9 Great Sites for Hosting Brand Videos

Online video is proving to be a very effective internet marketing tool. Businesses, individuals, politicians, amateurs, everyone has used online video in a way or another to promote themselves, businesses, beliefs, a house for sale, a new website or just to share a cooking recipe or a vacation funny video moment.

Because online videos are a great way to convert viewers into buyers, it’s worth considering them in the same professional light as you would any other marketing materials.  Part of using video in your marketing efforts is knowing where to put them on the web so that they get seen. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of video hosting sites; here are the 9 that are the most popular and have the highest traffic.  If sites may not accept casual or self-produced video we’ll note that here.

YouTube

When you think of video hosting sites, YouTube of course instantly comes to mind.  It is undoubtedly the best and most popular video hosting site out there. It’s easy to use, easy to navigate and interactive.  Furthermore, YouTube is also a social community where anyone can post comments and build relationships with others over shared video interests.

YouTube has other great features, such as the ability to embed your YouTube video on your blog or site and an RSS feed that lets you instantly receive updates of new videos for a particular topic or business.  One downside is that many multiples of the same video often get uploaded (like popular television or news moments) – so you may have to wade through a lot of stuff to find what you’re looking for.

Metacafe

Metacafe is a selective video hosting site. All videos are thoroughly reviewed by a panel of 80,000 community members, so you’re sure to find quality videos without duplications as you would find in YouTube.  The juicy feature about Metacafe is that it rewards videos that are viewed the most. Once your video is watched 20,000 times, Metacafe will start paying $5 for every additional 1,000 views.

Break.com

When you need a break you can surf Break.com for a little laugh as the vast majority of videos on Break are humorous.  But you’ll also find videos related to sports, entertainment and the military. In other words, everything that appeals to male surfers, LOL.  It’s a pretty nice website that also doesn’t duplicate content.

Google Video

The search engine leader has leveraged all its expertise in Google Video.  Here you’ll find the biggest variety of searchable categories: Business, Animation, Documentary, Educational, News, Music, Comedy, etc. You can also narrow your results by length, date, relevance, rating or title and have the option to search the Top 100 videos in any country.

Daily Motion

Daily Motion is pretty buttoned-up – you can mostly expect to find newscasts, commercials and short films here. It’s great for viewers, but as a casual video producer you may not get approved to place your videos on Daily Motion.

Yahoo! Video

Yahoo! Video is a lovely site, but loaded with too much TV commercial and therefore not an ideal place for regular people to post their videos.

Revver

Revver is one of the few video host sites that share revenues from pay per click ads with the content creator. In other words, if the ads attached at the end of your video are clicked; you get 50% of the revenue.  It’s very user friendly and easy to navigate, though at times some of the pages open slowly.

Vimeo

Vimeo is a very popular video share and a social networking site as well. The proportion of original content is higher here compared to other video sharing sites.

VidiLife

At VidiLife you can see both professional and amateur videos in different categories such as music, nature and autos.  VidiLife also provides an easy-to-use Video Mail service that allows you to send a video to anyone you want.

Do you use video in your online marketing efforts?  If so, which sites do you upload to?  We’d especially love to know about any sites that we’ve missed.