YouTube recently put out a one-click subscribe button that YouTubers could place across the internet – prior to this the only way to subscribe to a channel was directly on YouTube.
The YouTube Subscribe Button lets you add a one-click Subscribe button to any page. The button lets people subscribe to your YouTube channel without having to leave your site to either log in to YouTube or confirm their subscriptions.
If you want to read all about the documentation and to learn how to do this yourself, here is the YouTube Subscribe Button Page that provides the documentation you’ll need.
Of course if you are looking for a walk through on how to do it, check out this post by Mashable – if you notice the URL they used, they are clearly expecting a great degree of traffic from this post – http://mashable.com/2013/07/24/youtube-subscribe-button/ and rightly so.
The big question I have though is what took YouTube so long to make this change? Perhaps the technology is complicated but clearly it is not insurmountable, especially considering that Google+ launched with this basic capability. Whatever the logic for why now instead of why a few years ago, the fact is the button is now available and if you are serious about using video to help market your business (or self) it would seem this button is another great incentive to consider YouTube as your video hosting platform of choice.
Further I suspect that over time we’ll see a deeper relationship between this button and other Google properties with some interesting potential for cross promotion across your Google+ Page, your Google Places listing and possibly even a Gmail or Google Apps for Business offering.
We will also likely see the introduction of an in-house video widget of sorts – great for sites, but perhaps a true home run for mobile sites. Perhaps an easy way to offer up a video embed that can also be subscribed to mid-stream on a third party site… One only has to look as far as the WordPress Plugin Directory to get a sense of how a fully baked YouTube widget might evolve.
And speaking of widgets and other Google properties, a widgetized ad unit would seem like a home run except for the fact that nobody talks about widgets these days and supposedly spending money on online advertising is the stuff that only fools do… so maybe it should just be called a “premium app” and all will be fine.
Whatever the what-if’s of it all, the simple fact is the button is out there, it is really easy to embed on your site and so now the only real question is do you want it. Again – here is mine – go ahead and subscribe to my video channel but for the time being video has not been my most active marketing channel…. who knows maybe 2014 is my video year!