Using YouTube Videos

[Brassneck]

Ok - I have a lot of sites. Mainly informational sites, largely text based. I would like to add videos to some of them as an experiment - mainly to try to get some better engagement and also keep people on-site longer.

Crudely, I was planning to trawl through You Tube and find suitable videos. If there is an embed code, then clearly I could add it to my site. However, to be safe I think I will try to contact the video owners to ensure they are happy for me to use the video and also to double check that it was their video in the first place (rather than something they posted from elsewhere). Has anybody got much experience of working on sites with a lot of video content. I can't see any major drawbacks, but maybe there are some I have not realised.

Thanks
Stephen.

[grynge]

Not all videos work in all countries which can be a pain for your users. Depending on your user base some may have youtube blocked as well. With my sites that deal with big business and governments I couldn't use youtube to host my videos.

[Chabrenas]

As grynge points out, Youtube won't allow viewing of some videos in certain countries. They (or the video submitter) can also take down a video without warning. However, it depends on the nature of your site whether it's worth living with that. As a minimum, you'll need to keep checking that the links still work.

In the cases where the video is an important component of a page, I would contact the owner - then download the file and serve it from your own site. You don't need to go to the trouble of providing a streaming service - just host the files and use something like Flowplayer to display them. Only if you have a lot of traffic is it worth worrying about optimising the way you serve the videos.

If you want to stay with publicly hosted videos, try alternatives like Vimeo as well.

[Kay]

Crudely, I was planning to trawl through You Tube and find suitable videos. If there is an embed code, then clearly I could add it to my site. However, to be safe I think I will try to contact the video owners to ensure they are happy for me to use the video and also to double check that it was their video in the first place (rather than something they posted from elsewhere).

It's a good idea to check you're not breaching copyright. However, it may not be as simple as some of us thought it was. I don't know if you're using AdSense on these sites, but apparently that could cause problems, because AS doesn't like you using copyrighted content from elsewhere - even if you own the copyright yourself.

Crabfoot said that people had run into trouble for embedding YT videos on their sites, even though it was their own videos which they'd published on YT. More info here:
http://experienced-people.net/forums...icle-marketing

Grynge is absolutely right about some countries blocking YT, and it's not even just places like China. Thailand blocked YT for several months after someone had published a video which was deemed to be offensive to the country. They did eventually lift the ban, but it sure as heck was a pain while it was still in force.

[JimWaller]

Another thing to consider if you decide to host videos and serve them from your site is if your hosting provider allows it. Make sure you check your TOS so you don't lose your hosting.

Jim