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Hi EGOL,

Your points are well taken and it sounds like YouTube is definitely the best option for your business.  If you are using video to generate ad revenue then YouTube is a great partner...  my comment that their business is built for advertisers plays both ways -- if you want ad revenue then this is a positive attribute of YT, rather than a criticism.

Our customers (ourselves included) use video in a very different way.  Instead of a direct source of revenue, we use video as a marketing tool to drive customers to our website, to explain our products and business, to provide support to customers, etc.  We don't want YouTube to own these assets and we certainly don't want ads appearing anywhere on our videos or our site.  Obviously we are not the solution for everyone using video on the internet and that is not our goal -- we just want to provide an alternative for businesses who want more control over the video assets that they spent lots of time, effort and money producing!

Hopefully that helps to clarify.

Ben

Hey Nima,

You actually have to have a massive audience to push 1TB of bandwidth per month...  the vast majority of our customers pay only $99.

That said, if you are just using video for basic brand awareness -- comparable to say display advertising -- YouTube is definitely a good option.. and of course you can't argue with the price!

However, if you want to use video to bring traffic to your website or to sell products / services, that's where the value of Wistia and other pro hosting comes in.

Thanks,

Ben

Hi Nima,

To be completely transparent, I work for Wistia so my answer is admittedly biased!  Nonetheless, I would like to share some thoughts on hosting videos on your site with Wistia instead of YouTube.... so here goes:

1.  Youtube is built on advertising revenue which means -- (a) their goal is to drive visitors away from your site and towards youtube to watch more videos / ads and (b) they can choose to show ads over your videos anytime

2. From an SEO perspective, all of the SEO benefits go to the YouTube domain, rather than yours when you embed YT vids on your site.  Wistia, on the other hand, helps you create a video sitemap so those serps point directly to the videos on your website -> near your call to action, more content, etc!

3.  Customization and Control - with Wistia you get to determine exactly how the video player looks and behaves -- from player color to post roll call to action.

4.  Support - we have a customer happiness team here that makes sure your questions get answered.  That's not in YouTube's business model.

5.  Analytics - Our analytics are designed to help you evaluate your videos and improve them over time... The YouTube analytics are designed for advertisers to understand demographics

6.  Views -- it's true that there are lots of viewers on YouTube, but there is also a massive amount of competing video content.  With some notable exceptions, business videos don't rack up the views -- just check our the view count on the next couple of businesses you come across.  We focus much more on turning viewers into customers, rather than getting another couple thousand views that lead nowhere

Hope that helps add another perspective to the video hosting discussion.  To be clear, we here at Wistia love YouTube and think they've done amazing things for web video...  we just think there are better options for the specific purpose of hosting video on your business website!

Also feel free to check out the video we made a few weeks ago on this topic - http://wistia.com/landing/youtube

Thanks,

Ben

Glad you're liking Wistia!

If you need a correction to the transcript, just drop us a line at support -at- wistia -dot- com and we'll take care of it for you!

Hey, great question...I thought I would just help out and provide a little more insight as to how this works.

When you use a Wistia SEO embed that includes a transcript, in addition to having the interactive transcript widget, we also include the text of the transcript in a

<noscript>tag to aid in the indexing of the text.  </p></noscript>

Ben from Wistia here. I can't speak directly to why SEOMoz doesn't use all of the social sharing buttons available. That being said, I can give a little insight as to how the Social Sharing features work within Wistia so that you can make an informed decision for yourself.

First, there are basically two classes of Social Sharing buttons that can be enabled. The first class is Wistia based buttons that we build directly and directly affect the video. These include:

• Embed - provides an iframe based embed code to embed on third party websites
• Stats - provides a link to a stats summary page for the video
• Email - a mailto: link that allows someone to send the link to your page
• Logo - an image and link that points back to your site

The other class is third party buttons for various social services. In these cases, we implement the button code as specified by the various social services. These include:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Digg
• Reddit
• Tumblr
• Stumble Upon
• Google Plus

All of the third party buttons are designed to share URLs, not individual pieces of media, such as videos. As a result, when you click the Facebook Like button on a Wistia video, you are actually Like-ing the page.

For all of these buttons as well as the Email button, we wire the URLs to the first page where the video is embedded. This way, even if your video gets embedded by various people (via the Embed button), all social activity will still point back to you.

As an example, let's say you embed a video on your website with the embed button and the Twitter button. Someone comes along and uses the embed button to get a copy of the video which they embed on their blog. One of their readers comes along and views the video. After enjoying the video, they click the "Tweet" button. The link (and text if configured) that gets Tweeted out will point back to your site, not the blog on which it was viewed. This allows your videos to get more social reach beyond just your website.

Again, I can't speak directly to SEOMoz's social strategy. It may be that they already have social buttons on their blog posts in other locations and feel that buttons on the video would be redundant or distracting. That being said, I hope this helps explain a bit more about how the the social sharing buttons work and gives more insight as to when you would want to use them and when you wouldn't.

Let us know if you have any additional questions.