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200 P a r t I I I Managing Your YouTube Videos

Why You Should Let YouTube Host Your Videos

If you produce a lot of videos for YouTube, there’s no reason not to display those
videos on your own website or blog, too. The more eyeballs the better, after all.

Now, it’s probably easy enough to pipe a copy of each video over to your tech guys
and let them create a video viewing page on your site. They can figure out how best
to host and serve the videos, and you’re ready to go.

However, it costs space and money to store a video on your own web server. If
you’re a small business, you can quickly eat through the storage space included with
your hosting plan, and have to pay extra for additional storage. (Videos are big files,
after all.) In addition, some hosting plans charge extra if your bandwidth usage goes
above a certain number each month, and videos use a lot of bandwidth.

You see where we’re going here. The more videos you create, the more storage space
you use, and the more that’s going to cost you. Likewise, the more videos that are
viewed—or the more viewers a given video attracts—the more bandwidth you use,
and that’s going to cost you, too. In fact, if you’re fortunate enough to have a video
that goes viral, with hundreds of thousands of viewers, it could bankrupt you—or
clog your available bandwidth.

You don’t have that problem if you let YouTube host and serve your videos. All you
have to do is insert a bit of code for each video onto your site’s video viewing page,
and the videos show up on the page just as if you were hosting them—but you’re
not. The video files themselves are stored on YouTube’s servers, using YouTube’s
bandwidth whenever they’re viewed. You don’t have to devote any disk storage or
bandwidth to serve the videos, which relieves a big load on your end.

The best thing is, YouTube does this all for free. YouTube doesn’t charge a single
penny to host or serve your videos. It doesn’t matter how many videos you upload
or how many people view them, you don’t pay a thing. And that’s a good thing,
especially for small or cash-strapped businsses.

Adding YouTube Video Links to a Web Page

Now, not all companies want to include videos on their official websites. Instead,
you might want to reference your YouTube videos without displaying them.

The easiest way to do this is via a link to a specific video on the YouTube site. Every
YouTube video has its own unique web address (URL). You can copy and paste that
URL into a page on your company’s website, email messages, blog postings, and the
like.