Should your church use YouTube or Podcast? | Tech Help for Churches

Should your church use YouTube or podcast?

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On today’s Tech Help for Churches, Should your church podcast or use YouTube?

Here are some things to consider:

[tweet “How do you choose between YouTube and podcasting? Click here for some things to consider:”]

-Cost–When you consider how much it costs to upload and maintain files, YouTube is the clear winner with a cost of $0.
-Audio–If your content is audio only, you might consider putting up a still graphic and uploading that with the audio to YouTube, but you’ll find that people only watch for a short amount of time before they drop off and doing this consistently trains them to ignore your channel, so if you ever do real video, they won’t watch it. If you’re only doing audio, do a podcast.
-Traffic–If all you want is a ton of traffic, YouTube is the clear winner here.
-Dedicated traffic–If you want traffic that is much more likely to actually be looking for what you’re sending out, a podcast is a better solution.
-Copyright–You control the feed with a podcast, so YouTube can’t pull it down for supposed copyright violations. With that said, there isn’t a good license to get for podcasting worship music, so both have their plusses and minusses.
-Access to audience–With YouTube and a podcast, you have people who will subscribe. While YouTube has the ability to send messages to that audience, that could go away or change at anytime. If people subscribe on your website to a podcast, they might subscribe to a newsletter, too and then you can email them directly. That’s unlikely though. Both allow you to contact people, but neither is awesome at it.
-Control of platform–If YouTube wants, your account could disappear at anytime for any reason. I know of a channel with controversial views (on something political, not church-related), that, although he had millions of subscribers and many more views, he was pulled by YouTube. Happily his channel came back, but there’s not guarantee. You have MUCH more control with a podcast.

So, how about you? Which of these things pushes you over the edge one way or another? Watch the video above for more on this discussion.

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If you use the internet, social media, or new media to advance your church’s mission, this show is for you.

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