youtube for universities

[Peter Woodbridge]

We've been experimenting with youtube as a platform for hosting our university videos and films. The pull towards it was the reach that it potentially gives us . How is everyone else getting along with it?

[Paul Whittle]

Yes, we are considering this as well. Excuse my ignorance, but what are the costs and how do you get your css style up there?

[Chas Grundy]

With such an investment in video (http://nd.edu) we use YouTube as a repository for all the rest of ours. We created a channel: http://www.youtube.com/nddotedu.

Some notes...

1. Develop a relationship with YouTube so that you don't need to get your videos approved and so that you can post longer videos.

2. Allow embedding for your videos. A lot of traffic comes from outside the YouTube website, embedded into outside blogs.

3. Try allowing comments. This kind of freedom scares conservative administrators, but it develops community and can give you better feedback.

4. Including branding in your video. The last 2-3 seconds of your video could include your university's mark and web address. This is something we recently realized - when your video isn't shown in the context of your branded properties (such as your YouTube channel) then people don't necessarily associate your great content with your brand.

[Brian]

Hey Chas, I like your YouTube channel - how did you get YouTube to allow you to include a header in your channel layout - it's my understanding that the standard layout doesn't allow for that. Did you request special approval?

Thanks,
Brian

[Chas Grundy]

I wasn't the one who set that up, but I think we signed up as a Partner account. http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=94526&...

You can also customize your backgrounds and styles through the normal layout as well. I'm not sure if that's what you meant.

[Kris Martin-Baker]

We are using it for all video hosting at this time http://youtube.com/lynchburgcollege . We have hardly any video material, relatively speaking, so haven't run across negatives yet. The videos live on YouTube but we embed them into our site pages as desired. We also have an iTunesU "store" for longer academic content. Setting these up wasn't straightforward, but proved easier than actually getting the video content created. Lots of people seem to "want video" but few want to actually take the video, and we don't have any staff to do it for them.

[Wilson Tsang]

We started our YouTube channel just under 2 years ago and are doing very well now. Our channel is: http://www.youtube.com/vancouverfilmschool. The potential for reach is definitely there. On one of our more recent start dates, more than an 1/8 of the students surveyed heard about us via YouTube.

In terms of resources, we have a media producer on our media team whose full-time job is to prep the videos and upload them. However we do generally upload on a weekly basis and on multiple video-sharing sites hence the full-time position. We have someone who occasionally moderates and tries to answer any questions or address comments posted. We also have one of us in the web team do the design layout for the channel page. We now have a director's account and have more freedom with the design of our channel page -- it was quite frustrating initially trying to market our brand with the limitations of a normal account.

Some notes:
1. Reiterating Chas' point for emphasis: develop a relationship with YouTube. We just recently completed a successful scholarship campaign in partnership with YouTube -- working with them allowed us to work through the obstacles we encountered much easier.

2. Along the lines of extending your branding, I would suggest logo watermarking your videos as well.

3. Set a upload target and stick to it. This creates expectancy for new content and increases your regular viewers. We try to upload videos every week. While this may be impossible for many channels due to resources, even updating monthly will help you in growing your video content on your channel and subscriber base.

4. Polish your content before uploading. Don't just upload your video as is and plan on making a better version or fixing issues and reuploading down the road. When you reupload, you lose all the valuable data associated with your video (i.e. view stats, comments, ratings etc.). I'm no longer involved with this project so I'm not sure if this has been addressed but it was a big issue for us back then.

Hope this helps.

[Claudia Snell]

This is great information! Thank you.

When you say "develop a relationship" are you referring to setting up a Partner Account? (http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/topic.py?topic=12632)

Any additional information about developing a relationship with YouTube would be much appreciated. Thank you.

[Chas Grundy]

A partner account for sure, but if you have another connection to YouTube it can't hurt to build that relationship. They have been good to universities, from what I've heard and personally experienced.

[Claudia Snell]

Thank you for the quick response. I do not have another connection but I will be looking into the partnership account details.

Thank you again!

[Debbie]

We want to be a YouTube partner, so we can associate our website with our YouTube channel. Do we need to monetize a video?  How did you proceed with signing up?

We don't want to monetize our content, so how can we be a partner. I notice that Universities cannot be "non-profit" partners.

Thank you.

[Peter Woodbridge]

thanks for the comments, very useful.

i'm particularly interested in how people deal with negative feedback (not that we get any!)

i'm gradually starting the process of talking to youtube about getting a branded channel (there's not so many over here in the uk)

in the meantime take a look at

[Peter Woodbridge]

www.youtube.com/covstudent