There are plenty of great reasons to produce video content these days, with the chief among them being the ease with which video gets attention. Taking the information from a dry blog post and presenting it through a video can radically improve its mass appeal. It’s also fantastic for showing personality (something that’s key for modern brands), since you can easily express emotion through appearing on camera or even just providing a voiceover.
Additionally, video content production has become remarkably accessible. You don’t need expensive dedicated equipment or comprehensive editing training to create something worth watching. All you need is a half-decent smartphone, a stand of some kind (ideally a tripod), somewhere to film (a kitchen table will do), and something to say. It’s that simple.
But creating valuable video content is never easy, no matter how straightforward the production side may be — so if you’re going to do it, you need to make sure you make the most of it, and that means getting as many eyes on it as possible. The obvious solution is to get all your content on YouTube, the most popular video service in the world, and implement a sensible YouTube strategy. But are there easier ways to get video content noticed? Let’s look at some alternatives and infer what we can,
Social media distribution can work for snappy content
Many social media channels allow users to upload video directly, and using social media to spread video can work very well — but only if it’s short and punchy. Someone scrolling through YouTube suggestions might be willing to watch something that’s five minutes long (or even fifty minutes long), whereas someone scrolling through their Twitter feed might give a video ten seconds at most. If they’re not hooked immediately, they’ll go elsewhere.
If you’re offering long-form videos, then, social media isn’t for you (though you can certainly promote your videos there). One option is to cut snippets from your long videos and use those as hooks through social media. It’s a good way to squeeze extra value from video you’ve already recorded, and you can track referral traffic to gauge the performance.
Social media is also great for live video, of course, particularly for things like Q&A sessions. You can also consider sites like Twitch, which is ostensibly for gaming but also allows things like tutorials. Streaming video can be more sedate, but you need to have a compelling value proposition, and this makes it rather tricky for lesser-known brands. On YouTube, at least, any given video could hit the algorithm sweet spot and become a hit at any given time.
Direct download links can work for content compilations
Let’s suppose that you’re producing high-value video content that doesn’t fit social media, and you want to get it to people with minimal fuss and no third-party hosting service. It’s an odd task to undertake because people generally prefer to stream video instead of downloading it, but you can offer video content to download — and it can make sense in certain situations. One such situation is that someone has intermittent internet access and wants to stockpile video content for entertainment and/or education, or that their data is limited and they want to rewatch content.
The note there is that someone probably won’t want just your content as a download, so you’d need to offer a full content series. If you can put together a series of video tutorials, for instance, you could package them together as part of a course. You could monetize that course through elearning platforms, or distribute it for free purely for marketing — and the best way to do the latter is to create and seed a suitably-labeled torrent.
Torrents (files shared through peer-to-peer transfer) get a bad rap throughout the internet because they’re often used to circumvent copyright laws, but they’re also used perfectly legally by many institutions that want to keep large files in circulation without covering hosting costs (files like operating system images and, yes, training videos).
That means that if you want to create a torrent and start seeding it, you don’t need to worry about the usual precautions that people search for: you don’t need to know about copyright laws or the best VPN for torrenting (it’s a common concern) if you fully own the content you’re uploading. And if your torrent gets downloaded a handful of times, you can probably stop seeding it, meaning the content can remain available without you paying anything.
Vimeo can function as an embedding alternative
Perhaps you’re looking for a YouTube alternative not because you dislike streaming media but because you simply don’t like how YouTube specifically operates. If so, you should think about trying Vimeo. It doesn’t have the reach that YouTube offers, naturally, but it’s a fine option for storing your video so you can embed it in social posts or blog posts without needing to rely on the varying video capabilities of the different channels.
Just don’t expect to make any money from Vimeo if you choose to use it. YouTube isn’t actually all that profitable if you only consider ads, with many top creators making most of their money through Patreon pages and merchandise sales — and Vimeo has a much smaller audience. Use it for embedding alone if that suits you, and otherwise keep your focus elsewhere.
YouTube is ultimately impossible to ignore
Having looked at the few options, we can get to the titular question of whether there are easier avenues than YouTube for getting your video content noticed — and the simple answer is no. It can be done, certainly, but YouTube is simply too dominant to be anything other than the easiest route to video success. That doesn’t make it outright easy, as there’s just so much content for people to view, but no channel or marketing avenue will be easy.
To put it simply, video content isn’t a magic bullet that will inevitably deliver results if you distribute it correctly (though you do, of course, need to distribute it correctly). Video is a great format that requires exceptional work. The best thing you can do is put your time and effort into making your video content as good as it can be. The better you make it, the less you’ll need to worry about getting it noticed, because just a handful of views from the right people can lead to snowballing word-of-mouth promotion.
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