Congratulations! You’ve finally finished your video and it’s just like you: Awesome! All you have left is to upload the video to your website, but it’s not the only option—or the best option. With over 1 billion users, YouTube has grown to become the second largest search engine behind Google.
This video platform offers user a wealth of options over self-hosting and is the prime way to show off your video. Learn a few reasons why uploading your video to YouTube is much more beneficial than self-hosting.
1. Gargantuan Viewership
The success of your video greatly hinges on its visibility. If your site already has a significant number of visitors, self-hosting may prove to offer several benefits. For example, LifeLock.com hosts its testimonial videos because the brand is national and has a huge audience of regular visitors on the site. However, if you are looking to increase viewership and expand your brand image, YouTube offers your video exponentially more exposure.
When you upload a video to YouTube, other users can also embed the video on their own blog or website. As a result, it makes your video infinitely more accessible to others. Best of all, if you are interested in making your video viewable to only a few choice individuals, YouTube allows you to do that as well.
2. Easy to Use
Choosing to upload the video and host it on your site will more than likely require a certain level of HTML5 coding experience. In addition, you will need to choose a video player, which is a small piece of software that is designed to automatically detect the device viewing your video and the connection speed of the device. If you don’t have coding experience or experience with web video players, YouTube is the easiest way to share your video.
With YouTube, all you have to do is follow a few simple steps such as:
- Create an account
- Sign in
- Upload the video
As a matter of fact, uploading a video to YouTube is so simple, users can do it from their Smartphones within just a few minutes.
3. Bandwidth
Since YouTube has numerous dedicated servers to manage the boatloads of traffic, you will not run into problems with bandwidth when you upload to this video repository. On the other hand, if your video goes viral and you choose to self-host, the low-bandwidth limitations of your site could result in a crash. In addition, YouTube doesn’t limit the number of videos that you can upload.
4. Conversions
YouTube allows users to upload a video in just about any of the most popular formats. It also automatically converts the video into the most standard format supported by the majority of browsers. If you self-host the video, however, you may have to convert the video to multiple formats to accommodate the wide range of browsers used by your audience.
5. Searchability
When you upload a video to YouTube, you can utilize keywords in the titles, descriptions, and tags to enable users to search by topics and keywords. Simply put, YouTube automatically allows your videos to be indexed by search engines. According to Forrester Research, videos are 50 times more likely to make it to the top of a search engine page in comparison to text. If you choose to self-host the video, you will have to make sure you include various plug-ins to have the video indexed.
