A piece by our Designer and Creative Director, Rachel Cunliffe.
If your company is using videos on its website, it’s preferable to host them using a video provider that can serve up an optimized video in a multitude of formats and handle video streaming and traffic load.
The two big options are YouTube and Vimeo and both are used by businesses worldwide.
SEO
YouTube is the second biggest search engine and the second most visited website in the world (after Google). It has almost 2 billion logged in users per month. (Vimeo has about 170 million viewers per month.) If gaining organic traffic for your business is a key aim of creating your videos, choose YouTube.
Appearance
Vimeo offers the ability to brand the video player. Some consider Vimeo’s player to look much more professional. YouTube doesn’t offer the ability to brand the player. Videos are typically higher quality on Vimeo than YouTube. However, videos tend to have
more playback problems on Vimeo than YouTube.
Privacy
Both Vimeo and YouTube allow you to restrict which websites your videos are embedded on. Both allow you to add a private video that can only be seen by sharing the link to it (i.e. one which is not listed on your account and will not appear in search results). Vimeo allow you to password-protect videos. YouTube does not.
Ads
Vimeo is ad-free. However, you have the option to turn off ads and related videos on your own YouTube videos in their settings.
Cost
Vimeo ranges in cost between $7 and $75 per month and has almost one million paying customers. YouTube is free for everyone uploading videos. (NB: There is a $12 per month plan for those who wish to remove ads while watching other people’s videos on
YouTube.)
