Video

Don't Rely On YouTube

June 3rd, 2009 by Matt Haff

Now that I have your attention, let me explain. I’ve seen quite a few churches including 12Stone use YouTube as a means to host their video online and share it across the social networks, visitors and members alike. If your church is like any other hip up-to-date church then they probably have the Sunday morning sermons on video and online somewhere, hopefully not YouTube.

Have you ever seen a Christian video on YouTube? I’m sure you have, that’s no big deal but what about the so called “related” videos on the side bar? All too often I have seen where an inappropriate video shows up as the first or second related video. For example, this is a video that 12Stone did called “It’s Magic” and in the related videos the first one that shows up for me is “Trouble makers at 12Stone. (:” now this isn’t as bad as two girls making out on a bed but it’s still not something that we would have put up for everyone to associate us with. Point being, we have no control over what is associated with us on YouTube.

Now I’m not suggesting not to use YouTube all together, but instead of having it as your primary video source for visitors and members, you should have your own controlled video page. Use YouTube for the social networks and to draw more people in to see the message but direct all people from YouTube to your video page for more.

Our next step here at 12Stone is to publish only a certain amount or genre of video to YouTube while having links back to our controlled and branded video page where we have all our content. For this it would work best if you had a third party service to host and track your videos. I’ve done some research over the past couple of months in looking for a service that best suits our needs and we ended up going with Ooyala.

I’ll post more on my research later.