HI; I am working on starting a new web site. I create (write, film, photo) all of my own work. I plan to spend 6 to 12 months growing the site before I put any type of advertisements on it. For my video work, I can self-host it (pay for hosting) or use a service such as Youtube and Viddler. From a marketing perspective I am wondering if there is going to be any advantage to hosting my own videos. My content is all legal and perfectly acceptable for Youtube (pets, training, health). If I host my own videos, I know I would be able to put my own ads on the videos. I would not be able to have that level of control if I host them on Youtube or Viddler. I don't have any idea how valuable in video ads could be. The decision I need to make now is if I should spend the money to self-host all my videos and retain full control over them, or use a free service such as Youtube. Thank very much for any suggestions you can offer. j
Hi there, I've been dealing with video sites for a while now and been through a lot of trial and error. As you probably already know, hosting your own videos can and will boost your bandwidth through the roof - so in case you decide to do it, make sure that your bandwidth limits are very flexible and whatever you do, DON'T use a shared hosting account for video streaming. There's a lot of cloud services out there for very reasonable prices. But I digress - from marketing perspective, self-hosting does have quite a few tremendous advantages. The first one being the one you mentioned - being able to host your own ads - and to answer your questions, in-video ads can deliver massive CTR. But secondly (and this applies more to you as you won't be using any ads in the beginning), hosting your own traffic will help you keep the traffic on your site, which is VERY important. What I mean by this is that by using an external service, the provider you use (such as YouTube) tends to "steal" your traffic - i.e. someone watches a video on your site and then proceeds to watch another video directly from YouTube, resulting in you donating this visitor to YouTube. By hosting the video yourself, you can pinpoint where your visitors go next, not even talking about nice gadgets that help you relate certain videos of your own site and keep the visitors on your site for longer. Just my two cents worth
I have my development for my sites sitting on a shared host with 300,000GB a month in transfer. I would be very reluctant to trust any shared host to do much more than serve a tiny amount of video traffic. I've look at a couple cloud services, and they are pretty reasonable for what you get. Though seriously if I do any amount of video on my own server, I just don't want to deal with problems and will likely go to RackSpace for hosting. Thanks very much for making the point about the traffic. I read a few things on here about people doing very well with videos hosted strictly on YouTube. I would much rather keep that traffic on my own site if at all possible. Thanks again for your response, j
I think the amount of money you spend to host the videos yourself should depend on what you expect your ROI to be. For instance, if you have to spend $200 a month to hosting, but can earn $1000 a month from the videos, than obviosuly, you are where you want to be. If you have already made money by putting your videos on Youtube, then you know you can make a profit by hosting them by yourself. On the other hand, if you haven't earned money with the videos you have placed on Youtube, then you aren't likely going to earn money from the videos you host on your website. One factor you need to consider with hosting the videos yourself is that they aren't likely to produce nearly as many hits as Youtube videos, unless you are getting tons of traffic with your website.
It would be good to do both: put up clips on YouTube in order to draw traffic, but during the video have a link to your site where you're hosting the video yourself and draw traffic that way. YouTube is a great way to draw in traffic to your site, and the CTR is enormous on self-hosted videos so you'd make quite the profit off of it.
Thank you for the responses and suggestions. I have no real idea of the revenue potential for any of my videos. Most of the videos I have online at the moment are not produced / edited to the quality that I feel is necessary for a business site. My hosting / web site projects are going to be an investment, I plan to run them without ads for a year, so they are very well established before I place ads. Thanks for the Suggestion about putting some videos on YouTube to help drive traffic. Jamie
I would use sites other than youtube aswell. Although youtube is unbeaten for the amount of traffic it gets, sites like dailymotion, revver and metacafe are also getting some nice traffic. There is a service called tubemogul that allows you to upload videos to multiple sites in one go. Al these sites can then contain links back to your own site thus increasing traffic flow to your site. Some video sharing sites make it hard to include links in the description but if you watermark your videos with your logo and URL, people who are intrested in your content can check out your site
While hosting your videos on your site has some great advantages, you really don't have the opportunity to go viral with them. When you use youtube and other video related sites you already have an audience that can increase your traffic very quickly. I would recommend hosting on video sharing sites until you decide to place ads on them. That way you can use the power of social and save costs.