My client wants to put a video on a page to promote a show they are producing. What are the considerations of embedding a video vs having a link to the video which is already uploaded on youtube? She would like the video to start when a user visits the page but that doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. Any recommendations?
It’s really bad practice to have a video start playing when a visitor lands on a page. For one thing, they might have opened it in a background tab and not even be looking at it, so it’s a wasted effort. For a second, they might not want to watch a video, so it’s somewhat rude to presume they will. For a third, they might already be watching a video or playing music, and having yours overlaid with someone else’s is going to be extremely irritating - especially if they aren’t even looking at your page. For a fourth, they might struggle with video – for example, where I work we have really crappy computer terminals that seize up as soon as you try to play any video or the page uses various kinds of slideshow, carousel or animation. And you’re then stuck looking at it flick through frame by frame, a few seconds at a time, for at least a minute before the computer responds to your next click. And if it’s your site that’s made it do that, the chances I’ll ever go back to it are absolutely tiny.
In terms of whether to have the video on your site or YouTube … you’ve got to think about bandwidth, technology and professional presentation. From the point of view of professional presentation, it looks better to have the video on your own site than to be relying on a third party service most commonly used to show puppies falling off skateboards and pirating TV programmes. But you have to weigh that up against (1) the bandwidth costs of serving video from your own server, and (2) whether you have the technology available to you to create and embed video in a format that is accessible across different platforms and browsers.
Thanks for the response Stevie, very well presented points. Certainly lots to consider.
Thanks again.
Your points are considerable stieve. This the better idea to keep a link of youtube on webpage.
I’m going to have to agree with Stevie, not only is the autoplay videos annoying, it usually makes me exit a page immediately. If you’re going to do it embedded, do not autoplay it.
Youtube is good as another platform for online marketing.
You can do optimization for the video, which helps for SEO in google. In addition, optimization with the right key-words will help promotion inside Youtube.
I would be preferring video linking, as due to it you are able to get a backlink with sharing a video on each network of video sharing websites.
I am not schooled in the technical aspects, but I know you can embed a video from You Tube and it won’t auto play. Does embedding a You Tube video use your bandwidth or theirs?
Embedding Youtube video would also be a good idea.
And there is a option that video will not automatically start when the webpage will load.
I also do that with my blog.
Embed the youtube videos.
I always embed my YouTube videos online.
I embed videos from youtube but not on the landing page.
The video is streamed from YouTube so it uses their bandwidth.
Of course, if you embed the video and you’re not the one who uploaded it to YouTube, you should check occasionally that the video is still actually up there. That poster could take it down, YouTube could take it down if the copyright belongs to someone else, etc.
I think it would be better to embed the video since some people might not want to redirected to another site to view the video. However, automatic play for the video is not a good option, unless its the introductory piece of the site.
Youtube does make life a lot easier but the downside of youtube is that it’s branded with the youtube logo and therefore doesn’t look as slick as own embedded video. If using youtube, make sure you moderate comments and other adverts.
I agree with most people here, you shouldn’t use videos that start playing when the page is opened. It’s really annoying.
I think video embedding is more powerfull than video link… and Do not set to autoplay that video because it will be annoying