Which Video Platforms Should You Put Your Videos On?

Our customers often ask us which video platforms they should upload their marketing videos to. "YouTube" is the obvious answer -- everybody knows that this Google subsidiary is the market leader. But how important are the other platforms that are out there?

At one point, there were over 120 websites where you could upload your videos, but this number has declined significantly. Nowadays, there are probably about a dozen platforms that are still relevant, including sites like Vimeo, Yahoo Video and MySpace Video. But just how big are these YouTube competitors?

The answer might surprise you. We looked up current traffic numbers for the various video sites on Google Trends for Websites. Because this statistics service is owned by Google, we verified it with data from other sources, such as Compete and Quantcast, just to find that they confirmed our findings.

Here is the comparison:

YouTube's daily visitor number is about 25 times that of the the next biggest site, which is Dailymotion.com, the leading European video site.

Here are the details for YouTube's main competitors:

Metacafe, Yahoo, MySpace and Vimeo are all about the same size, while Dailymotion gets about twice the visitors of these platforms. However, most of Dailymotion's traffic is from countries like France, Japan and Turkey, so if you're trying to reach a U.S.-based target market, it's less relevant.

One important note: Facebook is increasingly turning into a very important platform for video, although it doesn't really compete with YouTube directly. Traffic information for Facebook's video element is not available, but we have reason to believe that it could be the number two site behind YouTube by now.

The conclusion for marketers is simple: If you are going to invest in the distribution of your marketing videos, focus your resources mostly on a strong YouTube presence. Make sure you get all the details right on the market leader, and only then put your videos on other platforms.