Wistia Versus YouTube: Pros and Cons of These Video Platforms

Video marketing, another section of content marketing that brings your marketing strategy power. As we dwell into the world of content marketing through the video medium, we learn that there are several different reasons why we develop a video in the first place. In turn, this presupposes that there is some type of strategy that is connected with the video we have produced.

Why does a business create videos? For an abundance of reasons, I’m sure. Businesses would like to educate customers (viewers) about their methods and processes, immerse viewers in their business culture, teach viewers how to perform certain tasks, and/or entertain viewers with comical skits. It is highly probable that any business would like to have a video library that satisfies all of the viewer’s visual needs.

Once you have decided what type (or types) of video to create, the next step is choosing the perfect video hosting platform. There are many different video hosting websites out across the internet. I would like to highlight just two: Wistia and YouTube. Remember, choosing a video hosting platform should go hand in hand with what you are trying to accomplish by producing the video in the first place.

Wistia

Pros:

• Each video uploaded to Wistia is automatically encoded with Flash/HTML5 versions at multiple resolutions that provide a high quality video resolution on any device tailored to your internet connection quality to allot the least amount of buffering possible.


• Customization. You can choose and select which controls that you want and which ones look great with the design of your website. You have the option to add social sharing buttons to your video so any viewer can instantly share this with their corner of the social media world.


• Viewer-to-Lead conversion. Wistia includes a Turnstile option which has the ability to do two things: collect emails from viewers interested in your content and link to add collected email leads into your email marketing campaigns/other marketing automation tools. Wistia also includes a calls-to-action capability where you have the power to guide viewers where you want to go with any clickable call-to-action button at the end of your video.


• Analytics. Learn what engages your audience the most and the least. Wistia includes video heat-maps that show exactly which part of the video viewers watched, where they skipped, and re-watched. It even shows you if a certain viewer has watched other videos of yours before as well. These analytics further provide information surrounding when a person stops watching the video, keying you in on which part of this content holds viewer interest and which part loses that interest.


• Video supported SEO so your video can rank higher in search results and the pages that your video is hosted on also rank higher in search results.


• No advertisements whatsoever.

Cons:

• It can be very costly, especially if you want numerous videos and video features. They do have a free plan that includes only 3 videos, pricing actually starts at about $25 a month up to $300 a month, but of course you save money when you pay annual fees versus monthly fees.


• Wistia is not searchable like YouTube.


• Wistia has a slightly higher difficulty with integration with some sites, but not enough difficulty to sway you away.

YouTube

Pros:

• Popularity. By a long shot, YouTube is the most popular video hosting website out there. Tremendous amounts of video are uploaded to this site daily. Viral-ability, I call it, is another thing YouTube is very capable of facilitating because of its huge popularity. Going viral is something almost every single video uploader across YouTube wants to achieve. It’s YouTube fame.


• Owned by Google. Since YouTube is now owned by Google, YouTube videos will obviously show up in Google searches before any other related video from a different hosting agent. Search result rankings from YouTube are catered a little more than other video hosting platforms.


• Completely free. It’s free to use, free to upload, free to watch, free to search, okay…you get the point. It’s all free.

Cons:

• The cost of freedom. Yes, YouTube being completely free to use is wondrous but it has a cost. Because it’s free that means that there is no dedicated support or guaranteed uptime.


• Mostly videos that go viral or have a certain attainment of views get bombarded with advertisements. This can cause anger and frustration amongst viewers.


• Lack of customization. Video embedding and end-of-video customization, such as clickable CTAs or email harvesting, can be very tricky compared to other video hosting platforms.


• YouTube comments. For lots of people this is single-handedly the best and worst thing about YouTube. YouTube commenters are vicious. They will say anything and everything. People could call this trolling depending on what the end result these commenters are wishing to get out of their comments. Comments could be considered virtual word-of-mouth, both positive and negative, but from my YouTube experience most comments are very negative.

My conclusion leads back to why you are creating a video in the first place. If you want to embed a video on your site and receive great analytics to help you capture leads and customers, Wistia is your go-to. If you are looking to entertain in some shape or fashion, YouTube is your go-to. I say, why not both? The combination of both of these video hosting platforms can be very beneficial to any business. Together, both of these agents can give you all that you have ever wanted to achieve out of a video marketing campaign.

via Business 2 Community http://ift.tt/1nHDDLO