YouTube Versus Vimeo
Should you upload your videos to YouTube or Vimeo?
You’ve started getting your feet wet with video and have even filmed what you believe to be some great footage. You’ve finished shooting, editing, and converting and now all you need to do is to upload. You seem to remember a site called Vimeo, which is similar to YouTube. You’re left wondering, do I upload it to Vimeo, YouTube, or both?
What Is YouTube?
I’m going to assume that most people know about YouTube. If not, here’s a quick video with the highlights. YouTube is by far the most well-known video streaming site on the Internet. There are over 1 billion unique viewers each month on the site. In fact, every minute there are over 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube. The scale of YouTube is pretty staggering and hard to imagine that it started just 10 years ago in 2005.
Google purchased YouTube in 2006, and since then, the site has improved leaps and bounds, placing advertisements on the video uploaded to generate revenue for content developers (and for Google).
What Is Vimeo?
Vimeo is a website similar to YouTube that focuses on streaming video uploaded by its user base. Vimeo was founded in 2004, and has a 170 million unique visitors a month, which is about 10% of YouTube. Vimeo is unique in that there are no advertisements placed on the video uploaded to it.
How Do YouTube and Vimeo Make Money?
There are key difference in how each of these video streaming sites approaches revenue. YouTube focuses on selling ads and placing them on user-uploaded videos. As I mentioned a while back in How to Make Money with YouTube, you can start making money after uploading content and following a few simple steps, and the more popular your videos are, the more money you can potentially make off the ads shown with them.
The idea is that content creators will upload their videos to make money off of the views. However, this also leads to a decent number of junk videos created for the sake of getting quick views that don’t have much content.
On the other hand, Vimeo does not place any advertisements on its videos. This makes them look much more clean and polished and doesn’t detract from the content that is being displayed.
In my personal opinion, the overall the quality of videos uploaded to Vimeo is much higher quality then YouTube. But how does Vimeo make money without ads? is the answer is through premium memberships.
There are three different types of Vimeo accounts: Vimeo Basic (free), Vimeo Plus ($60/year), and Vimeo Pro for ($200/year). The free account limits you to 500mb a month, which—if you’ve ever looked at an iPhone video size—is about 6 minutes’ worth of HD video. The basic account also allows you to password protect your videos in order to keep them private.
As you start a paid account with Vimeo Plus, you get 10 times more video allowance at 5GB/month. You also receive more advanced statistics, such as views and location, areas of the video that were paused, and if viewers finished the video.
As you move up tiers into the Pro account, you get many features which are generally most useful to businesses. You gain the ability to sell packages of your videos to users, limiting access to a certain amount of time and tailoring just about every aspect of the video and how it’s disseminated to your viewers.
Which Should You Use?
What I really like about both of these websites is that they both have individual spaces and markets that they serve. Overall if you’re looking to make money off of pure views of a video, you’re probably better off putting your videos on YouTube. It has way more viewers, and you’ll be able to monetize the ads that are put on the site by Google.
For example, uploading a funny video, a quick how-to, or even just something random is easily done with YouTube, and there’s no limit to the amount you can upload.
Vimeo is much better if you’re an artist, filmmaker, or if you have much more polished videos that you are not trying to generate money from. It may sound strange to say that professional creative types should not seek revenue from their art or content, but if you’re a business, or an individual trying to market yourself, you really don’t want ads popping up during key parts of your video. If you’re trying to sell training materials or instructional videos, Vimeo allows you much more control over your content.
The way to make money on Vimeo is if you are selling your videos as a product. For example a tutorial, study aid, or how-to. You can make money by selling access to your video rather than advertising.
If you’re looking for a video to go viral, you’re going to want to post it on YouTube for the sheer fact that YouTube receives almost ten times the amount of traffic that Vimeo does. Plus if you post the video on YouTube you can make money off of the ads!
Well, that’s it for today! Be sure to check out all my earlier episodes at techtalker.quickanddirtytips.com. And if you have further questions about this podcast or want to make a suggestion for a future episode, post them on Facebook QDTtechtalker.
Until next time, I’m the Tech Talker, keeping technology simple.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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Tech Talker demystifies technology and cutting edge devices so that even the most tech illiterate can understand what’s going on with their computer or gadget — and what to do when something goes wrong.
