Best Video Hosting Sites: Small Business Marketing

In our last blog post, we suggested creating a video marketing campaign for your business. Video is, undeniably, one of the most engaging forms of storytelling in today’s digital age. Audiences can find it easier to learn, engage and be moved by video in comparison to any other media form.

In last week’s post, we gave you an example of DollarShaveClub’s viral marketing video and our own E-Learning video; however, we didn’t give you any information on which platforms you can share your video on. Today’s post will outline the best video hosting sites for small businesses.

Uploading your marketing videos on any of the below platforms can help to increase the amount of people who will see and interact with your content. Choosing the right platform for a business comes down to how dependent your business is on its content. If you’re looking to create a series of educational tutorials or increase awareness of your brand through viral videos, choosing the right video hosting platform is paramount.

After scouring the internet for the best video hosting websites, we’ve narrowed down the list to the leaders and innovators in the space. Hopefully, the reviews of the four companies below will help you to identify which platform is best for you.

YouTube

 

About

First up, we have YouTube. It isn’t only a platform for creators to upload videos they hope will go viral. In fact, YouTube is often used by website owners who want a free way to promote their video content on their own websites. Most businesses use it for free video hosting.

Who should use it

If all you are trying to do is host your videos, YouTube is a great solution. It’s easy to create an account and upload videos; however, it offers little in ways of promoting your content. YouTube is made for the masses and everyone who is looking for access to its distribution. Because of its popularity, YouTube is a great place to upload videos in order to cast the largest net possible.

What’s missing

With that said, YouTube is YouTube. Everyone can identify a YouTube video player by seeing their logo in the bottom right of the video player. Your video will also have ads. There’s no getting around it. As ads are how YouTube monetizes its platform, your audiences will have no choice but to experience them and this may deter some potential customers and clients from watching your video.

YouTube’s related videos and auto-play features are great for viewers, as it makes the experience of watching videos seamless and keeps viewers on the site longer; however, it can pose a threat to small businesses as related content algorithms will most likely display videos from competition. It also does not possess lead capture tools and is limited in its data analytics compared to some other online video platforms (OVP). YouTube is the optimal money making platform for content creators; although, it is not made for small businesses looking for a premium video hosting experience, and the price indicates that.

Starting Price: Free

Overall score: 4

Vimeo

About

Vimeo is a leading platform in the space for artists who are using video. To make a crude analogy, Vimeo is frequently quoted as the LinkedIn of OVPs; whereas, YouTube is more akin to Facebook. Vimeo maintains and promotes a viewing experience which allows the user to focus on the artistic expression of its content as opposed to the product, video player, and branding.

YouTube is a collection of public and viral videos anyone can upload; Vimeo is curated content. YouTube is like an art show on the street; whereas, Vimeo is more similar to an art gallery display. This is how you can think about their audiences, even if you can, upload the same video to both platforms.

The types of content Vimeo displays most prominently are short films, information pieces, journalistic reports, and animations.

Who should use it

Vimeo provides tools for content producers to showcase their work to clients as well as enterprises who want to show their product in action. Vimeo has tools to collect user data and privacy features to allow only for specific users to view content. We can see the platform being useful to large enterprises running ad campaigns in order to capture the attention of high-end content viewers only. In terms of small businesses, however, even though audiences are smaller, there’s no guarantee small businesses will be able to win audiences when they’re competing against large companies with higher-production capabilities.

What’s missing

Vimeo is very strict on storage. It imposes weekly storage limits that do not allow for simple file transfers. Furthermore, it lacks development tools such as APIs and player speed for those who are highly focused on conversions and monetization or enterprise integrations.

Starting Price: $12/month

Overall score: 6

Rumble

About

Rumble is a video platform that’s been in business since 2013 and has amassed over 150,000 content creators on its platform. Its not quite a YouTube or Vimeo in terms of its popularity, but it inherits the good qualities of all OVPs that we’ve tried, making it more of a one stop shop for all things video.  

Who should use it

One of the nice things about Rumble is it specializes in providing you with a custom video player with your logo. This means, you won’t sacrifice branding in order to put out your video. This added layer of professionalism was a welcoming feature when we conducted our review, as a small business needs every edge it can get. Rumble also uses premium 4K video, third-party syndication (to YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, and more), and includes the option to turn ads on or off. Our experience tells us that Rumble is designed to give its users more fined tuned controls over their branding, video clarity, and targeting. Using this service to create high resolution videos and syndicating to sites like YouTube can be a great idea to leverage YouTube’s reach while taking advantage of Rumble’s video quality and branding.

If you are looking for a one-stop-shop, easy user interface, and advanced video creation features set at the cheapest price, this choice is for you. 

What’s missing

Rumble is the smallest of the four platforms. They don’t have the scale YouTube has, but some are referring to it as the next generation of video platforms, and it’s growing quickly. 

Starting Price: Free and paid subscription $10/month

Overall score: 9

Wistia

About

Wistia is a video platform for marketers whose direct focus is to convert leads into sales. It’s an enterprise solution that enables integration with many other analytics and software services.

Who should use it

Wistia is perfect for those who want to increase sales conversions by providing more insight to their product.  Advanced analytics such as heat maps and storing user data are key to helping understand user behaviour. One of the things we like is their lead capture ability and their very simple design. Wistia has a very narrow focus and is primarily only intended for marketers.

What’s missing

Wistia doesn’t encompass some of the above mentioned features such as syndication, monetization, and custom video players. Intstead, Wistia is a great choice for those who are looking to acquire lead generation from videos. Every business knows collecting customer information, for remarketing, is one of the most important pieces to their growth. Although, small businesses don’t have a lot of startup capital and price can be a big deterrent. With that said, Wistia’s pricing structure is based on the total number of videos you create, meaning you’ll be charged according to how much content you put out. From our review of Wistia, it’s clear to us, it is a niche product with great potential upside in its gated content; albeit, you can find other ways to guide viewers to your landing pages for cheaper. 

Starting Price: $99/monthly

Overall score: 3

Our Recommendation: Rumble

Choosing a video platform isn’t an easy task. With so many options to choose from, and more unique platforms arising every year, it can be hard to find one that fits your business’ needs. Although, YouTube is still the king of video platforms in terms of its sheer scale, we found the platform with the most value in terms of price, audience, and functionality to be Rumble.

Our rational for our decision is based on understanding that Wistia only provides value to a small subset of video users at a very high cost; and, even though Vimeo provides a more flexible approach, it comes at a cost by forcing members to upgrade their package to unlock specific features and to avoid weekly limit uploads.

Even with the reasonably priced Vimeo, you’d have to pay a monthly fee of $75 to equate the value you would receive from Rumble through its APIs, deep analytics, URL tracking, and impressive amount of upfront storage and streaming.

Lastly, through Rumble’s syndication feature, you don’t have to compromise and can upload videos to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and more, making it our top pick.

If this looks like a fit, you can create an account with Rumble here.