YouTube is a great way to share content with anyone and everyone. It’s a global organization with billions of users. Everyone knows what it is, and mostly everyone knows how to navigate it.
You can easily upload a funny pet video and share it with the world. Your friends and family, colleagues, and strangers online can like the video, comment and share within their own circles.
Not all video is created equal though. What about when the focus isn’t to make people laugh, but to inform, instruct and deliver value? This type of content is often the result of time, expertise, and production investment.
Whether it’s a researcher accessing a conference presentation, a clinician reviewing training material, or a student engaging with a lecture, the viewing experience must be focused, reliable, and distraction-free.
Embedding YouTube videos on your site or posting directly means inviting YouTube to compete for your audience’s attention. The interface, ads shown, and suggested content are decided by YouTube, and are designed in a way to keep viewers on the site, or lead them to their platform and away from yours. With suggested video, that could include potentially showing competitor content to your viewers.
On your own platform:
Meanwhile, hosting content on your own site keeps engagement with your platform. Users can explore your content while analytics can be measured for greater understanding of audiences.
Youtube offers basic metrics on video analytics. Views, likes and watch time can be tracked, but detailed insights are essential for organizations to understand impact, justify ROI, or support academic or professional reporting.
YouTube tells you what happened, a dedicated Media Player with detailed engagement metrics, can tell you who, how, and why it happened.
YouTube comments are open to anyone. That means off-topic remarks, spam, or inappropriate feedback. Anyone with a Google account can post comments to their videos. In some cases, comments can be off-topic, distracting, or inappropriate.
With a dedicated player on your own platform, access control can be configured to prevent this happening to videos on-demand or online live events.
You retain all your ownership rights in your content posted to YouTube. However, uploading to YouTube also means granting them broad rights to use, modify, and monetize your content. Even deleted videos containing outdated or incorrect information can be retained and reposted by other users.
YouTube can serve a useful role in outreach. It’s a high-visibility platform that helps attract new audiences and raise awareness. However, it should not be the primary home for professional or educational video content.
In these cases, YouTube is best used as:
Long-form, high-value content, such as webinars, training, or conference presentations, should be delivered through a dedicated media platform. This ensures control over branding, access, analytics, and user experience, aligning video delivery with organizational goals.