So is Vimeo the only way to go? or QT?

[Ralph Gereg]

Originally Posted by Ervin Farkas

Good luck with that - most people (me included) click away at the first sign indicating that their personal information is being gathered.

I'll have to second Ervin on this one.... there are way too many sites out there who want to make you "pay" for "free" stuff with your personal info which of course many if not most will turn around and sell to spammers and mailing lists, etc...

[Andrew Smith]

Even having to "register" is enough for me to think of something as "too much of a PITA" and move on.

Mind you, bugmenot.com is a very handy thing for those times when I care enough.

Andrew

[Ervin Farkas]

Try hosting your site with a hosting company that does this kind of work for you.

Good hosts will gather info like: what part of the world (country) your visitor is from, how much time did he spend on your site, exactly which pages he clicked on, the amount of data downloaded, operating system, browser and media player version installed on your visitor's computer, screen resolution, etc... mostly technical stuff.

Computing the number of visitors, time spent on the page, and the size of your video will give you an idea of how many people might have watched it and head to tail and how many just opened it and then clicked away.

Gathering demographic info means fishing for personal information, and that's illegal - except, of course, if somehow you can get your visitors to give that to you free willing.

[Andrew Smith]

I run a web host / server myself and I can tell you that you won't get any truly useful stats without paying extra for the seriously analytical server software. That said, Google Analytics always bucks the trend, though at a cost of their javascript link back to their stats server sometimes slowing your site down.

But it still won't tell you who actually clicked on your video and whether they finished watching or not.

For $60/year Vimeo is going to be your best bang for buck, and with minimal effort to set up and implement.

Mess around with the other "cheaper" methods if you want, but remember to consider the cost of how much of your time this is going to take ... and even then you might not be satisfied.

Andrew

[Dennis Stevens]

Yes, it seems Vimeo is the best bet. Thanks.

No, guys, I'm not planning on doing anything illegal. I would only try to ask people for that information, and obviously very few people would do that. I would never make it mandatory to register to watch the content. I'd put it off to the side, and give something extra if you register, but not require it at all.

Demographic info on the viewer would obviously be useful, but hard to get. Right now I'm just looking for the provider that will get the most info on who is watching, and if they are watching the whole video.

[Adam Stanislav]

Originally Posted by Dennis Stevens

I'm thinking the best way to get the most demographic info is to try and get people to fill out a registration form - they get updates or something, and put info about age, city they live in etc.

No, that is the best way to make people run away very quickly. And even if someone fills the form out, chances are he will just do it to get access to the video(s) and will fill out some completely made up "facts".

Personally, if I wanted to see your videos so badly that I would be willing to go through the form filling, I would create a new email address just to get access and I would code the email address to know it was the one I gave your specific site. The moment you sent me your "updates", I would invalidate that address.

I wish I had been doing that from the day I got on the Internet. Sadly, I was using one address, the same one my family and friends know, and my mailbox is flooded with loan offers, business "proposals", Nigerian scam, etc, every single day. Of course, I forward each and every one of those to spamcop, but that does not stop them from coming. I get hundreds of spam messages for every real message. And I am sick and tired of it, and so is anyone who has been on the Internet for a while.

A web site (which is just an anonymous machine to most of us) asking for personal information raises too many antennae, which means no real info is given (naturally, fora like this one are an exception, since I actually want to be here, and so do the rest of us here).

So, what you are proposing would scare away the people you want to attract most, and would give you fake and worthless demographics from the rest of the visitors.

As for statistics, the typical web server (such as Apache) will log the names and times of resources requested. But it will not tell you whether people finished downloading a huge file. And even if it did, it still cannot tell you whether people watched the whole thing. That is because online video files download faster than they play, so if someone starts watching and quits a minute later, either the entire file or at least a lot more than a minute's worth of it has been downloaded. And the web server has no way of knowing how much of it was actually watched.

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

Most companies have shied away from asking for demographic info simply because it scares away customers in practice.

The only thing that is worth asking for is an email address and a first name. You can include a check-box if you wish to be extra nice so the users can opt out of any updates. But since they are still 'opting in' technically, you can send them a personal message when you really need it. Make sure you mention this.

You can track location and certain demographic info from google analytics. Start from here and see how this works, then 'rinse and repeat' - that's how marketing works.

[Andrew Smith]

And for the record, whenever an Australian is asked for (and has to type in) their 5 digit zip code, we will inevitably type "90210". It's the only one we know.

Andrew

[Dennis Stevens]

So have people found google analytics the best source of info?

I did Vimeo Plus, and found most of my viewers are in the United States. Good to know, but more specific info would be good. Being watched in Portland Oregon is different (to me) from being watched in Portland Maine.

I'll check out Google Video myself, but how flexible is it? Can you embed the video in another website, the way you do with Vimeo and Youtube.

[Dennis Stevens]

BTW, doesn't the site you are reading right now ask for some demographic information? Maybe some of you Australians are not really Australian?

[Andrew Smith]

To the best of my knowledge, Google Video has effectively been merged with YouTube. My guess is that you will find that new videos are being added to the YouTube infrastructure which (in the end) Google found to be better than theirs.

Andrew

[Larry Reavis]

sorry - duplicate post

[Larry Reavis]

I just uploaded my first video to Vimeo a few days ago. It played smoothly for me, but others have told me it stutters (no buffering - just doesn't play smoothly). Same for me - some Vimeo videos play smooth as silk, others are a major pain to watch. I've put a thread on this forum and elsewhere, and no one seems to know how to make Vimeo movies always play smoothly. Here's a video that I put on Vimeo last night - in case you want to see for yourself:

(2c) Physics and Kriya Yoga on Vimeo

On the other hand, that same video on my GoDaddy-hosted site (Physics: The quantum explanation") play smoothly for most folks in the U.S.. but for some overseas locations the web links are so slow that playing is totally out of the question - even for those who have very fast web connections in those countries.

So it depends upon your intentions. If you want a lot of viewers, YouTube probably is best. I first posted there less than a month ago and have had over 600 hits - not viral, certainly, but more than I had expected; and more than for my own GoDaddy site.

If you want to post long videos or videos that can be seen in many countries or that you can password-protect, Vimeo is best. Vimeo also can get a surprising number of hits if you join Groups or Channels (even the video that I posted last night has had 2 view).

If you want the best local playback experience, JW Player or other good x.264 player set up to play Handbrake-encoded .MP4s on your local server almost certainly will give the best image quality/ stutter-free experience for most viewers.