Update Your Online Video Hunting
Although YouTube might be the king of online video, the truth is, it doesn’t have the most ideal interface for content discovery. Though the site makes it easy to upload and share videos, there are sites that make finding viral videos, corporate and otherwise, much easier. Here are a couple our favorite online video hunting sites.
Buzzfeed: A site that works a bit like Digg, in that users submit interesting things they find online, and the best submissions wind up on the home page.
Best Thing About Buzzfeed: The videos tend to be posted well before their viral activity begins–catch the clips before they go viral!
Devour: Another curated site, where humans help choose which submitted videos make the home page. In terms of look and feel, it’s much less busy than Buzzfeed.
Best Thing About Devour: The design and user experience. Clean, minimalist, and with gigantic YouTube embeds. I love watching videos on this site.
PopScreen: Provides an easy way to keep track of all your favorite online videos. Think of PopScreen as Delicious for your videos.
The Best Thing About PopScreen: Multiple sources. Because PopScreen works across most video production Chicago platforms, there’s always a variety of content to view. YouTube browsing will, obviously, only ever show you YouTube videos. But PopScreen browsing can help you discover YouTube clips, Daily Motion clips, Vimeo videos, and more.
Reddit: Like Digg, Reddit is a site where people share their favorite web content–videos, images, news items, opinions, etc. Part of the reason that Reddit is such a great source for finding emerging videos is the fact that there are so many users–when something hits the home page, it’s going to be clicked on an awful lot. So when a video hits the home page, there’s a great chance it’s either going viral… or about to.
Best Thing About Reddit: Variety of video. Science videos? Check. Colbert videos? Check. Funny or shocking videos? Yup. Reddit is such a diverse community of users, there’s something for everyone. Reddit is one of our favorite places for online video hunting because there are so many topics to dig through.
Bitly.TV: In a nutshell, it’s Bitly’s attempt to show you what videos are being shared the most at any given moment.
The Best Thing About Bitly.TV: The timeline. Above the featured videos on Bitly.TV’s home page is a little time line. And if you want to go back in time a bit and see what the most popular videos were yesterday, you can do that. Or three days ago. You can go as far back as seven days.
In addition to using these site for your online video hunting, it would be a great idea to post your own videos on them! If you are hunting on these sites, the chance are that other people are too.
