Which Online Video Sharing Site Should You Use?

In a recent conversation on Progressive Exchange, Michael Hoffman of See3 shared some thoughts about considerations when choosing a video sharing site. With his permission, I wanted to share them here, as I think they're really useful. Michael said:

You need to look at video sites in two ways. One is as a host -- a free host -- for your video. The other is as a social network, a community of video viewers.

YouTube is both a free host and a social network. As a host, it's OK, but not great. There are limits on format, the quality is OK, not great (as the default).

YouTube is also a huge social network, where people are browsing video, making comments, and -- IF this is your goal and you do the right things -- there are ways to get your video to a community who otherwise wouldn't see it.

I actually think for most nonprofits the overall size of YouTube's community is not really that essential a point. You will only get a tiny fraction of that audience and could potentially get more elsewhere, even though the overall audience is less.

For our Guide To Online Video, we used Vimeo on our site because we love the quality and format options. So in this case, our main interest was using it as a host. Blip is another good choice when the host issue is the main thing. We don't expect to get views of our videos from the Vimeo community.

But we also put the first video on YouTube, so get it out to our YouTube friends but also to be able to embed it in Ning and other communities easily.

In terms of using video for outreach there are two basic camps on this question. One says, put it everywhere. For this, go to TubeMogul. One upload, then you get on dozens of sites. Those in this camp say, why not? With your video on many sites, many more people will see it and you can have communities of supporters among the people who make those communities their home.

Then we have the YouTube only folks. Like Brave New Films. They say, we don't want to "dilute" the views, because if we get enough views on YouTube the video goes into rotation in other places on the site -- like most viewed or most commented, etc... where it can get exposed to many more people. (it is also impressive to have videos with huge numbers of views and helps with PR and other things.)

It's a good point, but 99% of nonprofit videos never reach the threshold to get into this additional rotation anyway and most of their views are ones they sent through email and embeds.