Introduction

Maybe you're looking to become a YouTube sensation with your next video or you simply want to share your insights or your particular expertise with the world. Perhaps you'd even like to use YouTube and video to help your business, which could be a local coffee shop or a Fortune 500 company. No matter how you plan to make use of your video-making skills, YouTube has made sharing the results of those skills easy. And with the tips and techniques included within the pages of YouTube Channels For Dummies, you'll be ready to take full advantage of YouTube's user-friendly platform when creating your very own YouTube channel.

To get a better sense of how YouTube has changed the entertainment playing field, cast your mind back to ten or so years before the turn of the millennium — if you can remember back that far. Despite an explosion of ever better and ever cheaper video equipment for consumers, sharing a video still meant gathering family and friends around your giant 25-inch, tube-laden television screen so that everyone could watch your latest video masterpiece. Back in those days, someone who wasn't in the room watching along was clean out of luck.

YouTube changed all that. It globalized the viewing experience, reinventing how people show videos by making it possible to share with audiences considerably larger than that bunch of friends and family gathered around the TV set eating popcorn. Any viewer who wanted to see any video anywhere in the world only had to type ...

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