Lately, we’ve seen YouTube quickly entering the competition:

Google is about to expand its movie-on-demand offering through YouTube, according to The Wrap. The expansion of the library to include titles from major studios will purportedly begin in the next week or two.

Rumored licensors include Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Brothers and Universal, including smaller studios such as Lionsgate.

The reason so many companies have been able to compete with Netflix is because each comes with significant market share — Amazon already had millions of credit cards on file and sold DVDs; iTunes had its large music base; YouTube already has billions of monthly views on its amateur video. This might give key insight into how other companies with huge market shares — Google for search engines, Facebook for social networks — can face real competition.

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Google revealed last week that it is running ads against three billion videos a week on YouTube, up 50 percent from last year. That means the amount of cash it shares with its YouTube partners is going up as well. Google gives its content makers more than 50 percent of the ad money from their videos.

Hundreds of YouTube stars are making more than six figures, and hundreds more are making more than $40,000 a year — roughly the median salary in the US. There are even stars who have topped a million dollars, although the company wouldn’t say how many.

While it should remain obvious that these successful partners make up an extreme minority of all YouTube users — and that their success would be incredibly difficult to mimic — the lower barrier of entry that YouTube provides creates a kind of democratization of talent, one that will surely award at least some filmmakers who would not have had the luck that’s necessary to break into major media markets.

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Your more “professional” journalistic sites also put up big viewing numbers, for sure. The Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan’s blog, and Wonkette combined for about 200,000 referrals. But views from social media sources built on people-to-people sharing — primarily Facebook, with 95,000 views, but Digg and Reddit too — outnumber those from “news” sources in the end. Social media, according to YouTube, contributed about 229,000 views to the Frank video.

According to YouTube, here’s the breakdown of that data:

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1. It had already been uploaded on YouTube for about a month and so it no longer had the value of being new.

2. It was for a relatively small-release documentary, so it likely didn’t have a large marketing budget or widespread mainstream appeal.

3. There were many other competing versions of the same trailer on YouTube, the Apple website and the movie’s official website. This way I could keep track of how quickly other versions of the trailer were spreading without my help.

The version of the trailer I chose had 76,790 views a week ago when I started the experiment. It had been on the web for 27 days so in total averaged about 2,800 views a day. I began by spending a few hours seeding out the video to communities I thought would be receptive to it. One of the talents I have is using analytic search tools to identify specific micro niches of influential bloggers that are most likely to write about the content I’m pushing.

Within days, the trailer made it onto the Huffington Post and then less than 24 hours later on the front page of Digg. When I began the experiment, links and embeds on Twitter and in the blogosphere were about equally spread out across several versions of the trailer, but within four or five days, links to the trailer I was pushing far outnumbered all the others:

By the end of the week I had the trailer up to 115,397 views, an increase of 38,607. The views-per-day count jumped up from 2,800 views a day to 5,515 views a day.

As a point of comparison, this version of the trailer had 36,346 views when I began my outreach, and by the end of the week was only up to 40,470 views, an increase of 4,124. Like all the other versions of the trailer on YouTube I was tracking, it actually had a decrease in the daily views, likely because it had already been on the web for so long.

This was a relatively niche small-release documentary and the trailer was a month old. Think of what I could do with your trailer or video if I had it on the day it launches.