Multimedia Strategy: Video – Host or Post

Video is becoming more and more prevalent on websites.  And why not? If done well it can be a powerful marketing tool.  But what is the best way to get your video content online?  There are two options host or post.

Posting to an external site has advantages:

• Easy to upload video
• No bandwidth costs
• Lots of traffic
• Easy to share (embed, email links, rss feeds, etc)
• Serves as a pseudo social media platform

But there are also some disadvantages:

• Videos are watched on their site, not yours.
• No link benefit if people embed/share your video
• Limited analytics to understand user engagement, video bounce rate, etc
• Tend to be lower quality
• Ads appear on your content
• Limited length/duration
• No custom branding

So taking pros and the cons I tend to use a hybrid strategy.  For shorter length video where highest quality is not a concern put them on a video sharing site (like youtube).  Everything that’s on youtube can be embedded into your site.  This provides the benefit  of uploading video using their pre-set tools and the extra exposure online.  When embedded on your own site you also gain better tracking and can brand the page to ideally suit your online marketing campaigns.

If high quality, duration, or limited compression is a concern, always host the video on your own site.  This is necessary because the video sharing sites won’t support it and  time consuming work-arounds are necessary which make it an inefficient strategy.

Using this method is a way to get some of the benefits of hosting and posting while minimizing the limitations.