Summary: There are pros and cons to hosting your vids on Youtube, just as there are pros and cons to hosting on your own server.
To host your video content on Youtube or not to host on Youtube? This is the question! The growing interest in video content has left many business leaders unsure which way to go. If this is you, this article helps you answer the question and more.
There are three opinions with video content, as far as we’re concerned:
- Host video content on your own server
- Upload and host video content on Youtube
- Do both (host it on your own server, and have a Youtube channel)
There are many industry opinions on this topic, with all answers getting positive and negative comments.
Nobody can deny that YouTube videos rank incredibly well. But the downside of hosting on Youtube (from an SEO point of view) is that you create a video with excellent content, upload it to Youtube and then when it gets popular, they benefit from all the positive links, not your own website. What’s more, YouTube will usually insert a watermark on to your video and may insert adverts or links to other videos. If you then embed the video on your website, you’re advertising Youtube (and goodness knows what else).
Many companies don’t go for the all out Youtube hosting because of this. Instead, they have their videos on their website and then have their own Youtube channel, giving them their own space (like a profile page) which they brand up with their colours, and have their own contact information on it – making it very clear where the video content came from. Want to see ours? It’s here: Angel SEO on YouTube.
We don’t host our vids on YouTube but we do have a YouTube account which we upload our vids to, to get more coverage for them. However you’ll see that on our website we don’t have Youtube watermarks/branding on the vids, because they’re hosted elsewhere (we can’t avoid the watermarking that YouTube adds to the vids on our channel, however!).
Doing things this way, there’s no SEO issue with duplicate content like there is for identical pages, as Google doesn’t really understand what’s in the video and generally relies on the context of the video as well as links to it, to determine what it’s about.
With Youtube’s ever increasing popularity, it can be good to have video content on their site but you do need to make sure you milk the coverage it will give you. Somewhere in the video your logo needs to be shown – for example, a small logo placed in the bottom right hand corner. If your video starts gaining traffic it could appear on the landing page for your business sector or even Youtube’s own home page, therefore increasing the amount of potential views. This is coverage that you would normally have to pay tens of thousands of pounds for – the site is ranked #3 in the world according to Alexa’s traffic rankings for the past three months.
If your campaign does take off from the coverage provided by YouTube, the pros of this are that Youtube deals with all that traffic for you – but you still have the vids that are not watermarked on your site too.
Hosting vids on your own servers means you can also publish an iTunes feed, gaining subscribers both through YouTube and the video feed, which you can subscribe to using an RSS reader, through iTunes itself, or using other video/podcast readers.
Contrary to popular belief, when you upload videos to Youtube, you retain your ownership rights in your content – you grant a ‘limited licence’ to YouTube and its site visitors. The licence allows YouTube to
“use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform that Content in connection with the provision of the Service and otherwise in connection with the provision of the Service and YouTube’s business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats [and through any media channels]”
and allows users of YouTube to
“access your Content through the Service, and to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display and perform such Content”.
This is quite a wide ‘limited’ licence although in practice users will just embed your video content on their pages, thus increasing its popularity, which most people are generally happy with.
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