Last week I put up a link to my DIY Moleskine PDA video. Part of the process, of course, was finding a good site to host the video. Here are the three finalists.
YouTube. Ladies love him, men want to be his friend, give a big Las Vegas welcome to a dear old friend of mine, you all know his name: YouTube. (Wild sustained applause.) Truth be told, I don’t like YouTube much. It’s like Sears — first on the scene, it was a respected powerhouse for many years, and still commands pretty strong name recognition. But at the end of the day, I’d rather stick with its competitors.
What’s great about YouTube is that people spend a lot of time on it, just looking at video after video, so you’re guaranteed some views of your work simply by the law of averages. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into people visiting your site; they may be more likely to simply check out the next suggested video.
YouTube’s performance is also finicky to a degree that’s pretty unacceptable, considering how well its competitors work and the general state of technology today. I’d wager that I’ve had to reload about half of all the YT pages I’ve looked at, simply because the media player refused to load the video all the way. I expect that from some crappy embedded Yahoo! player; I can’t believe the granddaddy of all Web video doesn’t have a better interface. When it comes to posting videos, I’m uncomfortable with the fact that someone might not be able to watch the whole thing.
Metacafe. Metacafe is sort of the opposite of YouTube, with very little name recognition but a much more dependable interface. I feel like users probably associate Metacafe with cheesy, ebaumsworld-esque videos of guys in banana suits setting themselves on fire, and thus don’t give it the propers it deserves.
But MC has a great user interface and relatively quick upload time. The drawback is that it takes a bit longer for your video to show up online than if you use YouTube, where it pretty much shows up moments after it finishes uploading. The wait isn’t terribly long, but if you’re liveblogging and need to get something up NOW, you might run into trouble.
Revver. The best thing about Revver is that allows you to monetize your video based on the number of views it gets. I’ve never used Revver, so I’d be interested to hear about anyone’s experience with it.
Revver’s page seems a little light on details as to how exactly its users get paid. And the hardest part of Revver — speaking from a creator’s standpoint — is that Revver’s panel of admins has to approve your video… and approval can take a few days. I found this out a little too late; last week’s video was my first foray into Revver territory, and my deadline would have approached faster than the admins’ approval. This is a great security measure from Revver’s point of view, and I have no arguments with it, but it does require the artist to do a little creative planning.
Oh, and embedding any of these on your blog will require a plug-in based on your blogging platform and video host… just a reminder.
In the end, I went with Metacafe, simply because of the great interface. I also posted to YouTube, since I already had an account there, but overall I think Metacafe will be my #1 choice for future videoblogs.
