by Michael Podlesny

Created on: June 25, 2008   Last Updated: September 02, 2010

Video sharing online is a huge rage right now. According to Advertising Age magazine, over four billion downloads of video from the website YouTube occur each month. This number of downloads by a single video sharing website clearly shows that YouTube is the number one website in this market.

The question arises though, is it better to host your own videos on your own website or use YouTube. Both have their pros and cons, however YouTube may be the way to go. Below I have outlined the pros and cons of using YouTube.

Lets start off with the obvious. YouTube is free. You do not have to worry about hosting fees, server information, backups and the many other things that go along with running your own website.

If you are looking for people to actually watch your video, well, at four billion downloads per month you already have a world wide audience built in.

YouTube takes care of making sure your video can be seen by those who visit their site. In other words they take care of all the compatibility issues.

If you video turns out to be a hit and becomes very popular you won't need to worry about bandwidth. Bandwidth is the amount space available for transferring information from a website to a user's computer. Most web host companies offer up to a certain amount of bandwidth and then anything over that you have to pay for. When you use YouTube you do not have to worry about that part of it.

In the coming months YouTube will be offering individuals a chance to sell advertising space on their videos. Although it is still in testing right now, this will eventually present an opportunity to content creators to make a few extra bucks with their videos.

Now the downside of using YouTube over your own website is basically control. Control in this sense is where and how you get to display your videos. You lose control specifically when your video appears on YouTube and YouTube displays similar or like kind videos around it. Some of these videos may be objectionable but appear based on the users search keywords. Also, YouTube limits the size of videos being uploaded to 100mb (megabytes). Normally videos should be no longer than two and a half minutes, so 100mb is plenty of space. Finally YouTube will convert your video to a screen resolution of 320 x 240. So if you film something in a higher resolution it will get downgraded.

If you can live with the cons of using YouTube and do not think they are that big of a deal, then go with YouTube. Upload your video, tell everyone you know about it and watch as your video's popularity grows.

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