At-A-Glance Guide To 7 Major Online Video Platforms

3 mins to read

At-A-Glance Guide To 7 Major Online Video Platforms

Online video is … so hot right now.

And with apologies to Ben Stiller and the Zoolander crew, it’s not likely to cool off anytime soon. The metrics are staggering: Facebook regularly touts its 4 billion daily views, Snapchat says it now serves 2 billion views a day and YouTube checks in with hundreds of millions of hours watched daily.

Head-spinning numbers, but that’s not the complicated part for marketers to manage. Just about every online entity seems to be jumping into the game and each platform has unique requirements, metric measurement capabilities and sharing features to keep track of. Some provide robust analytics to anyone posting a video on their sites; others only share that information with advertisers. Some video starts playing automatically without sound; some doesn’t start until someone clicks on it. How the networks count video views has even come into question.

So with hopes of making sense of a sometimes confusing landscape, we’ve put together a guide to social video platforms, with information compiled from seven of the leading companies in the space. We focused on the socially focused networks that specialize in clip-based video sharing, rather than live streamers like UStream, Livestream, Google Hangouts on Air, Periscope or Meerkat (which we believe are different animals because they are meant primarily for live consumption and either can’t be watched later or probably rarely are).

Each of the networks in our guide allows brands to post video natively and all except for Vine give the option to promote video with advertising dollars. (Although Vine videos can be promoted on Twitter.)

Thanks to marketing pro and spreadsheet wiz Andréa Lopez, who is keeping tabs on these issues as well and from whom we have borrowed some ideas.