YouTube is terrific. I use it to host a number of videos you might have seen here. It’s easy, cheap, and incredibly convenient. However, it’s not the ultimate video hosting solution for your firm website or blog. I’d suggest you avoid it.

When you put videos on YouTube, you may end up with advertisements on your videos. YouTube uses pre-roll and lower-third ads in some circumstances. Those ads might be for your competitors. That’s less than ideal.

Additionally, when visitors click through from your site to YouTube, there is a strong likelihood that they are going to be introduced to videos you don’t want associated with your practice. For instance, I was watching a family law attorney video on YouTube yesterday and found myself distracted by the Lady Gaga video “Bad Romance.” YouTube assumed it was a “related video.”

As an aside, the divorce lawyer video had been viewed about 200 times. The Lady Gaga video had 252 million views. The Lady Gaga video was also MUCH more interesting than the divorce lawyer video. (Sorry, Miles.)

Let me clarify one thing: I’m not suggesting that you avoid YouTube entirely. I’m only talking about the videos you have on your website. I suggest you put videos on YouTube in addition to having them on your site. YouTube is definitely a place to expose your expertise; I just don’t want you to embed your YouTube videos on your site using the YouTube embeds. The people coming to your videos straight from YouTube are already exposed to the ads and suggestions. That’s unavoidable.

So what should you do with your videos? Here’s what we do, and it works for us on our family law site. We upload the videos to a private hosting account. (We use Libsyn.). Libsyn is one of many hosting services. Libsyn, like many of its competitors, offers accounts starting at $5 per month. We’ve been happy with this service.

You’ve got to set up a player on your site to play the videos if you’re not using YouTube. When you’re using YouTube, you’re embedding the YouTube player on your site. When you leave YouTube, you’ve got to have your own player. We use JW Media Player from LongTail Video. The Libsyn/JW Media Player combination has served us well on our sites for some time. Our sites run on WordPress, and LongTail Video makes integration between its product and WordPress easy and seamless. Each platform is different, so you’ll need to do some checking to find out what’s going to work for you.

By avoiding YouTube, you introduce some hassles and some expense. You also avoid some potentially embarrassing and damaging fallout. For attorney videos, I’d suggest you look somewhere other than YouTube and other public video hosting sites.