You Tube is no John Doe to all of you. Being the leading “video-sharing website”, YouTube hosts millions of videos on different topics from learning, entertainment, to everything else under the sun. YouTube has over a billion users-that makes it one-third of all the people online with a billion views being generated out of a million hours of viewing. The statistics might seem huge and all, but why YouTube?

It’s easily available and free. The revolutionary idea, YouTube, became an instant hit because until then there was no common website/platform to share videos (random and subject-oriented). No hidden subscriber fee or charges made it even more accessible and a place to turn to when in need. It was for the people, by the people, and of the people who loved videos. Registered users could upload, watch, and subscribe to videos and channels and unregistered users could watch videos free of cost.

Another reason for the success story of YouTube is because of its wide choices of video formats. It was available only in one format during its inception, but today the users are given many options when it comes to video formats. Today YouTube accepts almost all container formats like .MOV, .AVI, .MPEG4, .MP4, MPEGPS, .FLV, 3GPP and .WebM. What’s more wonderful is that they support you on how to convert your video file to match the supported file format.

The huge popularity for YouTube and its success motivated a whole new area of business. This gave birth to parallelism in the Internet video scene. On one side we have YouTube, free, publicly available but not secure, and on the other we have secure video hosting platforms that are private/semi-private, secure, with a minimal fee. So we now come to the next question.

Why an alternative to YouTube?

The widespread popularity of YouTube boosted the video industry and many people began searching for alternative options for video sharing. Why alternate options? The security of videos is very minimal and anybody can download videos from YouTube and use it for their personal needs. This catalyzed the need for better alternatives. YouTube is still not able to control downloads, and many software’s and applications are capable of downloading materials from YouTube. Like I said, security is key when it comes to sharing content; especially, content that you have created with your sweat and toil. So what alternate YouTube options do is concentrate on providing the highest level of security and privacy for hosted content.

Another problem or rather nuisance that pesters users is the advertisements that kills the fun of the viewer. These ads hinder the viewing process. It is not easy to monetize with YouTube. Only YouTubers with a large number of subscribers can make a living out of YouTube and rest of people with mediocre views and subscribers find it difficult to make a considerable amount of money.

If you are counting on hosting your video online to collaborate with your users in a secure manner and alongside white label your brand, then you should look at parallel video hosting services and ignore mainstream YouTube.