What is Better for Business Vimeo or YouTube?

Loes Knetsch ^©

When you want to promote your business everybody is advising you to make a video. But then? Where can you make the most profit from your video? What is better for your business? Vimeo or YouTube? Why do some entrepreneurs choose for YouTube and others for Vimeo?

The YouTube Pro’s and Cons

Pro’s

YouTube is Free

YouTube is free to use for entrepreneurs. It is the most used video hosting platform in the world and has more than 1 billion users worldwide and hundreds of millions of hours of videos are watched every day. And, more than half of all YouTube views come from mobile devices.

YouTube and Search Engines

YouTube is owned by Google, the #1 search engine in the world. YouTube videos appear in Google search results. YouTube is the #2 search engine. Google and YouTube use the content from your video to index and rank your video. So if you’re going to make a video, you need to be aware that you also need to do keyword research for your videos. Your video will be indexed by Google and YouTube. A good keyword research tool can help you to be found better in the search engines.

YouTube as Social Media

YouTube is more than just a platform to host your videos. Think of it as a social platform, a community where you can connect with your audience. Engage your viewers with your videos via social functions. By adding a subscribe button you allow viewers to subscribe to your channel. You can share your videos, and people can leave comments on your videos.

Advertising on YouTube

Do you want to reach more customers with your YouTube videos? Then think about advertising on YouTube. There are several ways to promote your video.

Video ads that are shown before, during and after a video.
You can also choose to be shown in the YouTube search results.
You can target your ads by gender, age, interests, and location.

All you need is a Google Adwords account that allows you to manage your ads and monitor the results.

Style your YouTube

You have extensive possibilities to put your YouTube channel in your unique style. If you make smart use of this, you increase the branding and visibility of your company. What do you want the viewers of your video to do during or after seeing your video? Visit your website? You can make one or more redirects to your own landing pages.

Cons

Monetizing your videos: Before you can make some money with advertising on your videos, you need at least 10K views. Besides that, you can’t choose which ads are going to be displayed. So you can get ads from the competition on your video. And those ads are darn annoying.

Comment section: Your videos are free to comment on, and not all comments are nice. You can delete them, but you need to take into account that people can be nasty.

Endscreen: YouTube has recently dropped the option for end screens, so every embedded video plays through on your website. You can still add this manually in the HTML editor.

The Vimeo Pros and Cons

Vimeo Traffic

Vimeo has monthly 250 million visitors, which is considerably less than YouTube.

Vimeo Advertising

There are no advertising options on Vimeo. At Vimeo, you can be sure that there will not be shown advertisements before, during and after your video. It is more likely that the viewers will view the whole video because they are not distracted by annoying banners that pop up while they are watching.

Clear and Clean

The look of Vimeo is clear and clean. And that is worth a lot. The quality of the videos you find on Vimeo is very good. It can clearly be seen that this is the breeding ground for filmmakers and creative people.

You have the option to protect your video with a password. That can be useful if you do not want to make your video visible to everyone. And there are more privacy options for your video on Vimeo.

You can make your video available to everyone
Only for yourself
Only for people you follow or select
You can hide your video on Vimeo.

The advantage of the latter option is that no one can see your video on Vimeo, but you can embed your video on your site.

Do you want to embed the video on your website? Then you have a lot of options at Vimeo to fully adjust the video player to your own wishes.

Cons

Traffic: Vimeo has less traffic than YouTube.

Search Engine: Your Vimeo videos will appear in the Google search results, but not in the YouTube searches. If you want to be found well and generate a lot of traffic, you can better move to YouTube.

Pricing: A business account on Vimeo is not free, it’s not a mega price, they charge $20/mth. They offer 3 packages. View the packages of Vimeo yourself.

The right video in the wrong place can make all the difference in your business Click To Tweet

YouTube vs Vimeo questions

What is your budget?
What do you want to achieve with your videos?
Do you want to be found in the search engines like Google and YouTube?
What do you want viewers to do after watching your video?
Where are you going to post the video?
Do you want it presented on a landing page?
Do you want to make a closed training page?

Vimeo and YouTube are both good hosting platforms. It is just what your requirements are and what your budget is.

When you want a lot of traffic, YouTube can handle that. When you just want to host your video and display it for training on your website or internal for your employees, Vimeo might be the best option for you.

What can you create?

Download the text from this video here (PDF )

Sharing your video on your website

It is better to host your video on YouTube or Vimeo, than to add it directly to your website. That takes a lot of library space and it reduces your site speed. It is very easy to embed a video from YouTube or Vimeo. An embed code starts with an iframe tag and ends with an iframe closing tag. When you want to center the video on your website you can place the iframe between a center tag. <center>iframe</center>