If you use YouTube to host your videos, you’ve probably noticed some recent changes to the way they do things.
To make a long story short, they’re superimposing a whole lot more stuff on your videos – and it doesn’t necessarily benefit you.
For example:
1. Viewers are offered the <embed> code and the video’s URL at the end of the video without having to click through to the YouTube site
2. Viewers can scroll through and view related videos right in the YouTube-provided player without leaving your web site.
The first feature is designed to make YouTube videos easier to share. The second allows YouTube to, in essence, highjack your web page and turn it into a YouTube platform.
The benefits of these two features to YouTube are obvious. What I’m waiting for how is Google/YouTube will monetize this new-found ability to colonize other people’s web sites.
Maybe Google will cut web site owners in on the revenue they derive from their video services, but don’t count on it. In any event, relying on YouTube to host business-critical communications like ads is a very bad idea because it puts your users in a place where they’re just one easy click away from leaving your sales process.
Bottom line: If you’re depending on YouTube and other free hosting sites for your video hosting, it’s probably time to look into some better options…unless of course you don’t mind making a free gift of your web site’s traffic to YouTube (Google).
Hosting with and otherwise dealing with Internet video can be a tremendous hassle – and very expensive, but it doesn’t need to be in you pick the right service.
Here’s the one I like for hosting – and controlling – your own videos:
Here’s an extended interview I did with the creator of the service:
Enjoy!
– Ken McCarthy
P.S. For over 25 years I’ve been sharing the simple but powerful things that matter in business with my clients.
If you’d like direction for your business that will work today, tomorrow and twenty years from now, visit us at the System Club.
P.S. This is the service I recommend to Internet entrepreneurs who want to control their own videos:
Hi Ken
Thanks for the information on YouTube, I have noticed that a lot of ads are coming up with my videos there. Another site that I have found to be very easy to upload content to is Free IQ, founded by Brad Fallon, of Stompernet and SEO frame. I had a video that I had been trying to get to work on my site from months. It was very easy using Brad’s service. I will check out webvideozone. It sounds interesting.
Duh…of course they’re going to run their own ads. It’s also a shame to see some marketers regress in terms of the low quality of these free hosted videos. Why not just upload the file onto your own server and give people decent quality? If you’re already paying for hosting, it IS free. How is YouTube so much easier in terms of “the last mile”. What does that mean? Anyone can upload a simple file to their server and cut/paste player code into a page. You don’t need any subscription service to do it.
One free resource to host media (pictures, audio, video) is OurMedia.org http://www.ourmedia.org – they’re a grassroots movement that claims to be forever free.
If you want robust hosting with stats tracking on how many times your media gets downloaded or played, consider LibSyn.org http://www.libsyn.org – their pricing model is based on storage used, not bandwidth usage – very cool.
Happy media hosting! 😉
Hi Ken,
Another service out there that I use and love is, http://mkraemer.AudioAcrobat.com
Hope your readers find this company as beneficial as I have!
(Mary posted an ad instead of a comment and the ad has been deleted.)
I use Macintosh iLife06(website creator) combined with dotMac to serve the website…I drag & drop movies, podcasts, photos & other content-plus the iLife program gives me garageband to create original music so no copyright infringement issues…I think these two programs only work for Mac computers, but if you are serious about visual presentation, that is already not a problem…
This is one reason why I’ve always maintained that YouTube and similar free video hosts/directories/repositories should only be used for distribution purposes. A way to get your video out to others whom you may not reach. Not for marketers to host videos for their own use or even their affiliate’s use for that matter.
It’s like trying to build a list using Bravenet’s free service or Yahoo groups. Very unprofessional.
Getting off the soap box, it’s been 3 years I’ve used Hipcast.com. More than reasonable prices and awfully easy to use.
Thanks everybody for all the service and vendor suggestions. Keep them coming. I’m learning a lot.
To “David L” – AKA the know-it-all:
Uploading megabytes (or gigabytes) of data to a server is not the issue.
Presenting video on the Internet efficiently and economically is. So is designing the look and function of your video player.
YouTube makes these tasks so brainlessly simple and the results so reliable that everyone with a video file can share that file on the Internet today. That’s why they got the $1.2 billion from Google. The volume of video sharing we see today simply did not exist before YouTube.
The “last mile” is the act of putting a produced video in front of a live viewer.
This is the most important and least discussed part of the video making process and until the Internet (and services like YouTube) came along, it was a very tough and expensive thing to do.
There are also other reasons to stop using YouTube.
I woke this morning to find numerous spam emails (asking to be my friend) directly from the YouTube server. Likely the result of a well known marketer’s recently released YouTube-Spam-athon software.
Anyone with an existing YouTube account might want to go in and ensure that email contacts are turned off (not the default).
Happy Father’s Day!
Laura
David, nothing is free including your bandwidth. If only 1000 people view my video of 50 meg I dont have enough zeros on my bank account to pay for the resulting bandwidth downloaded. Hence the main advantage of Youtube.
Thanks Ken,
Great discussion people. I’m very interested in all the points of view and your comments too Ken.
Keep them coming.
Stan
PS – Does anyone think there’ll come a time when YouTube will cease to be free?
Hi, Ken,
Thanks for sending me an email regarding this post,which is of great interest to me, as video marketing has become a red-hot Internet marketing strategy.
The reason why people like me like to use YouTube or Google video to host our videos is because we wanted to tap into the free traffic these popular sites will give to us. Provided that you use a good title incorporating the keywords of your products / services, your video can be found by the YouTube / Google Video users.
So it will help in getting more traffic and building brand using these video platforms.
Regards,
Harrace
Personally, I don’t think it matters one little bit.
YouTube has never been an ideal place to host videos or put on your site due to the fact that it’s compression CODECs are inferior to most of the other free hosting services.
They include Google Video, BrightCove, Veoh, Vimeo and plenty of others.
I recommend using YouTube for one thing: getting noticed and generating traffic for your site.
The key to doing this is simple:
Keyword load your titles (first four words matter most)
Put your domain name in your title
Put your domain name in your description
Keyword load your description
Include a call to action
And put a “bottom 3rd” at the bottom of your video, “Visit http://www.MyDomain.com” so viewers know where to go to watch or get more.
YouTube is one of 35 video hosting services I recommend to put your video onto… Then put your video in a podcast feed, get it listed on iTunes, publish to various podcast directories and then post links to social bookmarking sites.
If you follow the above steps, you’ll get loads of traffic to your site.
Hi Ken:
Thanks for the heads up on changes at YouTube. As someone mentioned, YouTube is still the best place to post your videos to get views on the site itself. YouTube has by far more traffic than any of the other video sites.
So this sets up a two-tier strategy:
1.
Still upload all your videos to YouTube. Be sure to place your URL as a watermark on your video, and also as an intro / extro panel before the video begins and after it ends so folks can pop over and find out more about you.
2.
There are quite a few other free sites you can use that don’t have the issues of the new YouTube viewer for posting videos on your own site:
Revver
http://www.revver.com
Revver posts ads at the end of your videos but does share the ad revenue from views of your video with you. More info on this on their site.
BlipTV:
http://www.blip.tv
Veoh
http://www.veoh.com
Both these sites (amongst others) also have the cut and paste html that creates video players on your web pages. I have heard that the Veoh Player is more compatible with blogs, although I don’t haven’t confirmed that.
So you can leverage YouTube for the eyeballs it brings with it, and one of the other sites to host videos that play directly from your own web pages.
Hope this was helpful.
Rob
DeskPing.com is another website which offers streaming audio / video and playlists. Best of all, ypu can track the progress. In the sense, you can know several stats info associated with each of your media files. They offer the following stats:
– Number of times the media was played
– Number of times the media was played till completion
– Data Transferred due to the media file
– The size of the media file
– The duration of the media file
– The average duration the media file was played
Try DeskPing.com for free here: http://press.deskping.com/Order.aspx
Thanks,
Satya
Ken, or anyone else listening – what about a weekly or monthly post sharing results of traffic generation based on a number of these video service sites?
Many of us post on Google to get the exposure and traffic, with some of the other alternatives listed, what are the findings?
A top 10 list of video listing sites/services in terms of traffic would be very useful.
Jeff
Youtube provides the option of turning off the new related video feature so that embedded youtube videos appear just as they did before the update.
Here is a quote from the youtube blog telling exactly how to do this:
—-
If you’d like to turn off the option to see related videos through your embedded player, simply add “&rel=0” after the video ID number in the embed code. Here’s an example of what your embed code should look like if you’d like to turn off this feature:
—-
Additionally, I personally teach people that there really is no reason to post a video to youtube unless it is for youtube marketing purposes.
The best solution for encoding and hosting videos that I have found is to do it your self.
I use:
FLV producer – the most professional embedded player software available on the market.
Aplus.net – Economy hosting with huge storage and bandwidth allotments.
Flash 8 video encoder – superior video encoding, file compression, and picture quality
I have started using http://freeiq.com/megmcneal . It is so easy to use and to upload video and any kind of content, be it your free content or your paid content and since Brad Fallon is the owner and he is the SEO Expert, it’s very easy to get into the search engines. One of my keyword videos are on the first page of google all ready and I just uploaded it two weeks ago and I got my first sale from it yesterday.
The world of video options and monetizing video is huge now. I put up a resource directory website with video on demand providers, video monetizing options, broadcast sites and many other related areas, help yourself to it. It is free right now, but later might be a membership site. The address is: http://www.broadcastvideomailresource.com
I used to use a dedicated video host to stream videos. Well, I still have a few out there that I have streamed for clients. But Google does everything I want it to. Videos are easy to embed in your blog so you don’t have to worry about other content being near it. Example:
http://www.sellingwithwords.com/2007/06/21/promoting-with-video
On the other hand, I want people to see my video on Google and YouTube and then come to my site. That is the point. Your video needs to speak to your audience.
I’ve been producing corporate and multimedia video for ten years. Back then, people would load (tiny) videos onto an HTTP server and expect viewers to have the patience to download them. The interesting thing for me is not the technology. It is the content. The question to ask is, does your video achieve its purpose.
When I saw that YouTube introduced related videos, I was in the same moment impressed because it is a cool feature, but even more I was greatly disappointed, as that feature destroyed the whole concept of my site in which it it essential that viewers rate the video after seeing it, and not after seeing another few related videos.
That is why I did some research before removing my web-site, and have luckily found on YouTube site how to disable related videos feature. One poster above already mentioned this feature.