Here at Motiv, a question we are commonly asked by clients when discussing the distribution digital video content is ‘what is the best platform to host on.’ Our answer to this has changed somewhat over the past few months and of course, it depends somewhat on the purpose of the video.
In a recent study conducted by Searchmetrics, 5% of all keyword searches return at least one video blended into Google’s web search results, and 8 out 10 of those videos belong to YouTube. It is interesting to note that the proportion of YouTube videos in Google’s Universal Search results was 82% at the end of 2014. This leaves just an 18% share for other video platforms. YouTube still dominates – which isn’t too surprising considering Google is its parent company.
Searchmetrics state this is due to the decrease in the number of videos from other platforms. The study examined YouTube and its six largest competitors and found that YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion were treading water throughout 2014, while Metacafe, Hulu, Muzu, and Helpster were sinking to the bottom of the ocean.
There are also Facebook videos to consider. Facebook just announced that it had served up 4 billion video views a day in April 2015, up from 3 billion in January, and just 1 billion back in September 2014. Now, these numbers suggest that Facebook, as a platform for video distribution is not to be ignored and presents a great marketing opportunity. However, Facebook videos will not show up in Google Universal Search results. And they are probably not going to anytime soon because Facebook doesn’t let Google crawl its pages, which accounts for the lack of visibility.
At Motiv, we host our videos on both YouTube & Vimeo. Our reasons for doing so are that Vimeo gives us a lot of control over how the video is displayed. This is extremely useful when it comes to displaying video on our website or sharing work with a client. Vimeo (pro) is also great for displaying a portfolio of work, providing multiple options for grouping videos and laying out content in a logical fashion.
We also leverage YouTube due to its’ power in search results. As the Searchmetrics study shows, a correctly optimised YouTube video can go a long way in terms of getting your content seen by a lot of people and is clearly the winner when it comes to search engine visibility.
Therefore, YouTube can still be considered the No.1 all purpose hosted video solution with other platforms becoming useful depending on your usage needs.
Premium video hosting platforms such as Wistia or Brightcove will be discussed in a future post.
