Raised Eyebrow Blog

We find ourselves recommending YouTube to our clients on a regular basis as a low-cost and easy way for them to post videos on their websites and blogs. Why?

• It’s free. Set up an account, upload your video, and you’re good to go — YouTube will do the work of converting your video into a web-friendly format (Flash video, which has near-universal support among internet users), optimizing it for fast streaming, and even providing you with the code you’ll need to embed it into your web pages.
• YouTube has a built-in audience. Sure, your website gets good traffic, but YouTube gets crazy-good traffic. And YouTube visitors can and will find your video when it’s added to YouTube’s database, so long as you tag it with the appropriate keywords. You never know when and how this’ll pay off for you — for example, Vancouver-based vocal ensemble musica intima saw online CD sales increase when one of the singers posted a couple of YouTube videos, prompting a whole new audience to discover their exquisite sound.
• Search engine positioning. Just as you can leverage YouTube’s audience share, you can also piggyback on their excellent search engine ranking to get your videos to appear among the top search results for your keywords.
• Built-in technical support. By using a hosted solution like YouTube for your videos, you benefit from their technical support system.

Now, all that being said, YouTube isn’t the perfect solution for everyone. It does have a few downsides:

• Time limits. YouTube won’t allow videos longer than 10 minutes to be uploaded. (However, there’s an argument to be made that most web users won’t sit still for longer than 10 minutes, anyway…)
• Low quality. Because YouTube videos are optimized for fast streaming, you do lose some quality in picture and sound.
• The logo. YouTube places their logo on your video, so even if you embed the video on your website, their branding will show up.

For most people’s purposes, the benefits outweigh the costs, though of course each organization’s needs will be different. And YouTube isn’t the only option out there; Vimeo is another popular video hosting site, though its reach isn’t quite as wide as YouTube’s and their content policies are different.

Got a YouTube story to share? Post it in the comments.

Tags: hosted video, streaming video, vimeo, youtube

This entry was written by Lauren Bacon on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 12:19 pm, is filed under Nonprofit Tech, The Social Web, and is tagged as hosted video, streaming video, vimeo, youtube. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.