YouTube

YouTube is currently the most popular video hosting service. As the most popular service, it is also the most widely supported by third party sites. YouTube has extensive help screens, a help forum, and a customizable embed code generator which allows you to specify colors, border or borderless, and whether or not to show a "related videos" list. If your main concern is to have the widest possible audience for your videos with the least amount of effort on your part, Youtube is probably a good way to go.

Given the fact that YouTube has the vast resources of Google behind it, you probably don't have to worry that the site will disappear any time soon. That might not be true for some of the other sites in the video hosting area.

YouTube does have a length limit of 10 minutes. So if you make two hour epics and would not want to consider breaking them into smaller segments, you will want to look elsewhere. You can potentially earn a share of advertisement revenue from videos uploaded to YouTube if you are accepted into the Youtube Partners program. As mentioned on the YouTube Partners page, however, a qualification for being accepted into the program is that:

You regularly upload videos that are viewed by thousands of YouTube users.

That's a significant hurdle for many video creators.

Revver

When it came to sharing ad revenue with video creators, Revver was in the vanguard. In addition to being among the very first to pay a share of ad revenue to video creators, Revver offers to pay 20% of the ad revenue for sharing the videos of others. So even if you don't have any videos of your own, there's the potential opportunity to make money by embedding other people's videos on your site.

The Revver site does not get as many visitors as YouTube. It does, however, offer a lot of tools for building your own audience. There is a tool which will generate either embed code or Javascript for either Flash or Quicktime. There is also the capacity to create playlists (collections) of videos (yours, other peoples, or a combination). You can manually choose the videos that go in a playlist or set a criteria to automatically populate the playlist. Once you have created your playlists, you can embed the playlist in your site (or elsewhere) using Revver's customizable "playlist widget".

Revver also has an API (applications programming interface) which can be used to go beyond the basic tools that Revver offers. If you need some help with the api (or other aspects of Revver), you can visit the Revver forums.

Unfortunately, in addition to all of the good and innovative features of Revver, there are some real negatives as well. Technical glitches have been far too frequent, especially lately (problems with statistics, the Revver site going down at times, slow loading videos, people with Time Warner/Road Runner ISPs not being able to view Revver videos at all).

Worse, Revver has failed to pay the amounts they owe users for quite a number of weeks. Similar problems, it seems, have been reported by the users of some of the other companies owned by Live Universe (which acquired Revver back in February 2008), such as Peerflix. Understandably, this has caused great concern among Revver users. This post in Eric D. Snider's Blog, makes for interesting reading. If the account he relates is accurate (and I have not seen anyone alleging that it is not), it certainly does not inspire a great deal of confidence in Live Universe.

Update 12/10/2008: Earlier this week Revver finally paid its users the amounts that were due in August. Hopefully this indicates an intention on the part of Revver's parent company, Live Universe, to work towards fully resolving the matter. Time will tell.

Blip

After became concerned about Revver's future in light of the problems I cited above, I searched for the best alternative I could find among the various video services that share ad revenue. Blip (that's Blip.TV, not Blip.com), for a variety of reasons, was the one that I chose.

In my experience so far Blip compares very favorably with Revver in terms of techological reliability. All of the videos I uploaded to Blip were up and running in an hour or less (usually much less) compared to hours or even days when uploading the same videos to Revver. Moreover, I have not experienced any of the all too common glitches which I mentioned have been plaguing Revver. Like Revver, Blip has an API (actually two of them) for developers.

Blip pays its users their share of the ad revenue quarterly, rather than Revver's specified monthly. On the other hand, I have not seen any reports of Blip failing to pay on time.

There are a few significant areas where Blip does not yet equal Revver:

• Blip does not currently offer users a share of ad revenue for sharing other people's videos.
• Some video sharing services and/or forums offer support for Revver videos but not for those of Blip. This could change, however, especially if the problems I cited at Revver continue. For example, one of my favorite video forums, MyVidsRock.com, once supported Revver videos only but now has support for Blip (and others) as well.
• Blip does not have its own help forum.

Conclusion

If it were not for the payment problems, frequent glitches, and the related uncertainty, Revver would be my first choice for hosting videos. Revver still has a lot of great features, but at this point my number one choice is Blip. They don't do quite as much, but what they do they do exceedingly well.

Of course, there is no law that says you have to go with one and only one video service. In my own case, I host a number of my own videos at both Blip and Revver (and I'll probably get around to trying some of them out at YouTube as well).

In addition to the added exposure (and possibly added revenue) from using more than one service it's nice to have a little variety in video hosts so that if one of them crashes utterly, goes out of business, etc., you don't have to totally start from scratch in the video area. Also, some services may be more appropriate for a particular video or may have better embed features for a particular site or blog. Diversification is good!