Editor’s note (September 2026): this post was published in January 2018 and describes SmartVideo as it stood then. Automatic YouTube conversion was retired in March 2026 and is no longer part of the product, and Swarmify’s pricing has changed since 2018. The argument for owning your video still stands; the feature and pricing details below do not. Current SmartVideo plans, trial, and terms are on our pricing page.
We’ve been around awhile now and work with all sorts of video publishers both large and small, accelerating and delivering over 500 million streams in the past two years alone. Unfortunately, there’s an increasingly disturbing trend we’ve observed among online media and entertainment companies publishing video on their site.
Many publishers who once paid an Online Video Provider and published native video on their site are now just uploading their video to YouTube. Uploading content to YouTube is great for distribution and driving traffic back to their online properties. In fact, most publishers should be taking advantage of this. However, many of these publishers are simply grabbing an embed code from YouTube, placing it on their site instead of a native video, and calling it a day.
Publishing videos on your website from free video platforms in place of native video is throwing in the towel and declaring video bankruptcy.
We get it. Publishing video you control on your website is hard. Even paying an Online Video Provider involves planning, setting up, migrating, and managing all of the moving parts on an ongoing basis. And then there’s the cost…
- Storage ----> Total cost = surprise!
- Encoding (based on device type and formats) ----> Total cost = take a guess!
- Bandwidth ----> Total cost = unpredictable!
- Player ----> Total cost = usually somewhere around $100/year, although sometimes included free
- Per site licensing ----> Total cost = annoying!
- Overage/underage penalties----> $$$$$$
- Price per “seat” ----> Wasted money when users move on to other jobs
Can you say…
Each of these individual costs is confusing, variable, and piles up.
Having said that, YouTube may seem free and simple but using free platforms like YouTube are not as free as they seem.
When you hand your video over to a free video distribution platform and embed those videos back on your site, you are giving up your sovereignty and power. You’re also allowing those “free” platforms to infiltrate your website and siphon off your traffic (they have to make money somehow). The free video platforms have gotten very good at moving audience attention from your site to theirs and keeping it there!
You give up using an ad network of your choosing and relinquish control over monetization. You are now at the mercy of a single platform’s ad network and earn much lower CPM’s, effectively trading real dollars for Internet pennies. What happens when some of your videos are demonetized because of some arbitrary rule or fickle algorithm? There is no support when something goes wrong.
Taking a long hard look at your video strategy and drilling down into the true trade-offs of a free service is essential.
***Swarmify created SmartVideo around a simple idea; video is hard but publishers of all shapes and sizes deserve tools that create effortlessly uncluttered, accelerated, playback experiences on their website that load fast and look professional with all-inclusive dead simple pricing and automagic YouTube migration. ***Get your free trial today!
