Three reasons to use Vimeo instead of YouTube

John Murray

December 2021 statistics show that Google-owned YouTube is the second most visited site on the internet, behind Google.com itself. What’s more, the average user spends over 21 minutes on there per visit – around double the time they spend on other huge sites like Google, Facebook and Twitter.

It may come as a surprise then that we don’t necessarily think it’s the best place to post your videos – at least not if you want to launch a serious video marketing campaign for your business. Of course, it’s valuable to have a YouTube account, as it’s a free, quick and easy way to upload content, but don’t forget that YouTube was originally set up as a way for casual vloggers to broadcast self-filmed videos of themselves, and it still tends to be favoured by people creating videos as a hobby rather than as a business venture.

To really get the most out of your videos, we recommend signing up for a paid account on Vimeo. Here are three of the main reasons why:

1. Easier to brand and customise your videos

If you create a YouTube video and try to share or embed it somewhere, it screams “YouTube” at you. Look at the below from our YouTube channel for an example:

You get YouTube’s red and white logo right in the middle of the thumbnail image, as well as in the top left, and even a prompt to “Watch on YouTube”, just to encourage people to leave your site or social media page and go down a YouTube rabbit hole instead.

Below is the same video, but from our paid Vimeo account:

This looks much better. It blends seamlessly into our site, rather than looking like something we’re borrowing from YouTube. Our own logo is visible in the centre of the thumbnail, rather than YouTube’s.

2. No ads

YouTube isn’t really “free” – it’s paid for with the ads that appear before, during and after videos. If your video is preceded with ads, viewers may get fed up waiting for the ads to finish and not watch your video. Worse still, they might click on the ad and buy something. That something could even be a rival product or service – in fact, that’s quite likely as advertisers target videos on relevant subjects.

With a paid Vimeo account, you can be sure of an ad-free video.

3. Videos can be hidden

Paid Vimeo accounts give you the option to protect videos. This is ideal if you have video content you only want to share with people who have signed up for a paid service, such as a recording of a conference or an online course.

YouTube does offer the option to make videos private or unlisted, but private YouTube videos won’t show up if embedded in a blog post. Meanwhile, although unlisted videos can’t be seen by casually browsing YouTube, once someone has the URL for them, there’s nothing stopping them sharing them with other people.

With either Vimeo or YouTube, videos are one of the most engaging forms of media, whether shared on your Facebook or Twitter account, or appearing on the home page of your website. To learn about our video production services, get in contact with Engage Web.