You may or may not realize it, but 90% of my blog posts are literally answering questions from clients.

Here's one I've received several times over the years, and got again recently.

Client: "Video question for you … is it better to use Vimeo or YouTube to host our videos?

I heard a rumor this morning that most (of our clients) block Vimeo more often than YouTube because of the possibility of more explicit content due to lack of restrictions by the platform."

Me: "Great question. We've used them all, but for different purposes.

YouTube is the best for public video that is designed to increase brand awareness, enhance visibility and SEO. It also has all the same features that a paid Vimeo account has, related to embedding into a website, etc.

Vimeo paid is a solid, affordable choice for what I would call "members only" type video. Specifically, videos that you ONLY want to be available on a particular web URL or behind a password protected wall.

So, requirements typically dictate our recommendation.

There is a third platform that we love called Wistia. We use Wistia for many of our clients who want advanced video analytics (data, of course) to see how long videos are being viewed for, and where they're being viewed from, etc. Wistia also has "turnstyles," which basically allow you to overlay promotional messages on the video.

For an example of this, view the videos on our homepage - https://datadriven.design/ (scroll down to right under the Facebook reviews).

On the video on the left, you'll notice two different "Work With Us" CTAs that you can click. At the :20 mark, it stops, and you can skip it, if you skip it, it says "Learn Digital Marketing From Our Experts!" These are created within Wistia.

You can also use a lead generation turnstyle on a Wistia video that forces the user to enter their email address at any point you want them to on the video timeline in order to continue viewing the video. This is awesome after looking at data and seeing that 99% of users only watch the first :15 of a 1:15 long video. Putting a turnstyle at the :14 mark makes a ton of sense. 🙂

I hope this helps. I thank you for asking this question as I think I just wrote a blog post!"

Yep, I sure did.

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

Paul Hickey, Founder / CEO / Lead Strategist at Data Driven Design, LLC has created and grown businesses via digital strategy and internet marketing for more than 10 years. His sweet spot is using analytics to design and build websites and grow the audience and revenue of businesses via SEO/Blogging, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Social Media Content Marketing and Email Marketing. The part that he’s most passionate about is quantifying next marketing actions based on real data.