Last week I had an opportunity to present with Shiva Rajaraman and Prerna Gupta at 500 Startups. Shiva gave a very interesting overview of how to develop content for YouTube and how it is different from traditional media. Prerna’s presentation drilled into marketing products on YouTube with plenty of colorful examples, including her own app – LaDiDa. It was amazing to hear that LaDiDa used the YouTube as an advertising platform exclusively and the company was able to reach profitability thanks to it. Sometimes a simple trick of adding an off-site link in video metadata, such as in this example :

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/exmwSxv7XJI?prettyprint=true&v=2


<media:description type='plain'>http://grasshopper.com - This is a Pantless Knights tribute to our ... />

is enough to drive significant traffic to your site.
I covered, you guessed it, the YouTube API. The session was live-streamed and the recording is available below.