YouTube is the gold standard for video sharing and marketing. Every business wants to increase its presence and customer engagement on YouTube. Your YouTube channel’s views, likes, and subscribers are key to your brand’s success. But, recently, digital marketers, especially video marketers, are also exploring alternatives to YouTube. The primary reason is to utilize the audience pool that dwells in these not-so-popular video-sharing platforms. Continue reading to find some statistics on YouTube as the primary video marketing platform, reasons to use various YouTube alternatives, and some great platforms that are worthy alternatives to YouTube.
YouTube as the Primary Video Sharing Platform
YouTube is one of the best mediums to reach your customers from any niche since more than 2.6 billion people globally use YouTube at least once a month, as reported by Statista. Other vital YouTube stats you must know are:
YouTube added $28.8 billion in revenue to Alphabet’s global business account. It has seen year-on-year revenue growth of 46% in 2021. A whopping 247 million active users of YouTube are from the USA. Brazil, Mexico, Germany, the United Kingdom, and South Korea added another 395.2 million users. It is the second largest internet search engine after Google Search. Approximately 3.7 million videos find their way to YouTube daily. The entire YouTube community watches approximately 250 million hours of videos each day. A YouTube user spends up to 23.7 hours on YouTube in a month.
The stats suggest why YouTube is the undisputed king of video sharing and marketing on the internet. Apart from these numbers, there are other reasons mentioned below:
YouTube has become more popular than conventional TV. A huge number of households now prefer to watch their preferred TV channels via YouTube TV. YouTube is also important as an audio consumption platform via YouTube Music. Most customers use YouTube for purchase decisions. Marketing videos on YouTube rank more easily on Google Search than YouTube alternatives. YouTube also has an algorithm for local search and local SEO.
Reasons to Use YouTube Alternatives
A Datanyze report suggests that YouTube’s market share is 75.95%. It means 24% of users are consuming videos from YouTube alternatives. Hence, the main reason for your business to consider alternatives to YouTube for video marketing is an untapped audience base. Since most businesses target YouTube, you can do the same and also be smart and target a non-YouTube customer base as well. By doing so, you will stay ahead of your competitors since you are targeting a 100% customer base, whereas your competitors are targeting 76% of the global audience. Other vital reasons to choose alternatives over YouTube are:
A fraction of the business community thinks that YouTube’s content quality will deteriorate sharply since there is no dislike button for the videos. YouTube is now focusing more on advertising than the content creators on its platform. It is the creators who pulled the stats of YouTube up, and now YouTube is ignoring them. Many YouTubers do not think this is ethical. YouTube is constantly changing its algorithm. One negative impact of this is irrelevant products or ads shown to users. YouTube’s policies for content censorship are also sporadic and change regularly. It is not good for businesses to keep changing their content creation policies with YouTube regularly. Companies need a stable policy to make money.
Now that you have gone through the reasons to try YouTube alternatives, here are some platforms for you to host videos, stream content, share videos with the world, or for video marketing:
Vimeo
Vimeo is the second-largest platform for video marketing, video sharing, video advertising, and more. Your marketing team can use Vimeo for many purposes, including the followings:
Engage with your audience base through content posting, likes, comments, shares, and subscriptions. Acquire new customers through ads and promotional videos. Collaborate with the video content creation and marketing team.
That is not all! Vimeo also works as an online tool for professional and high-quality advertisement creation. Not to mention all the tools and interfaces to host virtual events, webinars, and product promotions on the internet. Vimeo also includes advanced customer engagement tools like offline polls, real-time polls, customer interaction during live events, and more. Not just activities; there are tools to measure your progress as well. Moreover, you can also make Vimeo the central hub for everything about your video marketing strategy. You can create and store content on it. Your team can share videos with clients and stakeholders for final approval. And last but not least, Vimeo maintains complete secrecy about your media assets and events.
Dailymotion
Dailymotion is popular for localized short-form video content. It publishes content in 183 languages in 43 regions. More than 2,000 professional content creators from the global market contributing to Dailymotion. You can also become a part of this creator’s community to witness the maximum monetization of your video stories. Dailymotion is also good for brand advertising through high-quality video content. It offers innovative ad formats that easily attract the audience to your brand. If you need help from advertising professionals, Dailymotion has premium content partners who produce ad videos for some leading global brands.
Facebook Watch
Facebook is a full-fledged competitor of Google, and to counter Google’s monopoly over video marketing, it has launched Facebook Watch. Your audience can watch trending videos on Facebook Watch. Facebook also has an algorithmic approach to suggest video content to users according to their Facebook likes, dislikes, follows, etc. This platform also depends on ad money for revenue so that you can run high-quality video ads on Facebook Watch. It claims it charges 49% less than its competitors per link click-through ad. Not just ads, you can grow your audience through organic traffic too. Small businesses and marketing agencies target Facebook Watch to grow a basic viewership for future marketing campaigns on Facebook.
Vevo
Vevo is a music video-only video marketing platform. Hence, it is highly suitable for artists, singers, bands, performers, and music video creators. According to Vevo’s official website, it has the following viewership:
Per month 26 billion views All Vevo users, in total, watch 1.5 billion hours of music videos per month. There are more than 500,000 videos on this video-sharing portal
Brands can easily choose to advertise on this platform since it is highly popular as a music video TV on the internet. Daily more than 35 million American consumers view content on this site. So, if your business is USA-centered, you can explore this platform for video marketing opportunities along with YouTube.
9GAG
9GAG is mostly popular among teenagers and youngsters who also like Facebook and Twitter. People would share 9GAG short videos, GIFs, and memes on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites. Hence, if your target audience is youngsters, you should present on this platform. Users can easily find the content they are looking for on 9GAG because there is a long list of content categories in the left-side navigation panel of this portal. Hence, you can use 9GAG to post short video marketing content. If you have an ad budget, you can also promote your marketing content on this content-sharing platform.
DTube
The global trend of decentralization has hit the video streaming and broadcasting industry as well. DTube uses blockchain technology to provide a peer-to-peer video-sharing solution with less chance of server outage. It has sprung up as one of the leading YouTube alternatives in Web 3.0. This YouTube alternative strongly denounces the AI-based censorship that YouTube follows. It supports free speech and allows the creators can earn from their videos in cryptocurrency. All your data also stays secure on this platform, and there is no one to temper with the videos you upload. So, uploading a video here means it will stay on the web unless you delete it. Although it has an interface similar to YouTube, it does not show you ads. Hence, your viewers can have a non-disruptive viewing experience that does not involve watching non-skippable advertisements. Moreover, there is no recommendation algorithm on DTube, and the content you upload here might not be visible through general searches on traditional search engines.
Spotlightr
If you belong to the small business community, Spotlightr is an incredibly powerful YouTube alternative. It is an all-in-one video hosting solution where you can also get video marketing and advanced analytics tools. You can upload HD quality video up to 4K here and auto-optimize the video resolutions. Besides hosting the videos on its cloud server, this platform also supports hybrid video hosting, which means streaming videos from popular sources like YouTube, Facebook, and Vimeo. It has a customizable and lightning-fast HTML5 video player for better playback. The responsive player is also perfect for any mobile device. Its built-in social sharing feature lets you post videos hosted here on any social media. Spotlight enables you to monetize videos you upload or find on social platforms. It even turns the videos belonging to others into videos that look and feel like yours.
Wistia
Wistia is the right platform for video marketing for businesses and social influencers. This single platform is enough for you to make, host, and market videos. Marketers can also analyze how much impact their video makes on the audience. If you choose to host your videos on this website, it will provide you with a customizable video player that you can personalize according to the brand identity. You can upload videos of up to 8 GB file size and 4K resolution. This cloud-based video CMS is also suitable for organizing videos and sharing them with teammates. Wistia also provides you with powerful marketing metrics to see how your efforts affect the marketing funnel. You can also run tests to find out which strategy works better for your campaign. It also supports integration with Animoto, Google Analytics, Hubspot, Drip, Mailchimp, Salesforce Pardot, Trello, Zapier, and Zendesk.
SproutVideo
Those looking for a powerful video hosting platform can join SproutVideo without a second thought. It offers an on-demand video hosting service for all businesses and functions as a YouTube alternative. This platform is packed with robust tools that you can use for video marketing, player customization, viewer engagement analysis, and many more. Companies can use SproutVideo to broadcast any business event live streaming or even share videos securely among teammates for internal communications. It supports video in HD and Ultra-HD that goes up to 8K, so you can stay assured that the viewers can enjoy top-quality video. It is also easy to embed your videos from this platform into WordPress and Shopify without even any coding skills. Marketers also get video marketing tools like in-player CTAs, customizable video lead capture tools, post-play screens, and video SEO. Moreover, you can also integrate it with Hubspot, Zapier, and Mailchimp.
PeerTube
PeerTube is another entry in the list that has decentralization at the heart of it. It is a free platform that can be used as a YouTube alternative for video broadcasting. This platform aims not to replace the currently popular service providers but to offer its user something else with different values. PeerTube currently has 6,00,000+ videos that have secured more than 70 million views so far. If you are tired of ads and trackers, it is the ad-free and tracker-free option. Here, users can upload high-quality videos and leverage peer-to-peer video broadcasting technology. However, it does not have a recommendation algorithm, and installation might seem complicated unless you are a tech-savvy person. Since PeerTube is open-source, you can even contribute to its source course to make it better.
Final Words
YouTube is not the last option for video marketing. The above YouTube alternatives are thriving in the monopoly market of YouTube. You can create your business’s presence in such video consumption platforms to tap into an audience mass that no one knows about. It might prove to be a great advantage for you over the competitors. You may also be interested in creating branding videos with Promo and sharing the video content online effortlessly.
