Where should I host video? A brief case study in Tube Mogul, YouTube, Viddler, et al.

This is a guest post by Josh Turner, who is producer/host of CampingGearTV.com, a new video blog featuring camping gear and accessory reviews. Contact me if you are interested to guest post on this blog.

When my buddy and I started our video blog in late November, we spent a good deal of time deciding on which video hosting service to use. Most of our focus was on YouTube, Viddler and Vimeo. YouTube quickly became unattractive due to their 10 minute limit. Seriously, you can’t upload anything bigger than 10 minutes unless you are the chairman of Warner Brothers Music Group.

Vimeo seemed cool, and used by a lot of hip producers and shows, but their rules seemed to be pretty strict. We didn’t want to get into a position where we started with Vimeo only to have them cut us off for any number of reasons, as they have become known for. So we decided on Viddler. Viddler doesn’t have a limit on file size or duration, they have a cool player and user interface, and we liked that we could add our logo to our videos through their service.

However, while Viddler was dubbed as our main hosting service and interface for our site, we simultaneously signed up for TubeMogul and registered for accounts at YouTube, DailyMotion, Yahoo, Metacafe, Revver, Vimeo, Sevenload, and VideoJug. TubeMogul is essentially a mass-posting or syndication service. By uploading a video once to TubeMogul, it then does the leg work of uploading the content to the other sites that you choose. Pretty cool.

We quickly found out that some services don’t play nice with TubeMogul. Vimeo requires a premium account to allow TubeMogul uploads, and we couldn’t get the uploads to sync with Revver and Sevenload. But with very little effort, not only are our videos running through Viddler and our site, but also hanging out at DailyMotion, YouTube, Metacafe, Yahoo, and VideoJug. (note: Uploads to YouTube through TubeMogul only work when the video is under 10 minutes)

From our perspective, this is a no-brainer. Although our site is new and receiving low traffic, you can see the benefit in percentage terms. As compared to our site traffic (Viddler), we’ve seen the following percentage of traffic at the other “syndicated” services:

YouTube 32.3%
DailyMotion 5.5%
Yahoo 1.8%
VideoJug 4.3%

The main thing to note here is that with almost no additional effort, we’re getting some extra viewers that would have probably never seen us otherwise. Our main home where we drive traffic is our own domain, campinggeartv.com. But by utilizing TubeMogul, our content is being placed with a number of services, each one pointing to our domain in a meaningful manner. Also to be noted is the smack down that Youtube puts on all other services. YouTube’s dominance is something that we didn’t want to pass up, and even though we like Viddler better, we’re very happy we can be in both places.