When I first suggested setting up a YouTube channel for our videos, I got a lot of sneers at the office. YouTube gets a bad rap (compared to a good rap) around our office. It’s probably because we’ve been soured by the comparisons between it and Wistia for business video hosting.

But for now, let’s ignore the comparisons between the two and focus on this question: can YouTube be used in conjunction with a pro-hosting solution as part of a broad video marketing strategy?  

The answer we have historically given to this question is, “sure, what’s the harm?” Host the videos on your site with a professional service, but also put them on the Tube in the hopes that you’ll get some free traffic from there. We honestly thought this strategy made a lot of sense (not to mention we didn’t want to force clients to have to choose between using Wistia and putting videos on YouTube) but we had never actually implemented the strategy for ourselves.   

The experiment:
We set up a channel on YouTube, posted 11 of our more popular videos, and added titles, descriptions, and tags to make the videos findable. That was over two months ago and now we’re ready to share some results and explain what we’ve learned.   

The short story:
This approach didn’t work for us and we’re taking the channel down.

The long story:

The views don’t just arrive on their own.

Perhaps the main reason it’s attractive to put videos on YouTube from a marketing perspective is the sheer volume of its audience. Earlier this year, YouTube surpassed 4 billion daily video views! It’s also the second largest search engine after Google itself. With so many views and searches, surely, we thought, we’ll be able to capture some attention.

So how’d our videos do? After two months, our 11 videos have a combined 202 views. Yikes. That’s an average of about 0.3 views per video per day. To be clear, we didn’t do active promotion of these videos on YouTube, but the result is telling in terms of the likelihood of our content being found on its own. This also helps us frame the cost-benefit discussion that continues below.

Which videos to promote?

As we thought about ways to get more views on YouTube, we had to stop and ask ourselves, “what’s the advantage of promoting these videos on YouTube when we could be promoting the version on our site?” Like most things, there is a trade-off here:

On the one hand, an advantage of getting more YouTube views is that your success can actually snowball. If your video gets a lot of views it will show up more often within YouTube searches and as “related video” – think of it as SEO exclusively for within YouTube.  This is a clear advantage that you can’t get any other way besides putting your video on the Tube. For this to pay dividends, however, your video has to be good enough to get the process jump-started, and the content has to be something people are actually searching for on YouTube.  We consulted the YT Keyword Tool to help us evaluate how much searching is going on for content like ours.  Here are the results we got for the terms video marketing, video hosting and video strategy:

The message here is that YouTube may be the second largest search engine, but we have to be realistic about what people are and are not searching for when they’re using YouTube.  

On the other side of the promotion discussion, the advantage of getting views on our site rather than YouTube is that we have much more control over the experience and those viewers are one step closer to converting into a customer when on our site.  It’s important to note here that there’s nothing more inherently shareable about a YouTube link than one from your site (especially if your video has social sharing buttons!). Posts to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn all act the same regardless of where your video lives – you’re just sharing a link after all. For our video content, this argument generally wins out over promoting a video on YouTube, but it’s important to at least consider the trade-off.

SEO costs of putting videos on YouTube

In addition to the importance of where a viewer is watching your video, there are also SEO issues that need to be considered when evaluating where to place your videos:

1. Building domain strength via video links

Getting video links is a powerful way to build domain strength for SEO purposes, but getting links on a YouTube version of a video primarily helps the YouTube domain ranking and not the video creator/owner. On the other hand, if you self-host and build a video sitemap (or have a pro host like Wistia take care of it for you) your site gets credit for all of the domain strengthening link juice.  Because of this, when someone shares links for a YouTube version of a video that is also on our site, we're actually missing an opportunity to move up in the organic search results.  (And for clarification, the domain benefit in this case comes from us being the video creator, rather than the video host -- if you use the exact same embed type your domain would receive the credit -- sorry, a bit confusing because we are both the creator and host in my tale!) 

2. Video results in search engines

A YouTube copy of a video will also compete directly with a self-hosted or pro-hosted version in video search results (in Google, Bing, etc). If you are hoping to drive additional traffic to your website via video results, a YouTube version of a video that appears above the one on your site is not ideal. Building your own video sitemap (which is possible using Wistia’s tools) helps your website version appear in the results, but getting it to outrank a YouTube version is never a guarantee.

Also, Google generally frowns upon "duplicate content" (i.e. the exact same content appearing on multiple pages on multiple domains). Basically, showing the same content multiple times in the same search results isn't valuable and takes up space that could go to a piece of content that may be valuable. Having the same video both on YouTube and your website sets us up for a potential duplicate content battle with YouTube. Let's just say it's not a battle that many can win.

And so, after a two month experiment, we will soon be taking down the Wistia YouTube channel and be heading back to the drawing board in terms of a YouTube strategy. For us, the benefit of a few extra video views doesn’t outweigh the SEO costs. And while we could definitely increase the views with active promotion, we would almost always prefer to drive traffic to the videos on our site.

That said, I would urge you to try the experiment for yourself because your videos might get a tons of views on YouTube in which case the calculus is very different. There’s also a case to be made for producing content specifically for YouTube, taking into account what people are looking for, as opposed to just posting videos that were made for an entirely different purpose. That’s something we didn’t do for this first try, and it will be on our brainstorming list for potential next approaches.

This was our experience – yours may differ, and if it does we’d love to hear about it!