Mobile Uploads Soar on YouTube

Written by Steve Donohue

Friday, June 26. 2009 at 12:40 PM EDT Post a comment

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YouTube Inc. is relying more and more on uploads from mobile phones to supply content for its online video site, with the company boasting that uploads from mobile phones have surged 1,700 percent in the last month.

And the debut of Apple Inc.'s new iPhone 3GS is driving even more mobile uploads to the user-generated site. Since June 19, the day Apple and exclusive carrier AT&T Inc. began selling the new smart phone, mobile uploads have increased by 400 percent a day, YouTube product manager Dwipal Desai and community manager Mia Quagliarello wrote Thursday in a post on the YouTube company blog.

"This growth represents three things coming together: new video-enabled phones on the market, improvements to the upload flow when you post a video to YouTube from your phone, and a new feature on YouTube that allows your videos to be quickly and effortlessly shared through your social networks," the YouTube staffers said.

YouTube recently added buttons below the video windows on its site that easily allow its users to share content with Web surfers that have Facebook, Twitter, and Google Reader accounts.

While one would think Google's flagship video service would be content with a 1,700 percent increase in mobile video uploads, YouTube said Thursday it wants to motivate users to upload even more mobile videos.

In their blog post, Desai and Quagliarello challenge YouTube users to upload videos from their mobile phones, add a “mobiletest” tag to the videos, and share them with friends on their social networks. After giving the videos a week to “go viral,” YouTube said it will add the most popular clips to a “mobile upload” edition of the “Spotlight Video” section on its home page.

YouTube remains the most popular online video site. According to comScore, Google sites generated 6.8 billion videos views in April, and YouTube accounted for more than 99 percent of those views.

But the vast number of videos uploaded by mostly amateur videographers to YouTube come with a steep cost. IT consulting firm RampRate estimated earlier this month that YouTube spends about $48.7 million each year on bandwidth costs alone. That's far less than the $360.4 million that Credit Suisse estimated that YouTube spends on bandwidth.