Which is better: put product videos on Youtube, or video host like Wistia or Vimeo ???

[GregB123]

I have a couple of new product videos for my ecommerce site. I am wondering if it benefits my marketing more to put the videos on Youtube, or on some video hosting service like Wistia or Vimeo?

The benefits of putting them on Youtube seem to be ease of embedding, the ability to get a link back from the Youtube page, and having them appear in Youtube searches. (I hear that Youtube is now one of the most used search engines)

I'm really not sure what the benefits of using a hosting service are. But I do remember reading articles saying it was better than using Youtube for some reason....

Help?

[Highland]

The largest downside to YouTube is that Google is starting to monetize it and there is a chance users could be redirected away from your site after viewing your video (YT will show them similar videos, which they can click on and go there). So there are downsides to not paying for hosting.
Vimeo and other sites do have some sorts of ads as well, but you can pay to reduce or remove them.

[Travis_Bailey]

Youtube is going to show ads on your video when it's displayed on Youtube. You should be able to opt out of ads on your videos via information in this link. You can also turn off related videos via query parameters in the embedded URL.

My personal favorite parameters are &rel=0 and &modestbranding=1. Happy experiments to you!

[hecklerponics]

Another consideration you may not have made is hosting videos on YouTube, if labelled properly can allow for another avenue of targeting particular searches.

[PhilNottingham]

It really depends what the content is like, but I'd recommend using Wistia as a rule for anything very product focused.

YouTube is more like a social marketing channel than a video hosting platform and you have to ask yourself "is this content relevant for a YouTube audience". You can qualify this by using the YouTube keyword tool to get some ideas about what people are searching for and also look in your YouTube analytics to see how many of your views are actually coming from other youtube.com pages, rather than referrals from Google or other sites. If the content isn't relevant for a YouTube audience, then there is no benefit to having the content on the platform. Additionally, YouTube.com pages can outrank your own site for branded queries, which is suboptimal. The only other thing to bear in mind is that contrary to popular belief, YouTube is not normally a good source of referral traffic. People don't often click from Youtube videos back to your site, so don't rely on this as an option if you're trying to drive traffic to sell products.

Your best bet is probably using Wistia, getting rich snippets for pages on your own site and driving all the traffic to your owned resource, rather than Youtube.com... since your audience can't buy from YouTube, so you're just adding a step into your conversion funnel unnecessarily.