Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of research on video for my clients. Video is becoming a huge factor in the online experience; in fact, there’s a good chance that your site will get totally skipped over by a good percent of visitors unless you provide video. New smart phones are also optimized for video and viewership is screaming.
YouTube is already the second largest search engine on the Internet. But other video platforms are doing quite well, with double-digit growth in traffic year over year. By far, though, Vimeo has made enormous strides… overtaking the two largest competitors – Metacafe and Dailymotion. Here’s the latest stats from Compete:
Video is also becoming a factor with search engines. Google often sprinkles the latest video results, along with images, in a regular search engine results page. The platforms are becoming more flexible… YouTube’s recent tests allowed custom landing pages and user interaction!
Aside from the SEO capabilities, video is just too good to pass up for two marketing reasons:
- Video’s ability to explain very complex processes or interactions easily. Why try to explain through images and text when you can do a 30 second video that makes a flawless impression.
- Video’s ability to connect personally and effectively with the audience. If a picture is worth a thousand words, video is worth millions.
I’m certain that Vimeo’s low costs, high quality and robust offerings are accelerating it’s growth. Business hosting is $59 a year with 5Gb of uploads allowed per week. The site allows for high definition playback with great analytics and nicely designed channel pages. We recently put up a DK New Media Video Channel that is pretty sharp. They also allow links at the end of your videos and removal of their logo when embedding it.
The goliath continues to be YouTube… so if you’re strictly trying to reach more people, you need to play in their backyard. Don’t count others out of the game yet, though! There’s plenty of opportunity.
