The “Millennial Way”

Photo by Szabo Viktor on Unsplash

Let me be frank, I love YouTube. I watch YouTube more than I watch Live TV, Video on Demand, Netflix, or Amazon Prime. I probably spend more time watching YouTube in a week than I spend with my girlfriend… (We don’t live together so don’t judge us, I love her very much!)

YouTube is a place literally chock-a-block full of content. It’s the Willy Wonka of video creation, and on a daily basis has 300 hours of video uploaded every minute, with almost 5 billion videos watched in a single day! And only about half of them are by me.

I watch YouTube predominantly for entertainment, but it’s the first thing I go to if I want to learn a new skill, if I need to research a product, or if I want to hear about pop culture news. Not only is it a platform to entertain, but to inform and teach.

It’s a part of our everyday life.

Now, I know Millennials get a lot of stick (most of the time just for being Millennials!) but hear me out. We’re a group of people that have been brought up in the wake of the digital era. Everything we’ve ever known became obsolete and upgraded, within a few years of launching the technology. Now that we’re growing up, and becoming the working force of the world, we’re doing what we do best and embracing technology to fit our dynamically changing world.  

In this day and age, having the technology to literally search through billions of videos to find as much information as physically possible about any given subject, is a brilliant achievement, and amazing tech to have.

I recently asked my Mum how she used to find out answers to general knowledge questions in the late 80’s. A question like “Where do Apples come from?”

This was her response:

• Ask friends and family if they knew (They didn’t)
• Walk to the nearest Library
• Sign up to become a member (if she hadn’t already)
• Ask the Librarian if they knew where books about Apples were
• Check the contents page of a book she thought may have the answer
• Skim the entire book to find the right answer
• Make sure this answer correlates with other books in the library
• Get the correct answer

And voila, she was done.

Nowadays, it’s as simple as typing “Where do Apples come from?” into Google and checking the results. Amazingly, if you don’t really feel like reading a Wikipedia page, you can click YouTube’s top video result and spend just over a minute to learn about the origins of Apples.

Video content has become the biggest necessity when it comes to advertising yourself and your business in the world today.  If you own a company, work in marketing, or just want to be well known, then you need to create video content with a platform to tell your story, and that’s where YouTube comes in.

Basically, get involved with the change of the world or become obsolete. And that is the “Millennial Way.”

Eric Wansell