Some law firms post their videos on their own website. Some post them on YouTube or on other video-sharing sites. When they post them on YouTube, they typically also embed them on their own site.
What difference does it make?
Here are the differences:
1. Hosting the videos on your site uses your bandwidth. A 10 MB video (which is pretty typical of a short video) watched by 100 visitors uses 1 GB of bandwidth. Many web-hosting companies limit your bandwidth usage and will charge you extra when you go over the limit. Be sure you know what you’re paying per gigabyte. If video is going to drive up your costs, look into hosting your videos on a service like Amazon S3. Of course, YouTube is free.
2. Your site may be slow. Some hosting companies serve up files faster than others. If your web-hosting provider isn’t optimized for large video files, you may leave your visitors waiting and waiting for the file to load. That’s not good.
3. Hosting videos on your site may be challenging. Services like YouTube make it exceedingly easy to upload your videos. Doing it on your site may require you to install software and won’t necessarily be as user-friendly as a service optimized for video uploading.
4. There are annoying ads on YouTube. Services like YouTube make their money by running ads. Your videos will be surrounded by ads and might even be preceded by ads depending on the options you select with YouTube.
5. YouTube has restrictive time limits. Services like YouTube limit the length of your video. Currently, YouTube limits videos to 15 minutes. That’s probably not an issue for you, but you may bump up against the limit with certain projects.
6. You won’t get links back if the videos are on YouTube. When you post your videos on YouTube, others are likely to link to them using the web address for YouTube rather than your firm address even if you’ve embedded the videos on your site. You lose the traffic and other advantages provided by gaining links back to your site if you host the video on YouTube.
7. YouTube posts view numbers. YouTube tells the world how many times your videos have been watched. That’s great if you’ve got tens of thousands of views. It’s not so good if you’ve had seven views and six of those are your mother. Keeping the number private might be best to avoid scaring off prospective clients.
8. YouTube has traffic and you don’t. YouTube has huge traffic. Your videos will likely be watched much more often on YouTube than on your site. YouTube has become the second-largest search engine behind Google, and users flood the site with queries for information. Viewers will find you on YouTube.
Why Choose When You Don’t Have To?
Deciding whether to host the videos on your site or on YouTube is a tough call. However, the good news is that you can do both. You can host your videos yourself and post them on your site, and you can also put them on YouTube. Doing that will give you the best of both worlds. That’s the choice we made, and it works for us.
Even doing both presents you with choices.
- Do you want to put the full version of the videos in both places?
- Would you rather put teaser videos on YouTube and direct viewers back to your site?
- Should you make distinctions within the videos depending on where they’re hosted?
- Should you include a special introduction for the video if it’s on YouTube rather than on your site?
- Should you have different disclaimers?
There are lots of considerations when determining where to host video. The key is to evaluate the issues, develop a strategy, and then execute. Execution is the most important element. You’re better off with a video hosted in the wrong place than with no video at all. Start shooting.
