My bosses want to use YT as a repository for any and all videos...strategy advice???

[Andrew.Film]

Hey guys. I'm not a full time channel manager, but I lead our video department and because our social strategist does not have capacity to manage YT, I volunteered to take it over. One of the biggest points of tension I always have with my superiors is they want to use the channel as a repository. We have more unlisted videos than public videos. We load all versions of our commercial spots on it for our agency to use - I know they do pre-rolls and embedding, etc, but we always have like 20 versions we have to load. I'm trying to be more strategic with our content and I know that's going to be a long battle. But what advice would you give in terms of dealing with all these "archive" uses of YT? I wish there was a way I could just stick them in a folder and out from my main channel content list. I'd like to get to a point where we are only uploading stuff that is meant for our subscribers and organic search. Probably wishful thinking. Any advice and tactics for conversations I'm having as to why this is not a good part of our strategy (or is it?) are welcome!

 

[crazy-logic]

sure - at some point youtube or rather google will run out of space a more and more people do this. At that point, they'll start transcoding down non public videos down or deleting them i suspect. Storage isn't free.

it's a pretty big business risk to put all your content in YT - a few copyright strikes and your channel with it's content is gone and you have to fight to get it back, that's a pretty big reason not to use YT as a storage platform.

 

[cy's escapes]

In my full time job, I manage my organizations videos and creative, I use Vimeo as a way to archive all our creative, pre-rolls, social ads, broadcast ads etc. It's internal foldering system and teams functionality makes it very easy to manage creative and decide what gets seen by the public and what just stays internal. If you have an option to switch I would recommend Vimeo for this reason as I can't imagine trying organize creative over time using YT for this purpose.

 

[Nicekid76]

At that point, they'll start transcoding down non public videos down or deleting them i suspect. Storage isn't free.

I somewhat doubt it - Storage isn't free but let's not pretend like Youtube doesn't make money. YouTube generated $15 billion in 2019 which was about 10% of Google's earning for the 2019 year. That being said a private video with 0 views can be deleted without warning. I'm pretty sure youtube announced this in 2019. BUT a private video with a few views that was used for internal reason, I doubt they would delete that... at least not any time soon.

If you have an option to switch I would recommend Vimeo for this reason as I can't imagine trying organize creative over time using YT for this purpose.

In youtube studio you can filter by visibility (see image below). With filters, you can quickly see only public or only the unlisted, private, draft, scheduled, etc videos. It's not that crazy to quickly filter it.
Also you can create playlist for the videos that are private vs public.

I use Vimeo for work videos, but haven't dove into it too far. That being said, what can folders do that playlist can't? I'm assuming you can have folders in folder most likely and youtube doesn't support playlist in playlist. Does it have any other benefit?


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[This is the image below. Hope that helps]

 

[Tito Tims Videos]

Having more unlisted than public vids will not matter to your viewers - they only see the public vids in their lists. I agree with Nicekid76 that you can use playlist to keep the vids organized (just like folders).

But even if you keep your vids online I would still make sure and have a backup. Not so much for YT deletion reasons, just because glitches happen. Memory is cheap now, so buy some extra drives, or pay for storage on more than one site. There is no problem using YT for storage - but it should not be your only storage.

 

[cy's escapes]

I use Vimeo for work videos, but haven't dove into it too far. That being said, what can folders do that playlist can't? I'm assuming you can have folders in folder most likely and youtube doesn't support playlist in playlist. Does it have any other benefit?

I would consider YT playlists as equivalent to Vimeo's Showcases, places where you allocate content to a title / topic with privacy options. Vimeo's folder system is purely designed for internal organization which is nice if you have a lot of videos. I appreciate the fact that I can skim through all my folders on Vimeo on the main video page. But other than that they're pretty much the same.

You can certainly use YT as a way to archive, but I personally find the UI on Vimeo more easier to navigate for archival purposes. Another big thing for me is that Vimeo allows you to replace the video file in case if you ever update the content, while still keeping the analytics of the current video which I need to report on. I learned that the hard way when I first started YT and accidentally uploaded a video with the music watermark still on thinking I could switch it out later. Lol.