were able to develop a platform that scaled quickly to handle the viral growth in content and traffic.