The Good, the Bad and the Viral: YouTube Pros and Cons

Do you love YouTube? It is a great video-sharing website where you can take in a lot of great information thanks to the many how-to videos along with a place where you can laugh at just about anything. YouTube has been around since 2005 and its immense popularity is only growing. Many of the people that use YouTube don’t intend to have malicious information on there but there are some people that just don’t care and they post inappropriate videos. If you are a parent, worrying about your child’s safety is something you likely think about all the time and YouTube can be a dangerous place for them if they aren’t careful. YouTube does have a settings tool for parents so you can try and keep your kids safe but it doesn’t always block out all of the bad images and things that you really don’t want your children to be exposed to.

Those of us that are familiar with YouTube are able to understand how to use it and how you can use the right type of terms when searching for videos. However there are a lot of people that aren’t really sure how to use the site or what it is all about for that matter. To help you understand the video-sharing site a little better, here are some pros and cons of YouTube.

Pros of YouTube

One of the things that really makes YouTube great is that it’s free. When it was launched, it was the only video-sharing site of it’s kind and it is still the most popular. Once the video is on the site, it will be available for anyone to view, which can mean a lot of money in advertising for you if you get people all over the world watching your video. For businesses and individuals that are trying to build online notoriety, YouTube will easily be able to provide this thanks to it’s ability to attract viewers from all over the world. As long as you are able to promote the right type of video, you will be able to get the right numbers you need for your business. YouTube makes it easy to share your video using HTML coding along with their share buttons that can easily send out the video to all of your Facebook friends and email contacts. It’s a great way to promote yourself or your company. You can create a series of educational videos, which can also aid in boosting your online presence and building your reputation. YouTube has so many different types of videos that you can actually pull up videos of a historical nature or find a TV special that aired once when you were a kid. It’s a great way to find cool videos that may be interesting to you.

Cons of YouTube

YouTube is filled with a lot of videos and not all of them may be things you want to watch. There are a lot of videos that are filled with spam and you can often get people leaving comments on your videos that are rude, vulgar, and spam. If you create a video and you don’t follow the YouTube requirements, it will be shrunk to fit the specifications and this can really hurt the overall quality of your video. To continue getting hits, the video will need to be optimized as well and this can be a very frustrating and time-consuming process to deal with. Once you make a video, you are sharing it with the entire world, which means everyone will know who you are and they can gain access to information that you really didn’t want to share. Your YouTube videos that you created for your family may end up becoming a viral sensation, something that you may not want.