VS.
As a video production company with social and multimedia elements we are no strangers to the dilemma of whether to host and share our content via YouTube or Vimeo. There are benefits and disadvantages to both, but we are here to try to help you figure out which is best for you.
First, YouTube. The site was launched in 2005 and quickly became the largest online video sharing community. Since that time it has morphed from a simple way to watch dumb cat videos to a vast network and behemoth site owned by Google. It now includes bells and whistles, add-ons, closed captioning, intelligent plug-ins, original content, channels, and television apps to help you share the dumb cat videos across your social media platforms. Obviously, you can watch much, much more.
What Google and YouTube have done with the site is amazing. It certainly has its advantages. If you are looking to make good original content, and possibly see some ad revenue from it, YouTube is set up perfectly. Anyone in good standing can allow ads to be shown before their videos or in the side bars of their page. They can then be paid through Google AdSense and make actual money (even if only a little for a while). YouTube also tends to load quickly and has interactivity on all sorts of devices, often natively. One example is that the iPhone come with a YouTube app as part of the OS. With YouTube’s high traffic volume, it is also much more likely that someone will see your video when looking at another video with similar content.
The downsides of YouTube tend to be more about the picture quality of the content. Because of the high volume of videos on YouTube and some of the compression rates, video quality can be compromised at times. We’ve noticed that particularly when we are watching videos embedded in other sites from YouTube, sometimes the playback is not as smooth as one might hope.
Vimeo on the other hand offer very high quality video playback. The content looks great, and the interface allows the user access to aspect ratio options that offers greater flexibility. Vimeo was started as a place for people to share original content. This isn’t a place to upload the video of grandma being scared awake by a sneezing baby. This is a site to seek out professional quality video content.
Vimeo doesn’t list ads on its site, so users won’t make money from 3rd parties trying to sell something, but the videos won’t be bogged down by commercials either. Vimeo allows sharing and embedding just like YouTube, and we’ve actually found that the playback on Vimeo tends to be smoother- remember, this is a site about quality video, afterall.
The needs of the company or individual will determine the best platform to host your videos. Here at PMI we tend to use both and send people to the content that makes the most sense for them. If you wanted to show off a cinematically exceptional piece you produced you would likely host it on Vimeo. If you had a client who needed to see a rough edit just to get an idea of where you are, hosting it on YouTube and making it a private video would allow for quick and easy viewing.
Often, we upload to both sites and share URLs from one site or another based on the needs of each client or circumstance. And that is it- figure out what works best for you, and use these tools to make you more efficient.
