Video sharing being the new mantra these days, when I’m often asked, “Is video better than texts and images for websites?“, my standard refrain has always been that video gives a richer experience to the viewers and so it has to be better than either or both texts and images.
Video sharing calls for additional work and resources, which may be the reason why many website owners feel it is a waste of effort because a web video does not by itself have the usual SEO parameters like the keywords, the title and the description, the ‘alt’ tag, and so on. So the argument goes that if the SEO parameters have to be given in any case with texts and images, why bother for videos then!
But that’s a fallacy…
The argument above has many holes in it. Suffice it to say that search engines have their own methods of prioritizing search results, and it will be a mistake to believe that they will not find out ways to give importance to web pages that have videos in them than those that do not in the search results. Google in fact encourages web videos for succeeding with web sites.
Regardless of whether videos have more visibility in search results, the fact that a video is a richer experience for viewers must weigh heavily on website owners. There are instances where videos have helped increase ecommerce conversion. And many experts strongly believe that business videos do succeed if executed properly.
It is not necessary though that all your web videos should necessarily be hardcore business videos. For any business, sharing how-to videos in its website, that help the viewers, go a long way to establish long-term goodwill among existing and prospective customers.
Sharing videos far and wide…
In this article we take a look at the various video sharing sites other than YouTube. They are all free to list in, and it is always a good idea to list your videos in them so as to enable them spread far and wide.
For each of these you need to first enlist as a member before you can upload your videos. After that you can use the video distribution service of TubeMogul where you upload your video only once and TubeMogul distributes it on your behalf to all the video sharing sites you select.
Oh, the problem of duplicates!
There is a downside in TubeMogul’s one-to-all service. It’s about duplication of content which is not liked by search engines.
A solution could be that after a video is distributed by TubeMogul you make ‘personal’ visits to the different video sharing sites and tweak the title and the description in each to avoid it being termed a duplicate.
How feasible will that be depends on 1) how many videos you make every week or so, and 2) the time you can afford to spare. Usually I make it a point to change the title and description of my video in YouTube if not in all the others. And for some of them I rather upload manually than preferring the TubeMogul route.
Video sharing sites – general
Here are the various video sharing sites that are worth considering. Mostly they accept all types of videos though some like 5min, Howcast, Sclipo, Graspr, etc. only prefer d-i-y or how-to videos.
YouTube
YouTube
Dailymotion
Dailymotion
Yahoo! Video
Yahoo! Video
MySpace Video
MySpace Video
Metacafe
Metacafe
blip.tv
blip.tv
Veoh
Veoh
Vimeo
Vimeo
Revver
Revver
Viddler
Viddler
sevenload
sevenload
Sharing how-to videos
These video sharing sites only permit how-to videos to be uploaded. Some like HowCast also allow you to write how-to steps to be included along with the uploaded video.
5min
5min
Sclipo
Sclipo
Howcast
Howcast
Graspr
Graspr
TubeMogul, the all-in-one
As mentioned above, the good news is you don’t need to separately upload your videos to all these sites. TubeMogul is an excellent do-it-all video distribution service that does it for you. And it’s free. Take a look at the following image to understand it better.
TubeMogul
TubeMogul does have many other niche video sharing sites in its ‘roll’ like the humor sites, the TV sites, sports related sites, and so on. You also get to see detailed stats there as to the number of times your videos have been watched in different video sharing sites. For example, my videos are more seen in Metacafe compared to even YouTube.
If you know video sharing sites not covered here, do let us know. We will be happy to include them in this list.
 This article of February 11th, 2010 is authored by Partha Bhattacharya, who runs this website. Catering to the clients' video needs aside, Partha also writes guest articles for other web publications. |
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