Youtube and Vimeo are the two biggest video hosting platforms online, with over 29 billion site visits between them in the past 6 months (May to October 2019). However, bear in mind that 28.85 billion of those belong to Youtube, so there’s a clear popularity gap between the two.
But which video hosting site is best for you? Well, it depends on what you’re looking for.
Clearly if you’re after the biggest reach and most number of views on your videos, then Youtube is the way to go. With Youtube boasting 2 billion monthly active users, there’s a lot of scope for reaching a lot of people.
However, this also means there’s a lot more competition for views, and considering there’s over 500 hours of video uploaded to Youtube every minute, there’s a good chance you’ll get lost. Compare this to Vimeo, who at the end of Q2 in 2019 had less than 1.5 million subscribers across the whole website, whereas Youtube has nearly 10,000 channels who each have at least 1 million subscribers.
A lot of the audience on Vimeo tend to be more mature than Youtube as it’s considered more of a space for artists and creators, meaning you can generate a lot of constructive feedback on content. Combine this with the fact that you can password protect your videos, and you have a lot of control over who can and can’t view your content on Vimeo.
In contrast, Youtube’s audience doesn’t have the best reputation. It’s renowned for trolls leaving abuse on people’s videos and spam comments as far as the eye can see. It’s just a simple case that quantity doesn’t always mean quality. This is of course not to say that this is always the case, as many channels on Youtube have inspirational and constructive communities.
Youtube is of course totally free for anyone to use, at its most basic level. This does however mean that you will be bombarded with adverts, so they offer Youtube premium at the cost of £11.99 a month. This also allows mobile users to play videos in the background which using other apps, as well as giving you access to youtube Originals.
Vimeo works on a totally different structure, with content creators being charged to upload their content, and viewing costs being £0. A Vimeo basic account is free, but comes with very strict limits on how much content you can upload, as well as how many settings you can play around with. The most expensive Vimeo (Premium) comes in at £70 a month, offering no weekly upload caps and 7TB of storage. Which is very appealing to creators looking to house longer films on there.
As mentioned, Youtube does run ads on its videos, as well as around the website, which many users find irritating. However it carries a great benefit from a marketing perspective in reaching a potentially huge audience. Being able to use your content as an advert on someone else’s video? The opportunities are endless (if you’ve got the budget).
Vimeo of course make their money from membership, rather than advertising, this does however mean there are limited opportunities for marketers on Vimeo.
A frustrating aspect to Youtube for creators and businesses alike is that you cannot update / replace videos and keep the statistics for them. If you’ve made a mistake or need to change something then you will have to delete the video and start again. You can of course trim the content, but this doesn’t help if something needed to be added in.
Vimeo on the other hand gives you the option to replace the video without losing any of its stats. Meaning if a member of staff leaves and you quickly need to change that video, it’ll keep its views and analytics even if its a totally new file.
Truthfully, it depends on what you want from the platform! On the whole with our clients we recommend Youtube because they’re looking for reach and accessibility, both of which Youtube provides in abundance with its billions of users. Youtube is after all, the second biggest search engine in the world, meaning there are potentially an awful lot of people on there searching for information that you could be providing. However Vimeo has its benefits and a number of our clients use this as their preferred platform. So do some research into your potential customer base first, or have a chat to us about what you want from your video content. For me though? It's Youtube every time.
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