Where To Host Your Videos

Ok, so you’ve decided to go the online video route. But should you host your videos yourself, or should you just upload them to YouTube (or somewhere else)?

It’s a great question, and one that Barry Schwartz discussed today at Search Engine Roundtable. He says to do both, and I would have to agree. Barry writes:

Let me start off by saying that Google and most search engines have a very tough time understanding the content within the video. Yes, they are testing out speech recognition and other factors, but right now, these search engines don’t rank videos based on the words spoken in a video. They determine the relevancy of the video based on meta data, content around the video, links to the video, the video title and so on.

That being the case, duplicate content is not really much of an issue in videos then it is with standard content on the web. Why do I say this? I publish our videos both on YouTube and on my own server because I am not currently worried about duplicate content in the video search space.

There are plenty of reasons why you would want your video in both places. Like Barry says, he hosts his videos on his site so he can offer them via his own feeds and set up an iTunes feed, etc (We also have our videos on our own sites and YouTube both).

With YouTube, though, you are opening your content up to a much wider audience. Not only is it BY FAR, the biggest online video destination, but it’s also the 2nd largest search engine. There are also plenty of ranking opportunities on and with YouTube as well.