So you’ve just created a brand new video for your product or your company? The excitement is through the roof! But now, people need to watch it.
There are several great performing hosting platforms out there but today we will discuss the 2 most popular: YouTube and Vimeo. Let’s look at some pros and cons of each.
Youtube
First off, let’s talk YouTube.
Pros
- It is definitely the most popular video hosting site in the world (check out some stats here). For businesses, it performs extremely well. It has more traffic than any other video site on the internet. (And more than most websites period!)
- It’s Google SEO friendly as it’s owned by Google and thus, given priority.
- Creating a channel on Youtube is very easy and provides a clear place to send your audience, as well as something to which they can subscribe.
- Playlists offer a defined path of videos to have your audience watch. Which is great if your videos can pique their interest within the first 5 seconds or so, since they autoplay one after the other.
- YouTube promises high performance, so videos load quickly for your audience.
- The resolution of your video can range all the way up to 4K, otherwise known as UHD, which looks great!
- You can monetize your videos with ads. Good for you, but this can be annoying for your viewer. And so we transition to the cons.
Cons
- YouTube is so popular, that it is very much oversaturated. There is so much content uploaded each minute, that it can be hard to be noticed.
- While promising high performance is a good thing, the downside is that YouTube’s quality may not be as good all of the time. They will make sure your viewers see your videos fast, over seeing it in it’s highest quality. Keep in mind though, that with most high speed connections, this isn’t a big problem.
- And the last con of YT: Ads. Lots and lots of ads all over the place.
Vimeo
Pros
- The standard for high quality video on the web. Vimeo markets itself towards video producers (like us), because they keep the video quality high.
- No ads so your content is front and center for your viewer.
- You can replace videos with updated versions.
- For the paid accounts, you have great privacy controls. You can password protect videos, enable private “review” pages, and hide it from Vimeo, but make it available for embedding on your own site or elsewhere. Vimeo is very popular for embedding for that very reason.
- You can also monetize on Vimeo. For all the current how-to’s, click here.
- You can select whether or not users can download versions of your video.
- Vimeo now has a great review and collaboration side to it for videos in the editing and review stage.
- And the most important reason… Vimeo is what we at Waves use for our video hosting as their API is kick butt!
Cons
- Vimeo was late to the 4K game. Not a great sign as resolutions may get larger and larger.
- To do much with Vimeo, you need one of the paid accounts. The free ones are great for a video once in awhile, but is very limiting if you do any consistent scheduling or higher amount of video content.
So hopefully that is helpful in the video hosting discussion. Of course, search out what is out there beyond these platforms to see if there are alternatives that fit you better.
And remember, let your goals and objectives speak to what you need in video hosting and what you choose to use. If you need to get content out for the world to see, YouTube may be the best. If you are a creative professional and quality and community are important to you, Vimeo is great. And if you can manage it, use both!