YouTube vs. Vimeo for Video Marketing

Video is a key component to marketing your business.  Now that you have hired a professional video production company like Skillman Video Group to produce high quality marketing videos, product videos, or a video lecture seriesfor your business, the next step is to put those videos online.  Choosing the right video hosting site is important and many factors need to be taken into consideration such as exposure, viewing quality of your videos, ease of use, and cost.  Easily the two most popular and effective sites are YouTube and Vimeo. Both have their pros and cons, and exploring these attributes is important to achieve the greatest success.

YouTube is the web’s video juggernaut with one hour of video uploaded every second, over 4 billion videos viewed per day, and 800 million unique users visited each month. These stats blow Vimeo out of the water with their unique visitors only reaching 64 million for the entire year (November 2010 to November 2011). Vimeo’s growth in membership for the year increased by 82% from 5 million to 9.1 million, which is nothing to sneeze at, and 2011 was their biggest year yet.  In terms of search results and SEO, one of the most deciding factors for internet video marketing, YouTube videos will most always appear before Vimeo videos. It’s no coincidence that Google owns YouTube and both take two of the top three spots for most visited sites on the web. While these stats definitely point to YouTube as the clear winner in the exposure category, other factors have to be taken into consideration before this fight can end.

The difference in these hosting sites is actually quite vast and depends on what you are trying to market and whom you are marketing towards.  YouTube caters to everyone and everything, virtually having no restrictions on content and as a free account you can upload as many videos as you want that are less than 15 minutes each (longer if you have had an account for a while and are in good standing).  Vimeo is more particular, they do not allow any commercial content, no copy written movies or tv shows, only content created by the user and cater to filmmakers and creative people.  The free basic account allows uploading of 500 mb per week and upgrading to the Plus account gives you 5 gb a week plus no banner ads on your videos. This also includes priority uploading, unlimited HD uploading, full customization of the video player for branding, and analytics for your videos, all for $60 a year. For businesses, here is the most important fine print- Vimeo only will allow marketing for products and services on their Plus accounts, which will set you back $200 a year. The look of your personal page and quality of videos is very sleek and professional however compared to the busy clutter of YouTube. The ability to get rid of ads is also a huge plus for Vimeo and beats YouTube’s annoying pop-up ads that will most likely feature your competitors on your videos.

In conclusion, both hosting sites offer businesses great ways to market themselves and the ability to embed their videos on their own websites.  While quality and customization go to Vimeo, cost and exposure fall to YouTube.  The deciding factor must be in choosing what is right for YOUR business. If you can’t decide then it doesn’t hurt to use both!