From my Comedy YouTube channel
Draw My Life
A white board drawing of my personal journey»How to optimize YouTube videos for mobile viewing
written by JoshRimer.com on January 27th, 2012
YouTube recently announced that its platform is serving over 200 million views from smart phones and internet-capable mobile devices daily. As I wrote about last year, there’s only one direction for mobile video viewing to go from here…. and that’s up! Having said that, content creators should consider optimizing their YouTube videos for the small, smart phone screen since the viewing experience is a bit different than on a regular computer.
Optimizing videos for smart phone viewing isn’t rocket science, but there are some key things you should keep in mind to make the experience as good as possible for the mobile viewer:
1. Make sure your text is large enough to be read. Remember that your mobile audiences are usually viewing your videos in a 2.7 to 3-inch screen so don’t make it too hard for them to reading the text in your videos.
2. Use good audio recording equipment for your video. Not all smart phones have quality speakers so make sure you’re giving your audience the best audio experience they can get by recording in high-quality audio, which usually means having an external shotgun or lavalier mic.
3. Put links to older videos or related content in the description box to help ease the browsing experience of your viewers. Most won’t be able to view annotations at this point on their phones, but they often will be able to click on links in the description.
4. Zoom in on the products you’re using in your video, especially when you’re doing a tutorial. A smaller screen requires more zooming in to see the details.
It can be a good idea to double-check your videos for possible glare issues or pixeled images by viewing your videos on a smart phone yourself. And as always, to get most out of your videos you should include a call to action at the end by encouraging your audience to like, comment, and/or share the video with their friends – all of which can easily be done on their phones.
Facebook Comments:
i have nokia phone, and when i’m watching youtube in my phone it really bad..
This is a very important lesson for all video uploaders. With so many people using smart phones and tablets to surf the web and watch videos, it’s important to make sure your video is mobile friendly. I think the best advice is what you said at the end, double check your video on your own mobile device, just to make sure it looks how you want it to.
I can’t agree more on the importance of zooming in. Even on a regular computer monitor, it’s hard to see the details of some YouTube tutorials. On a smartphone, small objects may well become nearly invisible, unless some special considerations are given, as you rightly suggested. Thanks for the great tips!
I’ve only just started using tutorials on Youtube and such whilst building my pet project site – bikiniwaxvideo.org – which is something I’ve been working on for a while. I agree with the comment above where a ZOOM option should be absolutely essential on all youtube videos for cell phones. I struggle when ‘on the go’ to watch these videos and such changes would be more than welcome.
Great blog by the way, Josh! I’m learning a lot just from browsing your pages also!
Anita. x
yes i agree with you because i have iphone and when i watch video i close those vedio which are have bad quality or some other porblem.So all video uploader should upload a very fine high quality video so that a user like me able to watch that video very clearly
Great post but let me tell you just a small thing: phone screen average size is increasing day by day and 2.7-3 looks pretty small to me (just think about the new 4.8′ of S3 and so on..) A good average size to care about would be 3.5-3.8. Thanks!
I have never thought in that direction when I uploaded a video on youtube. I will now increasingly used for internet marketing for my new site, and these tips will be of great help … thanks
Youtube can not support Nokia very well and not every uploaded video in Youtube is a very fine high quality video.
Also, please keep your videos short. I’ve found this works best if looking to show off a product. People have a very poor attention span these days
so it really does help. You can use Youtube insights to look for drop off points.
I have a Droid 3 and view videos on my phone a lot. The biggest problem I’ve noticed with Youtube isn’t that videos aren’t optimized…its that they can’t be viewed on mobile phones at all! Please people, I think it is just a simple “check this box” type of thing when you make a video that allows it to be viewed on mobile devices as well.
Thanks for all tips about optimizing our uploaded videos. Now I’m sure next time I’ll be much more carefull when uploading one of them.
We can only hope that more apps are developed for mobile devices so that YouTube is more available. Even now I still have problems with Apple’s YouTube app
Most of the time the it is ignored as to how the video will come in the phone. Good reminder for everybody. Specially the zoom nd rechecking of video on our own phone was good.
Thanks for the tips bro! I have done some video marketing for my website for weeks now and I hope this will help a lot.
I hope they covert all the vids to be able to watch mobile. i hate have to get up and watch from my desktop.
Good post – though on my Android mobile, a custom video viewer loads, when I click on a youtube video, thus making optimization unnecessary. Is that different for other mobile OSes?
I got a smart phone but i don’t maximize its use which makes me feel that i wasted the money I bought for it. Thank you for sharing this. I tried watching videos in my phone and that was awesome. Planning to check other feature of my phone.
This is a big issue to play heavy videos on your smart phones. Really like them a lot!
These are really helpful stuffs. I have tried some of them and it really worked. As of now I have so many uploads in Youtube and they are gaining a lot of view. Thanks a lot.
I have lots of videos on youtube and it is nice if those who are using mobile phones can view them too. This is an answer to my questions.
FINALLY, someone revealed this secret
Optimizing your videos for mobile is something many businesses are certainly missing out on. If business owners do not implement mobile marketing strategies in their campaigns, they will be left behind.