Why YouTube?

A client just asked me if it’s possible to keep their company videos within their own website, running it off their own web servers, instead of posting it on YouTube. He didn’t want to involve YouTube but was open to Vimeo.

I told him that anything is possible with enough resources, but I highly recommend we go with YouTube. Keep in mind that this is MY opinion, and I do my best to know as much as I can but I don’t know everything, so take it with a grain of salt. My reasons:

1. YouTube is a division of Google, and we all Google. Google is the most popular search engine, used by the most people. When Google acquired YouTube, it benefited the both of them; Google brought its cachet (number of eyeballs, trust, ubiquity) to YouTube, and YouTube brought its content creators to make Google even more powerful. So content meets marketing.
2. YouTube is the fastest growing search engine, and it’s not slowing down. One of the big reasons is technology has made it affordable and accessible to make your own YouTube videos (you can make videos using your smartphone then instantly upload it to YouTube), so there’s much more video content out there, on all topics, which means the average person on their mobile devices will more and more likely turn to YouTube to find answers. If you can’t find it on Google, look on YouTube. Which is owned by Google. See the pattern here?
3. YouTube is a more accessible and adaptable platform than Vimeo or most other video services–you can easily share a YouTube video, embed it onto your website without messing around with hidden codes, you can post it in a Facebook page or post, you can link to it in an email, and you can even resize the video to fit whatever platform you’re serving to. These aspects have their pros and cons of course, but the accessibility and versatility of a YouTube video, again in my opinion, is unmatched.
4. YouTube’s server farms continue to grow and evolve, backed up by Google’s resources–their expansion is basically UNLIMITED. If you try to stream your company’s videos off your own server, once those videos become very popular and you get tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of eyeballs watching, sooner or later you’ll have to upgrade your equipment to allow for more people to access your content. By going with YouTube, yes, you’ll have to put your corporate videos on their servers, but they will have the burden of maintenance and eating the cost of upgrades.
5. If YouTube’s servers get hacked, it’s better than your own company’s servers getting hacked. Your company’s security isn’t compromised, and your data is still safe since you still have the original videos on your company’s machines, hopefully backed up to other devices and your corporate cloud account. Even if all your videos on YouTube get wiped out because of a YouTube server malfunction (and from my knowledge this has never happened), you can simply re-upload your videos back onto YouTube when their machines are back online.
6. YouTube has an app for pretty much every platform out there. If you try to serve videos from your own server, you’d have to spend that extra time to test your videos on different browsers, different computers with different configurations, cellphones, tablets, smart TVs, etc.
7. YouTube is OPEN-ENDED, meaning that the experience doesn’t have to end after viewing the current video. Because of YouTube’s Autoplay feature, where a related video will automatically play after the current one has finished, as well as its Playlist feature that can “play all” within that playlist, if your company has, let’s say, a collection of 50+ videos, you can configure YouTube to allow the viewer to play ALL your videos back-to-back until they’ve seen everything you have to offer. In terms of “stickiness”, the ability to make your audience spend all day with you, watching your videos…well, think about how valuable that is to your marketing strategy and bottom line.

This is just the tip of the YouTube iceberg. In the near future, I’ll talk about monetization methods, using YouTube in tandem with other social media, using YouTube for fundraising events, and using the right video and audio equipment to make YouTube videos, among other things.

Stay tuned, and thanks for reading.

Gerardo San Diego