Changing Trends in Digital Business

Success Story of YouTube  by Prashant Kumar

TOP YOUTUBE TRENDS OF THE YEAR -One billion hours of YouTube are watched daily (source – YouTube)

That’s a lot of eyeballs. Paying attention to how the audience engages with YouTube and can tell a lot about them.

Video Marketing is yet another way to reach the global audience in the most effective means by using more and more video-based contents. The ideal promotional videos should be between 20-30 seconds and it can reach to any number, anywhere and also anytime.

YouTube recently shared the data of 1 billion hours of daily watched by a global audience, this is an Incredible number but I was curious to know, how this has happened and what are the factors that helped the 1-billion-hour landmark for YouTube.

I was curious and started analyzing multiple factors of YouTube or other online video focused Company success stories. While doing my analysis, I did a study of YouTube company Business Model, free uploading and watching video business models, online video eco-system, digital networking platform, asset-light models, global reach online video market research reports and so on. And at end of the day, I started getting into the final part of my analysis, what has prompted Global Audience to see more and more videos on the Internet and then I realized due to better, stable and higher internet speed are the primary reason of internet-based video streaming companies success stories.

Due to higher Internet Speed, the fundamental of doing business shifted by 360 degree for most of the Industries and business now focusing primarily on Digital Business. Now, most of the businesses are focusing on Digitizing, Digitalizing and transforming their 4 Ps of the marketing mix - Product or Process, People, Promotion and Price.

2G Internet Speed bought the Smartphone into reality (Data + Voice in 1 phone) and also can have access to internet, email, chatting, listening to music, videos. This encouraged businesses to focus on having their own website with images, text, and details of services as another platform to brand and promote company products directly to clients and also started helping to generate leads. But due to the limitation of internet speed, Website page load speed was critical in 2G internet speed era. Needs a limited number of Images with low resolution or size.  

The was also the beginning of Global Digital Marketing Business and reaching anytime and anywhere global customers by way of Internet medium. 

For Companies started focusing on:

1.    Digitization – 50%>

2.    Digitalization – 10-20%

3.    Transformation – No Data

3G Internet Speed brought the next stage of websites such as buy & sell, Payment gateway, easy to scroll images, e-commerce-based Business by looking into images. Still, need to optimized Website page load speed. less of video and higher resolution Images. This period was the beginning of the e-commerce industry & Payment Gateway industry- Amazon, Alibaba, Flipkart, Lazard and so on)

Internet access during the 3G period, companies started focusing on implementing SILO ERP software applications. Primarily, it was the beginning to cloud-based infrastructure and also the process of automation between multiple software’s has started. The digitization process has reached 75-80% and this helps software companies to focus on how to use the digitized information or data in various applications. And large companies started to use the digitized information or data into one or multiple software and then the planning stage came into the picture for one single database and software automation. But during the 3G stage, this is still expensive due to high cost of IT infrastructure and early stage of cloud business.  

Companies started focusing on:

1.    Digitization – 75-80% completed

2.    Digitalization – 40-50%

3.    Transformation – <10%

4.    Cloud-Based Services – 10%

Once the 4G internet speed rolled out, due to higher internet speed companies started adopting the cloud-based IT infrastructure and most of the cloud companies started giving features of API integration between all software applications at one place, one single database and focuses on pay per use unlike in past the company use it or not but still needs to pay for IT infrastructure. The software now became subscription based instead of buying the license and set IT infrastructure.  All of sudden the cost of IT infrastructure, software and services dropped from 10x to 1-2x. This is the period when Fintech or new Tech startups companies coming into picture due to the low cost of entry.

Another aspect of 4G internet speed helped the companies to focus on Digital Business Platform Model, which is also known as Asset-Light Model and popularly known as App based business into picture UBER was the first company who became global market player in less than 5 years and till date does not own a single car but now its world’s largest taxi services company. And also, with AIR BNB and now with many companies are going into App based platform business model.

Another part which 4G helped companies to evolve is the software companies from moving the License and AMC business model to subscription model based on number of users. This has helped that client company just need to take the services and rest all is not needed like building IT infrastructure and so. This has helped IT company to target not just big player but can be able to target SME companies as well. From SAP, HubSpot to any IT software company is targeting all the sizes of company. Another part is, IT software company is giving API services to the link between one software to another and create 1 single dashboard to controlling and managing software most effectively.

Companies started focusing on:

1.    Digitization – 90-95% completed

2.    Digitalization – 75-80%

3.    Transformation – 25-30%

4.    Business Disruption - <25%

5.    Cloud-Based Business – 50-60%

6.    App-Based Business – 45-50%

7.    Automation Software – 25-40%

8.    Digital Business Platform Model – 15-20%

5G Internet Speed – Once the 5G internet will be fully rolled out, there are various businesses will be impacted.Based on my understanding, I see that Data Analytics is going to be a big part to play to understand the tend analysis and this will define business to focus based on data analytics outcome and even the data analytics report will be shared by 3rd parties. I assume that data-based digital business platform is going to be a reality where companies can share the data & its outcome in a prescribed format without any Personal data to be shared.

This will help more companies, which have a larger global reach and subscription like Google, Facebook and so on. EDM market will continue to shrink due to PDPA regulation and also the GDPR restriction on EDM companies. The Paid advertisement will become more expensive as companies will have a monopoly and also this will propel FinTech and startup companies to build the next generation software such as Blockchain or could be a video-based promotional, Uber or Air BNB advertisement model. Not sure but anything can happen.

5G will also push the Artificial Intelligence to next or advanced level and this will soon be reality and more and more machine learning part will be shown or visible in our day to day life.

For Companies will focusing on:

1.    Digitization – 90-95% completed

2.    Digitalization – 90-95% (most of the silo software company needs to evolve as the cost or services offering will be higher or may be too expensive)

3.    Transformation – 50-75%

4.    Business Disruption - <50%

5.    Cloud-Based Business – 90-95%

6.    App-Based Business – 75-80%

7.    Automation Software – 50-75%

8.    Digital Business Platform Model – 50-75%

9.    Blockchain – 25-50%

10. Artificial Intelligence – 10-25%

11. Data Analytics – 50%

Source: 3 viewer behaviors we saw play out on YouTube in 2018