If you’ve made the decision to implement video on your website a question you will undoubtedly have to ask yourself is how you will deliver the video to your prospective clients or web visitors. After all, a video has to be stored somewhere right? The truth is there are hundreds of different options when it comes to video hosting (storage) but the main ones are public and private hosting.

Public Hosting

Public hosting involves placing your video on a video sharing website. There are many out there but really the biggest one by far is YouTube.  This is the way to go in my opinion. The reasons are below:

More Chance of your video going viral
If your video is hosted privately on your own server then the only way for potential clients to view it is on your website. This may not be such a bad thing if your website has a large amount of traffic, however most company websites do not have the required traffic in order to have their videos reach a significant amount of their target customers.

YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google and in Australia alone there are 6.6 million web users who use YouTube to watch a variety of different videos. Why would you stop yourself from reaching this potential market?

Google PageRank
PageRank is a number between 1 and 10 that Google assigns to your website and which is used in its searching algorithm to decide where to place your web page in search results. The higher your page rank the more likely your website will show up for search terms which would mean more targeted traffic and customers for your business. Because YouTube is owned by Google there are advantages to integrating YouTube video on your website. Hosting your videos on YouTube can not only help to have your video seen by more people, but because of its close ties with Google will allow you to raise your PageRank and thus increase traffic to your website at the same time.

Private Hosting

I am against private hosting of video unless the reason is due to privacy or subscription based content or any other type of content that you don’t wish for the world to see. If that is the case then private hosting can be a suitable option.

Faster Delivery Time
Another benefit of private video hosting is that if you are hosting your videos on a fast server then video delivery time (that is, how quickly a video loads in your visitor’s web browser) can improve substantially. This is probably the biggest reason in favor of using private hosting, the guarantee that your video will load fast. After all, there’s no point in having video on your website if the end user has to wait 30 seconds for it too load, in most cases if that’s the case your video will not get seen.

Copyright and Content Control
One other advantage of private hosting is that you are able to have more control of your content and where it’s distributed as well as less chance of someone stealing your video and using it for their purposes. In many cases this is not really a major problem if your goal is to get a message out there.

It is my belief that if you are making content that you want viewed by your potential clients then hosting on YouTube is a great advantage. While YouTube is not perfect its user base makes it difficult to be ignored in the world of online media.