Content & Campaigns

YouTube vs Wistia: Why Should I Pay to Host My Videos? [Video]

2 min read

March 9, 2017

Youtube vs Wistia: Why Should I Pay to Host My Videos?

YouTube is completely free, and it’s the world’s biggest video platform. So, why should we pay for a hosting service like Wistia?

We hear this question from many businesses dipping their toe into video marketing.

There are many reasons why we became a Wistia customer and partner agency, which you can read about here, but to answer the question:

Wistia is designed exclusively to serve companies using video on their websites for inbound marketing, support, and sales.

YouTube, on the other hand, is designed to primarily serve companies doing large, brand-building campaigns.

Let's hear it straight from an embedded video.

Wistia vs YouTube: Features

Wistia Features	YouTube Features
No ads	Ads shown by default for all non-YouTube Red customers
Fully customizable player controls and colors	Standardized player design with no customization
Responsive embeds as standard	Additional work required to make embeds responsive
Video served at the highest quality your viewer’s connection is able to handle	Video quality determined by size of embed on page
Ability to replace and update videos	No replace video feature
Asynchronous JavaScript & iFrame embed options	iFrame embeds
Domain restrictions to control where your videos can be embedded	No restrictions on where the video can be embedded
Ranks in Google search for your website	Ranks in Google search for YouTube.com
Able to include SEO metadata on every page automatically with JSON-LD	No SEO metadata included with embeds
Real-time changes to embeds	Lag in accepting changes
Lead capture with Turnstile email collectors	No lead capture tools
Annotations and full-screen calls to action	Annotations and cards
Can link out to any destination of your choosing	Can only use annotations and cards to link out to one external website (once approved)
Share buttons share version of the video on your website	Share buttons share version of video on YouTube.com
Complete playback data for each viewer, with user-tracking, heatmaps, and ROI-tracking	Sampled and aggregated playback data only
Playback data passed automatically into Google Analytics as events	No Google Analytics integration
Integrations with Marketo, HubSpot, Salesforce, Infusionsoft, and Pardot	No way of getting playback data into CRM or marketing automation platforms

Can I use Wistia and YouTube Together?

For many companies, using both Wistia and YouTube can be the right way to go. Wistia is the ideal platform to deliver videos across your site, and YouTube can be a useful supplementary tool to help you increase brand awareness on the world’s second biggest search engine.

However, simply embedding YouTube videos on your site means you’re missing out on all of the superior tools and analytics that Wistia offers.

YouTube is more like a social network than a video hosting platform. As such, not all of your videos will necessarily make sense to a broader audience when they’re browsing on YouTube.com.

Therefore, YouTube should be used strategically, as part of a wider video marketing strategy, but not just as a repository where all videos are held and hosted.

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