Where should you host your company’s videos?

Where should you host your company’s videos? 
 
This is not a no-brainer. 
 
If you say, “It’s YouTube, end of discussion,” then you’re missing a lot of important points. 
 
We know, because this question comes up frequently in our discussions with clients. 
 
Let’s review some of those here. 
 
Where does it hurt?
 
We have a client that put a lot of work into creating a series of B2B videos, aimed at a certain target audience. But they had a legitimate concern: What does YouTube suggest, at the conclusion of the video? 
 
Aha. A valid contention. Think about it. Whenever you watch a video on YouTube, it ends with a little matrix of tiles promoting other videos, which YouTube thinks you’ll like, and thus serves up to you as “suggestions.” If you click on any of these, you presumably get to view content that you find valuable, and of course YouTube is rewarded; clicks are their currency. 
 
Let’s get back to our (rightfully) concerned client. Think about this: Who is serving up those “suggestions” at the end of your video? Is it you?
 
No. It’s YouTube. 
 
Uh-oh. This can have serious repercussions. If your company is ABC Widgets, you want to promote and sell those to the widget-buying public. So as soon as your whiz-bang widget video ends, your viewer may well be served up a suggestion to watch a slick new video from—you guessed it—XYZ Widgets. Your direct competitor! 
 
See why we said that this is not a no-brainer? 
 
Different sized gorillas
 
YouTube is a behemoth. And they’re owned by Google, in case that wasn’t big enough for you. If you want the world to see your video, you certainly want it on YouTube. 
 
But what about our aforementioned client’s legitimate concern? Do you want your prospects to possibly be served up “suggestions” to explore your competitors? Of course not. 
 
Thus we enter the murky realm of trade-off’s. 
 
There is, for example, Vimeo. It’s a video-hosting platform. It’s a small fraction the size of YouTube, but it functions flawlessly, in terms of serving up videos so that they play easily on any device. 
 
And Vimeo’s business model is structured a little differently. When a Vimeo video ends, it just ends. None of these YouTube-like “suggestions.” 
 
But, again, Vimeo is smaller. Reaches a smaller audience through, say, SEO. And you need to get a subscription (read: “pay for it”), with different tiers of membership available, to really make use of it. Creating a YouTube channel, as you know, is free. 
 
So you need to weigh the relative merits of each. For example, if you really want to feed those search-bots and get your video all over the world, then it’s probably worth going to YouTube, despite its sometimes unhelpful suggestions. If you really want your audience to stay focused and are willing to pay for it, then it’s Vimeo. 
 
What? Shun publicity?
 
Sometimes, you don’t want the whole world to see your videos. What it it’s internal training? What if it’s client-specific/competition-sensitive? What if it’s gated webinar content that you don’t want to give away without collecting viewer contact information (as their “ticket fare”) first? 
 
There are lots of ways to skin this proverbial cat. You can create a private link on YouTube, so that it’s not searchable. You can create a Vimeo video that’s password-protected. You can even host the video on a private link on Dropbox or Google Drive, although they’re not really optimized for playback, and thus might force your viewer to download the actual video before they can watch it. But that might be a trade-off that you, and they, are willing to make. 
 
And of course, there are hybrid solutions. Remember our YouTube-wary client? They ended up doing both: YouTube solely for the SEO benefit (the “shotgun”), and Vimeo for the specific client views (the “rifle”). 
 
Need help answering seemingly-simple questions like “Where should we host our company’s videos?” Contact us. We help with these all the time. 

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