Hey everyone!
Jason here, digital marketing consultant, in this online course creation guide.
We're going to be answering the question, should you be using YouTube or Vimeo posting
your online course content?
Timestamp table of contents in the description as we go through these five considerations.
And of course, at the end, I'll be sharing why I think Vimeo, is in fact the best as
we go through these five factors.
Now the very first factor is privacy.
Something that is important to note is that both on YouTube and Vimeo, you can stay stealth
upload.
That means you can upload a video to these two platforms and nobody, who is browsing
these platforms would be able to see it.
On YouTube, it's something called unlisted.
You actually don't want to use YouTube private, YouTube, private makes it so restricted that
you'd have to manually send a access to the video to each person that wants to see it.
Of course, if you're doing an online course, you don't want to do that.
So, you're going to do unlisted.
And when you do unlisted, it essentially means that no one can come across the video unless
they have a direct link.
That direct link is going to matter in a little bit here.
On Vimeo, what you can do is you can, of course, stealth upload say, “Hey, I don't want anyone
on Vimeo to be able to see it”, but you can actually take it a couple of steps further,
which is leads us into factor number two, and that is access.
So, while you can stealth upload on both, Vimeo starts to pull ahead.
You see if you embed your YouTube video on your membership site, something that people
can do, is they can easily right click on the video, copy the video URL, and then go
over to YouTube and pretty much watch it wherever they want, or they can share it with whoever
they want.
Now with Vimeo, on the other hand, you can set it up so people can't copy the link.
And even if they go into the HTML of the page and they find the Vimeo link, if they paste
it into a URL and you've set it up so that it's not being shared, they'll get an error
page from Vimeo.
So, when it comes to access, Vimeo really pulls ahead because it makes it very hard
for people to just share the video.
Whereas with YouTube, if you're embedding that on your site, sure, you can take away
the controls.
You can take away a lot of things in the branding, but at the end of the day, someone can still
just right click on the video and then share it with whoever they want.
Whereas Vimeo actually can take it a step further and allow you to restrict where a
video can be embedded.
So, when it comes to privacy, Vimeo definitely wins because they're going to block sharing
links and they're going to block people from downloading or embedding it.
Whereas with YouTube videos, it's very easy for someone to just right click and get access
to all of your course content and then ask for a refund.
Of course, probably don't want a customer like that anyway, but that leads me into factor
number three.
And that is protection.
Because at the end of the day, put a tremendous amount of work into putting together your
online course.
So, there's nothing worse than spending all that time and energy.
And then just seeing it completely pirated and sharing across PTP platforms.
Now this brings me to ultimately the problem with any online course, and that is as soon
as it's online, it doesn't matter if it's YouTube, it's Vimeo, it's Wistia, Amazon S3,
you're doing your own player as soon as it's online, someone's going to figure out how
to steal it.
Heck! there are entire fiber gigs dedicated to stealing Udemy video.
So, if someone wants to steal your course, they're going to find a way.
So, it doesn't matter how much money you pay, people at the end of the day are going to
be able to take your videos if they really, really want to.
And I think that's the main consideration when it comes to the YouTube versus Vimeo
debate.
It's not necessarily about whether or not people can steal the videos.
Because they can steal the videos just a quick Google search and they're going to be able
to figure out how to take your Vimeo videos.
It's just about increasing that barrier and the work that someone has to do to actually
take your content.
Now, when it comes to control, which is our fourth factor here, Vimeo just goes through
the roof in terms of feature sets and available options.
So with Vimeo, when you're embedding, you can actually change the color settings of
the player.
You can add your logo, if you decide to pay for the business one, which I don't recommend,
but you can actually set it up so that people can click through to the next part of your
course in the end cards of Vimeo.
So, Vimeo now has kind of this nice end screen thing, similar to YouTube videos.
The other nice thing too, is in addition to being able to specify to the domain or sub
domain where you want to allow your videos to be embedded, you also have the ability
to easily swap out your video.
So, something that's very annoying with YouTube, is if you make a mistake in a video, you need
to update a video, you have to take the video down and then upload a completely new one.
Whereas Vimeo actually has the option of updating a video, which is great for online courses.
Because once you put together, your course, you don't have to change anything.
So, if you need to update a video, you find out you made some silly mistake in a video,
you can re-edit, re-record it and then just replace the current file.
And all of the embedding and sharing will stay the same.
So, it's very, very easy to keep your course up to date and just manage your course files,
whereas if you're on YouTube, well, you're going to need to take down the previous video,
put up the new one and then take the URL and put it on whichever online course platform
you're using.
So just a little bit of a headache that you get to skip, and you make sure that your videos
are always working and you don't have to keep track of any links.
Now, the final one here is user experience.
And this just comes down to thinking about your students, your customers, your clients,
and how they're going to perceive your content when they get access to something that they
just paid for.
And I can tell you from personal experience, that it's a much better user experience if
someone's paid for something and then they see something other than a YouTube video,
because whether or not you like it, YouTube is associated with free content.
So, if someone gives you money and then you just give them a bunch of YouTube videos,
the perceived value of what you're giving, is just going to be lower by nature of being
a YouTube video.
And also, what you have to consider is if you're using YouTube videos to embed your
course content, you're going to have other random videos suggested when they're done
watching and if they ever pause the video, they're going to see a bunch of other suggested
video options.
So, it'll just attract from the user experience that you want to have inside of your online
course.
So those are the five factors to consider when it comes to choosing whether or not you
should go with Vimeo or YouTube for your online course.
And really it just comes down to user experience and a greater ability to control, not only
the privacy, but how your videos are embedded.
So, go ahead and comment below if you have any questions or still aren't sure which one
to choose and go and hit that like button and subscribe for more online course tutorials
and review comparisons, just like this one.
And until the next video, keep building the business you love.