Where to host our videos
-
We're in process of moving HookahLounge.net to Hookah.org. We're upgrading all the software packages, adding features, etc. One of the things we're going to do is gradually add a lot of video reviews to our site (400+). All the videos are going to be hookah/shisha related of course.
Should we host the videos on YouTube and put them on related pages in our website? (We have a hookah wiki section with a different page for every shisha flavors, hookah, etc).
or Should we host it on another platform or our own server?
-
SEO. I don't know how where we host the videos affects the ranking of those Wiki pages that the videos would be posted.
-
View count. I think YouTube has a large number of viewers which would mean a lot more people will see our videos. That being said will that be mainly good for brand building? Or will I actually be able to put links on those pages and drive traffic to our site too?
Thanks
-
-
Hi EGOL,
Your points are well taken and it sounds like YouTube is definitely the best option for your business. If you are using video to generate ad revenue then YouTube is a great partner... my comment that their business is built for advertisers plays both ways -- if you want ad revenue then this is a positive attribute of YT, rather than a criticism.
Our customers (ourselves included) use video in a very different way. Instead of a direct source of revenue, we use video as a marketing tool to drive customers to our website, to explain our products and business, to provide support to customers, etc. We don't want YouTube to own these assets and we certainly don't want ads appearing anywhere on our videos or our site. Obviously we are not the solution for everyone using video on the internet and that is not our goal -- we just want to provide an alternative for businesses who want more control over the video assets that they spent lots of time, effort and money producing!
Hopefully that helps to clarify.
Ben
-
Hey Nima,
You actually have to have a massive audience to push 1TB of bandwidth per month... the vast majority of our customers pay only $99.
That said, if you are just using video for basic brand awareness -- comparable to say display advertising -- YouTube is definitely a good option.. and of course you can't argue with the price!
However, if you want to use video to bring traffic to your website or to sell products / services, that's where the value of Wistia and other pro hosting comes in.
Thanks,
Ben
-
I see a lot of these from a very different perspective and traffic numbers influence my opinion....
1. Youtube is built on advertising revenue which means -- (a) their goal is to drive visitors away from your site and towards youtube to watch more videos / ads and (b) they can choose to show ads over your videos anytime
YouTube is the world's second largest search engine. I get all of the traffic that my site can produce and enormous additional traffic generated by youtube search and related videos. These produce far more views of my video than my own site produces and I have a really busy site. Plus lots of traffic moves from links in my youtube video to my site and I am certain that showing my URL in the video brings additional youtube visitors to my site as type-ins and domain queries.
How much traffic does Wistia send to their clients?
And for the youtube revenue model, I make a lot of money from the ad revenue share.
How much is Wistia paying when videos on their service are viewed?
2. From an SEO perspective, all of the SEO benefits go to the YouTube domain, rather than yours when you embed YT vids on your site. Wistia, on the other hand, helps you create a video sitemap so those serps point directly to the videos on your website -> near your call to action, more content, etc!
How often do you see a Wistia video in the Google Search results when you type in "keyword video"? I haven't seen one.
**3. Customization and Control - with Wistia you get to determine exactly how the video player looks and behaves -- from player color to post roll call to action. **
Don't know what you have here but YouTube has some nice features.
4. Support - we have a customer happiness team here that makes sure your questions get answered. That's not in YouTube's business model.
I am really happy with Youtube. No complaints. Making nice money from ads and getting lots of views from their site that never would happen otherwise. Lots of support on YouTube from authors making videos of how to make videos for youtube.
5. Analytics - Our analytics are designed to help you evaluate your videos and improve them over time... The YouTube analytics are designed for advertisers to understand demographics
Do you have engagement metrics that show how my video holds visitors compared to how competing videos hold visitors... then drive me more traffic via rankings increase if my videos are more effective.
I hope advertisers do understand the demographics.... that means more targeted ads and more income for me.
6. Views -- it's true that there are lots of viewers on YouTube, but there is also a massive amount of competing video content. With some notable exceptions, business videos don't rack up the views -- just check our the view count on the next couple of businesses you come across. We focus much more on turning viewers into customers, rather than getting another couple thousand views that lead nowhere.
Where there is great competition that pulls in viewers. I'll take my chances against my competitors and if I win the prize will be really big.
Hope that helps add another perspective to the video hosting discussion. To be clear, we here at Wistia love YouTube and think they've done amazing things for web video... we just think there are better options for the specific purpose of hosting video on your business website!
I am trying to understand who would use a service other than youtube. I am sure that there are some folks who want their videos behind a paywall.. but other than that I don't see a lot of weight on the other side of the balance.
-
Ben,
Thanks for the reply. Wistia is $239 a month for unlimited videos with 1TB bandwidth. That might be industry average (I have no idea) but certainly far more than it would be worth to us.
Also for us number of views is much more important than turning them into customers. Because our YouTube videos are mainly to build our brand online not to sell them anything.
Best of luck to you guys
Nima
-
Hi Nima,
To be completely transparent, I work for Wistia so my answer is admittedly biased! Nonetheless, I would like to share some thoughts on hosting videos on your site with Wistia instead of YouTube.... so here goes:
1. Youtube is built on advertising revenue which means -- (a) their goal is to drive visitors away from your site and towards youtube to watch more videos / ads and (b) they can choose to show ads over your videos anytime
2. From an SEO perspective, all of the SEO benefits go to the YouTube domain, rather than yours when you embed YT vids on your site. Wistia, on the other hand, helps you create a video sitemap so those serps point directly to the videos on your website -> near your call to action, more content, etc!
3. Customization and Control - with Wistia you get to determine exactly how the video player looks and behaves -- from player color to post roll call to action.
4. Support - we have a customer happiness team here that makes sure your questions get answered. That's not in YouTube's business model.
5. Analytics - Our analytics are designed to help you evaluate your videos and improve them over time... The YouTube analytics are designed for advertisers to understand demographics
6. Views -- it's true that there are lots of viewers on YouTube, but there is also a massive amount of competing video content. With some notable exceptions, business videos don't rack up the views -- just check our the view count on the next couple of businesses you come across. We focus much more on turning viewers into customers, rather than getting another couple thousand views that lead nowhere
Hope that helps add another perspective to the video hosting discussion. To be clear, we here at Wistia love YouTube and think they've done amazing things for web video... we just think there are better options for the specific purpose of hosting video on your business website!
Also feel free to check out the video we made a few weeks ago on this topic - http://wistia.com/landing/youtube
Thanks,
Ben
-
Yup, I've used YouTube, Vimeo and a few other services for video hosting and I can say hands down that YouTube is the best one for so many reasons, most of which EGOL has mentioned. The only ONE thing I can say is that a premium Vimeo account is advert free, whereas with YouTube (embeds included) you often have Adsense showing and off the top of my head, I don't think you have control over turning the Adsense adverts on or off.
-
A big bonus is YouTube will serve non-flash versions when embedded on an HTML 5 page, so the embedded video will show on page on an iPad.
-
EGOL, you're always super helpful man. Thank you.
I think I needed a little more convincing to use YouTube and just did.
-
Nima, Mine are on YouTube. Here are the reasons...
-- after google.com, youtube.com has more searches done than any other website
-- YouTube videos work reliably on a range of browser versions
-- Easy to embed
-- good statistics so I know what is popular
-- engagement metrics so I will know what part of each video performs well or loses viewers
-- YouTube videos frequently appear in google.com search results
-- I can link to my website in the video description
-- my website can be associated with my YouTube channel (maybe that influences SERPs??)
-- my videos show up as "related videos" on competitor view pages
-- I can earn adsense revenue from my videos
-- views for videos embedded on my website count as views in YouTube popularity
Good luck with your site. Great domain!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Product Videos and SEO
We sell high end products and we try to educate the consumer as much as possible. Since the attention span is short, we try and break up the features/functions into 5-6 videos. We post everything to Youtube and we have been adding it to our blog as well. I am currently tasked with rebuilding our blog from the ground up. This means getting rid of all the thin content, updating content, etc. We have many videos up there and Just trying to figure out what the best practice should be. The blog is wordpress based and I have the videos now set up in a category structure. Should I just add each video as a video custom post type? Should I have each video posted with a transcript? Or should I post each video with sub background text of the video? We have about 120 videos in all and adding more, but making them longer to reduce the amount of videos per product going forward. Thank you.
Image & Video Optimization | | RevCom0 -
Any Free Video Analytics Tools?
Hi, we are looking for some free video analytics tools. We want to be able to provide our clients or prospective client some stats on how much reach (views, distribution, sites appearing on, etc.) their videos have. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.
Image & Video Optimization | | JohnWeb120 -
Video Schema needs a 2nd opinion
I added a video on one of my client pages via html5, added the video schema to the URL, and submitted a video sitemap and the video still isn't showing up a week later in the SERPs. The keyword I'm typing in is a keyword that DOES trigger video results, so I'm wondering if I screwed something up and would like a second opinion. Search Query that should trigger the video: https://www.google.com/search?q=clinton+township+silverado+1500&oq=clinton+township+silverado+1500&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60.3798j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8 Actual page URL: (html5 video at bottom) http://www.moranchevrolet.com/models/chevrolet-silverado1500 Video Sitemap URL: http://www.moranchevrolet.com/video_sitemap.xml I've added videos in the past via the Wistia automatic schema/sitemap generators and it worked, but via the html5 setup its a little different (like no embed). However, the video appears to check out just fine via the Google schema validator tool. Please let me know if you see anything that doesn't look right. Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | Cobalt0 -
Duplicate Video within site
My questions is about duplicate video content. I haven't been able to get a clear understanding from reading the previous threads. We are hosting our videos with Vimeo and embedding into our site. I want to embed them in 2 locations - on our features page with Java (Can be seen here http://simpletexting.com/features/). I also want to embed them in our resource section so that we can link to them directly. I am wondering what the best way to do this for SEO and whether there is a chance that google will penalize us for duplicate content? If leave out the videos on the features page in the XML sitemap, does that address the problem? There are 2 threads I saw on the topic and they have somewhat conflicting opinion from the same person. http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-video-content-question --Duplicate video on the same site is not a problem http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-video-onsite-how-do-you-treat-this-in-sitemap -- Duplicate videos are a problem as google can recognize them as such due to audio wave patterns, video length etc. Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | SimpleTexting0 -
YouTube Video Transcription
Hello there! I'm wondering if there is any legalities involved with transcribing a video on YouTube and posting the transcription on a site that does not have the rights to the video while sourcing the video and giving credit.
Image & Video Optimization | | OnlineMarketingGuy0 -
Video SEO - Youtube vs. 3rd party hosting with Video Sitemap
We need some feedback on the best place to upload videos. Should we be uploading our videos everywhere (YouTube, Metacafe, Vimeo, etc.)? Note: Currently we are using a 3rd party video video hosting solution called Treepodia. Previously we used Wistia. Both host our videos, and submit a Video Sitemap through Webmaster tools. When one of these videos shows up in search results and somebody clicks on it, they are directed back to our website. Are we competing against ourselves if we upload videos to other networks like Youtube, etc. if we are already submitting a Video Sitemap through a 3rd party? I've noticed we rank higher in Google Videos search for our Youtube videos vs. our 3rd party hosted videos. Also, how do Youtube video views tie into this situation... we used to embed videos via Youtube embed code. Now we seem to be missing out on the extra views we were getting by doing so. Ultimate question: host videos through a 3rd party and submit a video sitemap OR host videos on Youtube and embed on our website?
Image & Video Optimization | | tennisexpress0 -
VSEO - Is backlinks help youtube video to rank well??
hey, I made a test & got backlinks to 2 youtube videos of mine and saw what should happening in next few days..but nothing got! I didn't get update or change in my videos even if the keywords are low competitions.. but when I read many posts & experts say that getting backlinks to your youtube video or VSEO count by google and we should doing it! the only way I've found to improve your youtube video ranking in google is to add it in blog & use video sitemap! but I'm also use video to direct affiliate link & there where I think backlinks should work to help me. I would to know from your experience is that worth to do or not or if backlinks for youtube are link ping we should do it directly when we upload video? PS: any info or idea you've it can be a very helpful solution for all! thnx
Image & Video Optimization | | akitmane0