What advantages does Wisita (video hosting) give over using YouTube?

[Fasthosts]

I am currently undertaking a review of how we use video on our website and I am wondering what advantages Wistia provides over using YouTube?

My current stance is that we would use Wisita for our high-production value videos, and YouTube for videos embedded within our content pages so we can make use of the playlist functionality.

If anyone can provide insight into this, I would be most grateful.

Thanks in advance,

Chris

[TomRayner]

Hi Chris

One of the big, big advantages hosting with Wistia has is because your are self-hosting the content, you can help the webpage the video is on to rank, along with having a rich snippet appear in search.  With embedded YouTube videos, more often than not the video and the snippet goes straight to the page itself, causing a loss of traffic.  Self-hosting prevents this and also keeps a video surrounded by relevant content.

Embedding videos and getting rich snippets in search is a huge benefit and one well worth looking into.  With that in mind, I gone only point you towards Phil Nottingham's excellent guide on the Distilled blog.  You can find it here:

http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/

Hope this helps Chris!

[Fasthosts]

Hi Tom

This is great. Thanks for the quick response, the article really helps too.

Thanks again!

Chris