How to Choose the Right Host For Your Online Video

WellcomeMat was featured in a story today on Read Write Web, “How to Choose the Right Host For Your Online Video”. Independent videographer and freelance writer Robin Miller covers video hosting from several different angles including paid vs free video hosting and distribution. The quote…

“A good but often overlooked paid hosting service is WellcomeMat.com, which caters heavily to real estate people but welcomes other types of commercial videos as well. At $25 per month per account, with no bandwidth restrictions, WellcomeMat is a pretty good deal for all but the smallest video producers.”

We appreciated the coverage (thanks Robin!) and thought made sense to quickly cover two themes within the article.

1. Free vs Paid Video hosting. Many of our members consider WellcomeMat to be more than just a video host. WellcomeMat prides itself on helping pull traffic and customers to our members websites via social media and the realtime web. Free hosting platforms like YouTube do the complete opposite by pulling search traffic to their web domain. Publishing video content to free hosting services means you are effectively ceding all power you should have as a publisher to a third party site. In fairness to free video hosting platforms, someone has to pay the bills for video streaming. This is done by selling ads against your video content. Co-Founder Christian Sterner spoke at length about this decision faced by all publishers at the Real Estate Connect conference in New York City:

“If what you’re doing is using and creating content to generate an audience on your website or to to basically build up viewership on your website, than you’re a publisher. If you don’t care about that and that’s not part of your game-plan, than you can post your content elsewhere and the views will occur there. What it really comes down to is… What is the best funnel? What is the best experience for you as a business or a professional in regards to where the views occur?”

2. Video Distribution. Strategies for distributing commercial video (most especially real estate) are different than that of most other forms of video content. No sain individual is going to head over to YouTube and search for videos of real estate listings in their area. Consumers want to see all of the listings, not simply those with video. That being said, properties and places tagged with videos are far more likely to receive traffic (better SEO) and generate more interest from the viewer.

When it comes to distribution of real estate video content, publishers need to focus on sharing content in places where the consumer is most likely to look for associated content, not just video. For most real estate brokerages and professionals (Realtors®) this should mean your website. Gone are the days of ‘I’ll post my videos everywhere and hope someone finds them’ strategy. For more on this point, see #1 above.

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Read Write Web story is here:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/07/how-to-choose-the-right-host-f.php

Mike

This posting really got me thinking. I admit that I often post to YouTube because it seems that will garner the most eyeballs. But what am I giving up as a publisher? (I don’t run a real estate oriented site however).That is a good question that I will be looking into further. Thanks for the post.