WHEN SHOULD YOU USE YOUTUBE AND THE YOUTUBE PLAYER?

When Should I Not? This is a great question asked by many.A lot of people think, “If you put up a video on YouTube, people can click over to YouTube," or can find related videos about my competitors.

With the YouTube player, people can do all sorts of things that they shouldn’t do (or, more accurately, that I don’t want them to

Yes, the YouTube player is easy but I don’t want to use it for those reasons.

Having reasons for your actions is a good thing, but let’s make sure we work this one all the way through. Let’s review the facts.

YouTube is extremely friendly, safe, familiar and works on every machine,

phone and tablet. The fancy video player that you put on your website might not work on the very device that people are looking at. I’ve yet to see any other video player on the market that works with absolutely everything. Nothing is more frustrating than visiting a website that says “Click here to play” and then finding it does not work.

Since YouTube is going to work on every machine, phone and tablet, you can put that on your website and rest assured that the content has the best possible chance of being consumed.

If this isn’t your goal, ask yourself why not? Use YouTube’s player and you are not going to be producing frustration in your customer and audience base as they try to make someone else’s software work.

Nobody ever looks at a video player and thinks that their codec might not be supported; they simply think your video is broken.

You should understand that more often than not, the positives of having the YouTube player are going to outweigh the negatives. If you use a fancy video player that people don’t know how to use, they might struggle just to find the play button (you’d be surprised). Appreciate that your audience has done YouTube before, so your audience knows YouTube. Integrating the YouTube player into your website is going to make the experience easy and familiar; it’s

going to be exactly what people are familiar with. People love familiarity.

YouTube gives the strongest rankings to the videos that people actually watch all

The way through; that’s the number one ranking variable today. The best way to do that is to offer them a video where they can see exactly how long the video is going to be before beginning. People love to know what to expect. If people know exactly the experience they are going to get, then you have a better chance of them watching your content through to the end or, conversely, not watching at all (which has no negative effect on your rankings).

People from your site are the ones most likely to watch your videos all the way

to the end, because people from your site are the ones who like you the most.

Putting a YouTube player on your site or blog brings the familiarity of YouTube

to the relationship offered by your site for a powerful combination you just can’t get from another fancy player

However, you should not use the YouTube player when you’re doing something extremely commercial that will get you banned from YouTube. Look up the community standards at YouTube, which tell you quite clearly what you can and can not do.

If you have a video that’s going to break the rules, then definitely don’t do it.

It’s counterproductive to get yourself banned. In light of all the work you did to get your video on YouTube, doing something silly like this just doesn’t make sense. So, in this case, use the third party video player; but honestly, you still might want to use one that looks like YouTube.

Finally there is a decision to make:

Does the possibility of viewers leaving your site by clicking on the link inside the YouTube player outweigh the benefits of using the YouTube player? If the chance of them leaving is that big and that dangerous (I really have found very few times that it actually is), then put up your own player. But when it comes down to it, at least nine times out of ten, using the YouTube video player on your site is going to make a lot more sense.

This is something you can easily test with some decent web analytics software. Once again, the action items are simple:

Use the YouTube video player whenever you possibly can. And also, realize youcan check or uncheck the option to “Show suggested videos” so that at least you will not be automatically promoting somebody else at the end. Do use the

YouTube player whenever you can because the positives usually outweigh the negatives.

I need to close this with a warning to remind you of the massive market of

people finding solutions to problems that don’t really exist. If you’re looking at using a third-party player (and there are times when you should), ask yourself if their goal is to help you in your efforts, or sell you a piece of software. The answer to that question alone solves this issue for many.