Last week, we covered four reasons why you should host your videos on YouTube rather than self-hosting. This week we’re back with a few more! Let’s dive right in:
5) Mobile-Friendly. One issue with self-hosting is that your video player may not be mobile-friendly, especially if you’re using Flash. The YouTube player is pretty much universally excepted on mobile devices, even Apple devices that don’t display Flash media.
6) Storage/Organization. Even if you never planned on anyone seeing your videos, YouTube is a great place to store them. Self-hosting relies on either storing your video files locally or on your website’s FTP, which can present a few problems. For example, if you have turnover in your marketing or communications department, those files could potentially get lost. If your website suffers a catastrophic hosting failure, or an amateur is put in charge of your site, your files might get deleted, corrupted or over-written. With YouTube, you always know where your videos are. You can even download back an .mp4 file of any video you’ve uploaded. With Playlists, you can easily organize your videos by type for easy reference and enhanced user-experience.
7) Analytics. I was tempted to make this the #1 reason, because YouTube Analytics gives you more insightful and powerful data than any other content platform on the web, for free. YouTube Analytics allows you to see who is watching your video, through what technology, from where, and for how long. It even shows you how viewers are discovering your video. This data is absolutely invaluable in optimizing your existing content, as well as how you go about planning and producing future content.
BONUS) Fun Customization Options and Hacks. YouTube gives you lots of neat customization options for displaying and sharing your videos. One of the most useful is the ability to send a link to a video that is set to start at a specific time, rather than the beginning. For example, you might have a long video but know that your friend will only be interested in one specific part. Embedding videos on a webpage or blog is fully customizable, right down to the size, design and player controls.
All in all, YouTube is a pretty fantastic place to host videos. It’s free, there are built in SEO benefits and lots of ways to customize your overall presentation. If you’re still not convinced, prove us wrong in the comments section!
About Rocky Walls
The only problem with hosting videos on youtube is that you will also get negative feedback which is not good for business.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
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