Free vs. Paid Video Hosting Sites — Let’s Discuss

If you’re interested in reading this, you’re probably already aboard the video train, right? Choo-choo!

No, but seriously, video hosting is one of those things where you really want to decide early as to how you plan on hosting your videos. Some videos take hours to upload, so after uploading 150 videos to YouTube, it’s going to be a tougher transition to private video hosting especially if you want to track your analytics in one place.

Since I can’t possibly know whether free or private video hosting is appropriate for your content, let me just offer some insight to both, and some items to keep in mind as you build your video database.

Free Video Hosting

One thing to keep in mind about free hosting is that when you upload a video to a site like YouTube, you may retain ownership, but you often give away the keys to the content as well. If you look closely at YouTube’s terms of service, it goes a little something like this:

“You retain all of your ownership rights in your Content. However, by submitting Content to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and YouTube’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels.”

For many publishers, this is perfectly fine. After all, they’re taking advantage of a giant network of video watchers and utilizing the world’s second largest search engine (YouTube) which happens to be owned by the first largest search engine (Google). Traffic is traffic, right?

The real reasons why some publishers are switching to private hosting are actually because:

• They are selling paid videos.
• They need password-protected videos for members or advertisers.
• They want to post longer videos.
• Their stunning videos are being compressed too much due to size restrictions.
• They want to add a button with a call to action on their website (free YouTube accounts only let you point to other videos).
• They want better analytics.
• They want people to view the content on their own site.
• They don’t want to send people back to YouTube from their site.
• They simply don’t want a YouTube, Vimeo, or any other logo on their content.

By the way, if you have reasons for switching to a private host (or not switching), chime in down in the comments!

Let’s keep this an open discussion though, because the examples I’m listing above are for publishers who are producing an enormous amount of video content. If you’re not there, then simply keep this post in the back of your mind.

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Paid/Private Video Hosting

For publishers who have a legitimate video strategy and are pumping out fistfuls of videos every month, you might be more apt to use a private video host as you grow.

Private video hosting generally comes with a backend of robust analytics, a white-label player, an enormous amount of storage, and a real content management system for your videos. Here’s a look at some of the big guns.

Sprout Video is between $10-750 per month and has neat privacy features like SSL embeds and external domain blocking so that your videos can’t be played on any site but your own.

Like most private players, they also have visual analytics, a very customizable player, mobile playback, playlists and all of those goodies.

Wistia is my personal favorite, and my only bias is that I’m a loyal customer who’s consistently impressed with the features they roll out with. Also, they throw cool Christmas parties for their clients.

More importantly, they really understand monetization, analytics, SEO and everything that’s so important to video marketing. Here are some of their stand-out features:

• Anywhere between $0-240 per month.
• You can build your email list with with email interrupter ads in the middle of the videos.
• You can see who’s been watching your videos with in-depth viewer tracking and video heatmaps. These are cooler than I can explain in a bulleted list.
• You can customize and optimize your videos with SEO features, transcription, video playlists, post-roll calls to action and video player customization.

I promise they didn’t pay, ask, or beg me to recommend them. If you start using them and you don’t like them, you can send a flaming bag of you-know-what to my door, but I have no doubts you’ll be as impressed as I’ve been.

Brightcove is priced between $99 a month and the usual enterprise-level-call-for-pricing per month. This is a popular platform for publishers and media companies who are publishing reels of studio-quality videos every day, and want an integrated ad network or live streaming.

Their least expensive plans offer analytics, social sharing tools, and some styling tools for the player. Their cheapest account doesn’t include a white-label player.

Their most expensive packages include add network integration, live streaming, video SEO and cross-media account sharing.

If you’re simply looking for a platform to host internal videos, check out Google Video for Business.

Now it’s your turn. What platform are you using, and why did you choose free/private/both? There are legitimately great reasons for using both, so I’d love to hear your side of the story in the comments below.