Video Marketing

7 Free Video Sharing Sites To Watch & Upload Videos:

1. VIMEO:

Monthly audience: 130,000,000 visitors

Account types: free, Plus ($59.95/yr), PRO ($199/yr)

Vimeo.com is a fast-growing platform with a quite serious traffic. Unlike YouTube, Vimeo mostly holds prof-looking videos and has three options for its users: a basic account with limitations and two paid ones with advanced options and bigger space. Here are the principle differences between free and paid accounts.

As you see, Vimeo Plus or Pro accounts suit you perfectly if you are professionally involved into video editing or need to sell your videos. The only thing that you may not like about Vimeo is a lower number of views compared to YouTube.

SEE ALSO:How to Create a Video Channel on Vimeo

 2. DAILYMOTION:

Monthly audience: 100,000,000 visitors

Account type: free

Dailymotion is a French video-sharing website that allows users to view, upload, browse videos by searching tags, categories, channels, or user-created groups. Dailymotion offers a wide range of random video content: from funny animal videos to serious political reportages. If you want to upload your video to Dailymotion, you should remember that length of the video files is limited to 2 GB and 60 minutes. Also the upload quality to regular users is limited to 1280*720p. However, these restrictions don’t seem a real trouble, and Dailymotion can be a good alternative to YouTube.

SEE ALSO:How to download Dailymotion videos free & easily

3. TWITCH:

Monthly audience: 100,000,000 visitors

Account types: free, Turbo ($8.99/month)

Twitch is a video site for gamers. Here people broadcast themselves playing or talking about games while others watch them either live or via archived footage. You can also broadcaast or archive your gameplay, chat with other gamers and join various gaming comminities. The free account comes with advertising on videos. If you want to remove it, consider going Turbo. Here are more options open to Turbo subscribers:

Unlike Turbo users, free ones can store their live videos on Twitch for 14 days only. Twitch has a complicated system of broadcasting, still it’s a nice idea to use it for sharing your gaming videos.

4. LIVELEAK:

Monthly audience: 45,000,000 visitors

Account type: free

LiveLeak is a UK-based video sharing website that lets users publish videos. Although LiveLeak is majorly oriented to politics, war, and other world events, users are free to post any content they want if it doesn’t violate the website policy. For example. it’s prohibited to upload any advertising media, music (unless you are the copyright holder), videos showing criminal activity, etc. The ideal for LiveLeak video should contain sufficient factual background information or news value.

5.VEOH:

Monthly audience: 15,000,000 visitors

Account type: free

Veoh is an Internet television service that hosts studio content, independent productions and user-generated material. Once signed in to Veoh, you can upload videos of any length and embed them on your site or blog. Veoh accepts hundreds of different formats and has an extensive community for you to participate in. You may get in touch with other people, rate your favorite videos, leave comments and discuss the videos in channels and forums.

6. BREAK:

Monthly audience: 14,000,000 visitors

Account type: free

Break is a highly popular website mainly known for funny videos, clips, and funny pictures. Break accepts major video formats, such as AVI,  WMV, MPG and MOV.  All videos must be no bigger than 60MB. Break provides its users with three ways to upload videos: right from the site page, from your cellphone or you may send a video to Break via email. It’s also possible to add a photo album in JPG, BMP or PNG formats as an addition to your video.

7. METACAFE:

Monthly audience: 12,500,000 visitors

Account type: free

Metacafe is a video-sharing website with millions of short videos. The categories are quite different: video games, sports, music, movies, and TV. The website features a special ranking algorithm that ensures that the uploaded videos are of high quality. Each video can be uploaded only once. One advantage of Metacafe is that it pays people for posting videos. If your content is popular among users and your video hit 20,000 views, Metacafe will pay you $5 for every 1,000 views. This is a good motivation for making cool videos, isn’t it?

MORE WEBSITES TO POST VIDEOS

·        Vine is a website with tons of interesting 6 second looped videos;

·        StupidVideos presents funny and stupid videos from around the web and TV;

·        Ustream (from $99/month) is a video streaming service for business owners and media;

·        Flickr is Yahoo!’s service to host your images and videos;

·        Facebook and Instagram accept user-generated videos;

·        CollegeHumor is one of the most popular comedy sites with tons of funny videos.

OTHER VIDEO SITES WITHOUT UPLOAD OPTION

·        Vevo is largest site to watch music videos, premieres, and concerts;

·        Hulu is number 1 destination to view TV shows, episodes, series, online movies;

·        Netflix provides the biggest depository of on-demand movies and TV shows;

·        Vudu is another popular place to rent movies and TV shows,

·        Crackle stores indy and off-beat TV shows and movies which you can’t find on TV;

·        Viewster offers a wide range of ad-supported free TV shows and movies;

·        TV.com hosts English-language shows, episodes, reviews and more;

·        ABC  is a home for various entertaining shows, comedies, series, etc.

 So here is a small sample of video sites you should check out that many people feel are better than YouTube.

Current TV:

Current TV is a website that is also a TV channel, but unlike all other tv sites, that post their content from tv on their video sites, Current plays the content from their website on TV. People post their videos, or pods, on the site which get voted by the community and the highest ranking ones get on their television channel. Current has an enticing variety of videos, but the heart of the site is its amazing independent journalism. On Current, you can see all the reports that usually don’t get on television, or a whole new approach to the news you do see. For video producers, it’s a chance to get your video on tv and a little bit of cash to go with it.

TED:

TED is unique in the world of streaming video, and it is brilliant in its own way. TED’s whole concept is to spread ideas, and to accomplish that, it has enlisted some of the most brilliant minds in the world to create “talks” about topics as diverse as Eve Ensler’s “Embrace your inner child”, Murray Gell-Mann’s “Beauty and truth in physics” or Bill Gates’ “Mosquitos, malaria and education”. Better than YouTube in another way, the search on the site also works in an ingenious way, letting you search by keywords or by themes such as: inspiring, beautiful or fascinating. For those of us who are eternal students, TED is a jewel of endless facets.

Big Think:

Following a very similar style to TED, Big Think takes an interview approach to its video instead of a prepared talk. The result is a very interesting group of answers that make you feel like you actually got to ask a famous expert the question yourself and he had the kindness to reply. It’s not as evolved as TED is, but it is certainly biting at its heels.

Atom :

If you think YouTube videos are funny, you’ve never visited Atom, previously Atom Films. With an enormous array of animations, comedy shorts and sketches, Atom hasn’t lost its edge after its acquisition by MTV.  Because of its huge selection of talented filmmakers who normally contribute to the site and with their own staff filmmakers, who were selected from some of the funniest sites online, Atom manages to consistently have shorts that will lighten up the most boring of days.

Blip.tv :

Created on May 11, 2005, the same year as YouTube, Blip.tv has mimicked what network television channels offer but using the same resource Current TV uses: independent producers. It currently has about 48,000 independently produced Web shows and approximately 22,000,000 viewers. They share the revenue of their ads with the producers, which allows them to make some income from their shows and keep producing them and in exchange, Blip.tv gets a constant supply of episodes for their video site. So what can you find on Blip.tv? Mostly, the site consists of series of shows, much like television shows, with genres like dating, technology, animation and a diverse group of fiction stories.

5 Min:

Did you ever want to know how to photograph a red squirrel, how to reduce poverty in developing worlds or how to go geocaching with your kids? Well, you can find all of those answers and much, much more on 5min.com, the site that will try to teach you how to do almost anything in 5 minute videos.

World Wide Internet TV (WwiTV):

WwiTV is more an aggregator than a video site, since it doesn’t store the videos itself, but merely points at videos in other sites. The reason it made this list is that it points at video channels from all over the world, so if you’d like to watch a soap opera from Azerbaijan or a music video from Vietnam, you can find it all on WwiTV. The quality is generally quite poor and the site itself is quite an eye sore, but where else would you find a North Korean video as top selection of the day followed closely by the Hellenic channel in Greece?

Hulu:

Television channels seem to have noticed that trying to keep their shows out of streaming video sites is a lost battle. Their response seems to be finding partners who will help them deliver the content in its entirety and in higher quality than the ripped versions of the videos while sharing the ad revenue. One of such partner sites is Hulu. It carries content from many tv channels at very high streaming quality. The one catch is that it doesn’t have international streaming rights for their content outside the USA, so it’s for an American audience only.

Vimeo:

Since it was created by filmmakers, Vimeo shows a very holistic and welcoming approach to video sharing. Vimeo tends to attract more professional filmmakers than other sharing sites, the video tends to be higher quality and the design certainly beats YouTube’s messy look. The community projects and groups also make it easy to find videos of a particular topic or subject matter and with almost 3 million members and over 17000 videos uploaded daily, there is a lot to choose from.

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Stickam:

The proposal of sites like Stickam is very innovative. Let the audience participate by streaming their own video live. For most part, it works in an exciting way. Some shows are scheduled and you can stream your own video as an audience member and talk to the hosts or video chat among other viewers. It’s like being part of a live audience and always carrying the mike. You can also watch pre-recorded shows and interviews.

The one issue is that for a large part of the day, the site seems to be inhabited by the people who are most at ease with webcams, young teenagers. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but if you are looking for some more experienced discussions you must select your live streams carefully.

UStream:

The older, more mature version of Stickam, Ustream also allows people to create their own broadcasting channels and their own live shows. It does, though, carry live broadcasting from many mainstream media sites and it doesn’t allow people to join in with their video chats the way Stickam does, but it does have live text chat.

The topics tend to be more interesting than Stickam’s since it has a lot of contributions from professional journalists who decided to try the live interactive video format.

Blinkx:

Why bother visiting a bunch of video sites looking for viral videos when you can find it all on one site? Boasting to be world’s largest video search engine with over 35 million hours of video from all major video sites, Blinx even claims to have indexed more media searches than Google.  All you have to do is type in a keyword and you get results from major sites all at once.

There are literally thousands of streaming video sites to choose from, built just  to entertain or inform you. Some are very niche, some copies of what we’ve already seen.  The ones above are a taste of those I find myself checking out on a regular basis. What are your favorite ones and why?

We hope this post helped you find the most approriate video site to publish your videos or discover others’ ones. Feel free to share your all-time favorites in the comments below.