Video hosting websites are quickly gaining momentum making video streaming a massive industry. With 2.3 billion active users every month, and a revenue of 19.7 billion in 2020, YouTube tops the list. The simplicity and user-friendly nature of YouTube is one of several reasons why it has exploded in popularity. YouTube makes it easy for creators to share their content with a large global audience.
If you want to create a YouTube-like website, you are at the right place. In this blog, we will be taking you through the process, and by the end of the read, you will be well equipped with the fundamentals to start your own video hosting site. Let’s get started.
The business model of YouTube
Before heading to building a website like YouTube, it is important to understand the business model of YouTube, how it works, and how it makes money. YouTube is a popular video hosting platform for watching, uploading, and sharing videos. Basically, YouTube is free, meaning you don’t have to pay to use the website. Then how does it make money? YouTube employs a variety of methods to generate revenue and the major share of money comes from advertisements. Along with advertisements it also earns money from YouTube premium which is a subscription service. YouTube premium hit 30 million subscribers in 2020. It also implements a pay per view business model where users can pay for buying or renting individual movies.
Key features of video hosting websites
YouTube is a video hosting platform with a broad variety of rich features responsible for the best performance and incredible viewing experience. Here are some of the important features of YouTube that you must integrate into your video hosting platform.
Home screen
The home screen is the first thing a user sees after opening YouTube. It leverages a sophisticated algorithm to ensure each user sees a customized homepage. The homepage is one of the most powerful opportunities to reach new and high converting audiences with your personalized content. Make sure the algorithm of your video hosting site takes into account the past viewing history of users to suggest videos they are most interested in viewing.
Unlimited content upload
One of the peculiarities of video hosting sites like YouTube is that it allows creators to upload an unlimited number of videos. The convenient drag and drop feature of YouTube makes it easy for users to upload videos easily from their computer or cloud storage like Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc.
Custom video player
A custom video player allows you to offer a seamless watching experience to users across all platforms, browsers, and devices. It is recommended to choose an HTML5 video player just like YouTube that gives a quality video experience for viewers by adjusting resolution quickly and seamlessly depending on network conditions.
YouTube Studio
YouTube Studio is an all-in-one space where creators can upload, improve, and optimize their video channels. The studio contains a dashboard, insights section, Analytics, comment filters, and other important tools that inform creators. Likewise, integrate and a smart dashboard that helps creators to track the performance of the video and their channel in overall.
SEO tools
It is incredibly important to optimize the content for the video search engine and sites like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. YouTube allows content creators to optimize the content by using video descriptions, about section, playlist titles, keyword tags related to the topic, adding the SRT file for closed captions and subtitles, etc.
Analytics
Analytics is another important feature of a video hosting website that offers valuable data about how channels and videos are performing. The analytics data helps creators to make informed decisions about which type of content will bring in more audience. The analytics tab must show several data including views for each video, average watch time of videos channel-specific views and viewers, demographics about audience and their interests, and drop-off points where the audience exited the video, and more.
Live streaming
Live streaming is one of the features that are critical to the success of your video hosting platform especially during the time of the current pandemic the world is facing. Due to COVID-19, we no longer have access to people or social life as we did before, and live streaming is necessary to connect with people and businesses. Integrate the feature of live streaming which allows your audience to broadcast live straight from the website.
Paywall integration
Integrating secure payment gateways to your video hosting website is important to allow users to make purchases within the website and content creators to receive money.
Social media integration
This is another important feature a video hosting website must possess- The ability to share content on social media. Allow your users to share videos and stories directly from the website.
Building a website like YouTube
Now let’s come to the actual topic, creating a YouTube-like Website. The obvious method is to hire a development team for your big project and start developing the website from scratch. If you are looking to create a unique platform with a lot of customizations, you can opt for this approach. But, it comes with a hefty price tag which is not affordable for many start-ups. Another viable approach that saves you both time and money and helps you create a website like YouTube with custom branding and other customizations is to use White label solutions or YouTube clone scripts. YouTube clone scripts are nothing but readymade scripts that allow you to quickly build a site like YouTube with similar features and functions without much hassle. Make sure you choose a highly customizable solution that has an embeddable flash video player, messaging system, supports several video formats, etc.
Conclusion
The most critical factors that lead to the access of your video hosting site are content, user experience, and your marketing strategies. Developing a solid content strategy for the broad video sharing platform is the key to long-term success. You can experiment with the niche to uniquely target your niche. Hope you enjoyed the blog and gained valuable insights on building a website like YouTube. Share your thoughts in the comment section below.
