Hosting videos on your own site can be problematic. Videos use up valuable space, eat up your bandwidth allowance, and load times can be slow and ponderous. For this and other reasons most website owners upload videos to a third party video site . Then they embed the videos onto their own website or share them via social media. The third party then resizes and hosts the video reducing loading time on your site to a minimum.
There are two main players in the free video hosting market, YouTube and Vimeo. Which is the best to use and why?
YouTube
YouTube is arguably the leader in online video. They definitely beat all others if you want to maximize video sharing. YouTube interacts well with social media and has a huge following. The goal of many is to have a video go viral on YouTube guaranteeing massive exposure.
YouTube Pros:
- Vast Audience, social sharing encouraged and easy.
- File up to 20GB can be uploaded.
- 15 minute file length which can be increased by verifying your account.
- Videos can be private, only seen by those you allow.
- Videos can be prevented from showing in search results.
- High Definition.
YouTube Cons:
- Related videos can draw people away from what you wanted them to see.
This is the main draw back with YouTube. How many times have you looked something up, only to end up following thread after thread and forgetting what you went there for? Still if you wish your video to go viral or be shared easily YouTube is probably the best option.
Vimeo
Vimeo is a newer site then YouTube and the videos hosted tend to be more select than those on YouTube.
Vimeo Pros
- No related videos are shown at the end of your video.
- Up to 10 files per day can be uploaded (500mb per week or more on their paid for service)
- No length restrictions.
- High Definition.
Vimeo Cons
- Audience size is much smaller compared to YouTube.
- YouTube has a much bigger search engine than Vimeo.
The lack of related videos is the main reason that Vimeo wins over YouTube, and for this reason alone many professionals use it to showcase their work.
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