Video Hosting Secrets: How to Monetize Your Videos?
Are you concerned your video content is not generating income?
Video content creation and distribution has been the in-thing, and a lot of content creators, businesses, and online marketers are exploiting it grandly.
Yet, even after creating tons of video, they still face the problems of self-hosting and monetizing them or even finding the right online video hosting services.
So, in this article, we’d explore ways for video monetization of your original content and how choosing the right video hosting platform can help you in this process.
What is Video Monetization?
Video monetization is generating revenue through original videos you’ve created, published, and have distributed online via any platform. Subscriptions, advertisements, and direct transactions are the most common ways to monetize your video.
At this point, it would be nice to mention that this doesn’t include getting paid to create your videos. You can imagine that you’d pay for a chance to watch a blockbuster movie at the cinema but not for the producer to make the blockbuster.
So, you generate income when people watch your videos, subscribe, or advertise to your audience.
Ideally, video monetization is getting paid for all sorts of engagement with videos you’ve shared. The higher these engagements, the higher income it generates.
How to Monetize your Video Content
Typically, video monetization hinges around leveraging access. Every engagement with your video always comes around to this.
Consequently, without access, advertisers can’t get to your audience, and your audience can’t view your videos or gain entry to your platform.
Let’s see ways you can start monetizing your original video content.
Access to your Platform
In more direct terms, here we mean the audience subscribing to be able to access your video library.
So, you can set a subscription fee that your audience pays to view or download videos from your library. You would have seen this method actively taken advantage of on a platform like Netflix.
While this may not be the only way to monetize your video, it generates a lot of revenue.
Access to your Video
This method differs from the first such that your audience already has access to your library. However, to view or download a video from your library, they’d have to pay.
Bear in mind that the payment could be according to the amount of video watched. So, your audience can pay on a per-view or per-series basis.
Similarly, you could grant viewers access to free video content, but require them to pay for access to more premium content.
You’d have experienced this transactional method if you’ve used an e-learning platform like Udemy.
Access to your Audience
Giving advertisers access to your established audience is another way to generate income from your published videos.
Quite similar to blog monetization, where you get paid to mention a brand, its product, or service in your blog posts, here you get paid to feature a brand in your video.
While this method brings income, it’s most suited to creators with a large number of viewers or subscribers. So you see, the more the clicks, the more the revenue generated.
Those are the three ways you can monetize your video content. Yet, you can only make this possible with a reliable online video hosting service like Vdocipher.
What is Video Hosting?
Video hosting is a process that involves uploading your video content to a platform that takes the responsibility of distributing your video to all the places your audience is. Typically, an example of such platforms would be the popular YouTube.
Yet, there are numerous video hosting platforms providing different services. You can easily find one that works for you, depending on your needs.
Nonetheless, you may wonder, “why can’t I just self-host my videos?”.
Imagine you have just started a business with customers spread across different countries. It might not be very convenient handling your delivery personally, right?
Yet you can always outsource to delivery service companies that have the resources and technology to deliver your product to all your customers, wherever they may be.
Video hosting services are like the delivery service companies for your videos. So, with video hosting services, you can upload your videos, and your audience can access them without hassle.
How Video Hosting Works
Recall, we likened video hosting to delivery service in e-commerce earlier.
When you upload your video content to a video host that has the technology and means, they deliver the video to your audience wherever they are through Content Distribution Networks (CDN).
Directly put, the video host uploads your videos to groups of servers geographically dispersed to ensure fast and seamless delivery of your video content to your viewers according to their locations.
Benefits of Video Hosting Service
Does monetizing your content with video hosting platforms hold any benefits? Let’s find out.
Availability
Your video is readily available to your audience whenever and wherever they may be. Video hosts ensure this by replicating your video content on different CDN servers.
Great viewer experience
Video hosting services feature stable video players with controls for fresher viewing that give your viewers the best experience.
Content Backup
With safe and regular backup, your video content is always available online, no matter what happens.
Ease of goal attainment
Tweak-able features help you set up yourself and your team for success based on your needs.
Time-saving
Video hosting services can make the whole process of putting out your video hassle-free by automatically uploading, compressing, encoding, and distributing your videos. So, you can focus on creating the right videos for your audience.
Seamless integration
The ability of your video host to integrate with other relevant services and tools gives more traction and ease.
Improves video marketing
Having your videos organized in one place puts you in more control and a position with a higher chance of monetizing them.
Piracy Protection
With a video hosting platform that offers anti-piracy services, you can have your original video content protected and also available to people who have gained access to them.
How to choose the right Video Hosting Platform
This stage of your journey is the point to determine what matters most.
Now, you could begin by defining what your video hosting goals are, what you’d do to achieve them, and what you need from a video hosting platform.
So, to set things more in perspective, let’s get started with the following questions.
Are integrations supported?
Consider as necessary whether or not a video hosting platform supports integration with other services and tools.
Also, verify that the ones you’d need are supported. Start by making a list of tools you’d need and the ones that are not necessities, yet would be okay to have.
What format is your video content?
You could consider formats that would give your audience the best viewing experience. Still, ensure that the video hosting service supports other formats you may want to explore in the future, for better traction.
Are you concerned about piracy?
While not a lot of video hosting services offer this, VdoCipher ensures that there is no piracy of your videos.
How easy-to-use is it?
Well, unless you are very tech-savvy, your video hosting service should be very easy to use. It would save you time and trouble.
Do you have a budget?
Just being cheesy, you know that.
Surely, you do have a budget. The question instead should be, “what’s your budget?”
Weigh the pricing alongside the features of the hosting service and your budget.
How much video content would you host?
A six month to one-year video content plan can help put this in perspective for you. You can easily choose what plan and pricing would work for your data and frequency.
Are you interested in discovery and customization?
Decide early enough, which is important to your process, and choose from video hosting platforms with the right features.
Are there limitations with bandwidth and storage?
Watch out for this. Just remember that the more video you plan to share, the more storage and bandwidth you’d require.
Where are your viewers viewing?
Are they viewing on a mobile or the web? Most services provide a mobile app, while some others feature responsive web-based players. Whatever the case, ensure it suits your viewers.
How fast does the player load videos?
This factor would contribute to the satisfaction and overall viewing experience of your audience. Different video players have different features and capacities, so consider this strongly.
Are there additional features?
Extra features and functionalities could be nice perks to consider for a video hosting service. Such features would include interactivity, on-screen call-to-action and form, pop-ups, and so on.
Would you need a lot of support?
Yeah, during the onboarding stage, you’d need a lot of support. Bear that in mind, and ensure they can give it.
Do you need analytics and insights?
If you are looking to monitor your videos’ performance, with insights, you can keep track of how many viewers viewed, when, and what parts of your video content they viewed.
Also, it’d help improve your marketing, with the integration of customer relationship management (CRM) systems and marketing automation platforms (MAP).
Still wondering what video hosting services would be good for you? You can read our previous article on top 7 video hosting sites to find the perfect video hosting services for you.
Features and Functionality to Consider when Choosing your Video Hosting Service
Your choice of a video hosting platform should be able to provide basic functionality, meet your requirements, and not surpass your budget.
With that out of the way, you should consider these features and functionalities when deciding.
Video hosting
Most video hosting platforms sell other components, aside from the actual service of hosting your videos.
That means there’d be charges for several other offerings like storage and bandwidth, so be sure to get the best deal out of it.
Video creation
You should know, not all video hosting platforms offer tools for video creation.
So, you can either create your videos with a different tool and upload it to the hosting platform; or you can do it all on the platform.
Video streaming and Encryption
Will it stream videos securely?
Results of a survey show that customers record a 70% average revenue increase with VdoCipher.
VdoCipher offers encrypted video streaming, with Hollywood certified DRM (Digital Rights Management).
In simpler terms, it prevents the downloading or sharing of your videos without duly acquired access when you stream them.
Discovery
By agreement, secure videos hosting services that offer this feature push your videos to a network of audiences while promoting ads before your videos.
Personalization and Customization
Would the platform let you personalize videos according to the viewing audience?
Also, customization matters a lot in video hosting for video content monetization.
VdoCipher offers active watermarking with your brand elements (logo and so on), text overlay, and contact information while featuring a fully customizable online video player. There is an option for your viewers to download your video for offline viewing on an android app securely. View a demo for online watermark video here.
Video organization
The ease you and your audience would have at finding your videos would greatly depend on video organization.
So, ensure that the video hosting platform would let you organize your videos with tags, groups, and categories.
Analytics
You should outline the metrics you need to monitor your growth and up your marketing, find out which ones the platform can track, and finally, the kind of reports you expect.
Emailing
Can you integrate your emailing service to your video hosting platform?
When developing emails, will you manually generate a GIF thumbnail of your video, or will it be automatically generated by your video hosting platform?
User permission
If you are a team or an organization, will your hosting service let you grant different levels of permission to different users on a role basis? This feature amplifies team collaboration.
