Pros and cons of video onsite or youtube

[bakergraphix_yahoo.com]

what are the pros and cons of placing videos on the native website as opposed to pushing the you tube channel?

If I move the youtube and vimeo to the native website will i loose all the link juice?

is there an easy way to have transcript of the audio as html in the site?

[evan89]

These are the pros and cons of youtube from my perspective:

**Pros: **Youtube videos will likely get more eyeballs. Loading videos to youtube are better for virality, sharability, and exposure. Youtube is great for generating top-of-the-funnel type of awareness

**Cons: **It is fairly challenging to drive traffic from youtube to your website for a conversion. Also, if your video ranks, it will direct users to youtube, not your website - so there is limited SEO value from that perspective.

Vat19.com is a company that uses the virality of youtube to it's advantage with their product videos. If you are looking for an alternative, I really like Wistia.com if you would like to use rich snippets and use videos to drive traffic to your site through rich snippets, embeds etc.

As far as transcripts go, https://www.speechpad.com/ is great if you are willing to pay for the service, otherwise you could just type it our if you have the time.

I hope this helps

[David-Kley]

CON:
"if your video ranks, it will direct users to youtube, not your website - so there is limited SEO value from that perspective."

I agree with this. Having your traffic directed to YouTube doesnt really do your site or traffic any favors, BUT you can include links in the description and on the video overlays to combat this.

Vimeo Pro allows you to directly embed vidoes on your site, and not have the branded video player.

PRO:
Its free, and really easy to use/upload/delete/share/modify.
A lot of people use YouTube. Seriously. 
Google indexes YouTube videos in search result pages
Can overlay ads on your videos for extra revenue
Vimeo is $100 a year iirc.
Videos all under one account, and uses gmail account to manage/log in

To be honest, I don't think it makes a difference. I would focus on spending extra time on your video, to make it more "conversion-friendly". Spend more time on your message, and what you want to communicate to your viewer. That way, it wont matter where you host it, people will want to come see you.