vooPlayer Review: The Best Video Marketing Tool

For many years, blogging has been an essential part of content marketing. That’s why we craft helpful articles based on certain themes and keywords for our target audience. However, that may soon come to a tipping point.

With a staggering two million over blog posts published daily on the internet, it is increasingly harder for smaller publications, websites and bloggers to standout with only written content. Furthermore the average person can only read so many articles per day.

But all is not lost. Affordable data plans, increasingly powerful smart phones and a generation raised on Youtube videos, has led to the rise of a new form of content marketing. Video marketing.

vooPlayer Review: Why Videos?

Did you know in 2018, the average person consumes one hour of video daily? By 2021, video traffic will be an estimated 82% of all consumer Internet traffic¹

The State of Video Marketing 2018 by HubSpot further states the importance of video marketing. Here are some interesting statistics:

• Video usage is on the rise.
  • 81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool — up from 63%, the number reported in our 2017 survey.
  • 65% of those who don’t currently use video, say they plan to start in 2018.
• Marketers rely on video to help them do their jobs. Video is often cited as a tool that helps drive various areas of business performance, and the numbers back up those claims:
  • 97% of marketers say video has helped increase user understanding of their product or service.
  • 76% say it helped them increase sales.
  • 76% say it helped them increase traffic.
  • 80% of marketers say video has increased dwell time on their website.
  • 95% of people have watched an explainer video to learn more about a product or service.
  • 81% of people have been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video.
  • 69% of people have been convinced to buy a piece of software or application by watching a video.
• Consumers love video.
  • Where both video and text are available on the same page, 72% of people would rather use video to learn about a product or service.²

It is clear that video marketing is a fast growing trend. And alongside video marketing, comes the meteoric growth video platform market, which includes video hosting and marketing tools.

vooPlayer Review: The Growth of Video Hosting Platform

According Frost and Sullivan, the video hosting platform market is expected to top $1.5 billion in sales by 2021, with Brightcove at the forefront with its enterprise solutions.³

In fact, New York-based JW Player recently received a $20 million VC-backed investment, bringing its total backing to $25.6 million. JW Player runs on more than 2 million sites and serves videos to roughly 900 million people every month.⁴

But why do businesses and publishers use third-party video players when they could just stick with YouTube? After all, it is free, no?

Unfortunately not. Other than the 45% revenue cut that YouTube takes, YouTube comes with ads and related videos, which distracts your visitors from your content.

Simon Jones of Ooyala says it well.

“YouTube exists to drive video views for itself, so its objectives and the content owners’ objectives may not be aligned. When you, as a company, use somebody else’s platform as a distribution method, you are kept one step away from the customer.”⁵

The Benefits of Commercial Video Hosting Platforms

Thus, if you really want to take video marketing seriously, you need to consider the benefits of a paid hosting solution. Reliable hosting, no ads, advanced analytics, faster speeds, and extra features — including CTA buttons, forms, A/B testing, social media integration, custom ads, and more.⁶

But finding the right video hosting solution is difficult. While solutions like Vimeo, Wistia, Brightcove, Ooyala, Sprout Video and JW Player, are great, they cost a fair bit and might not be suitable for smaller publications on a budget.

That’s why the vooPlayer Pro AppSumo lifetime deal makes so much sense.

vooPlayer Review: Introducing vooPlayer Pro

The feature-packed vooPlayer Pro is already affordable. But with the lifetime license, you get to enjoy the benefits of the Pro tier for the cost of a few months’ fees.

And while vooPlayer Pro is a new tier and lacks certain Enterprise tier features (such as pre and post credit rolls and video funnels), it is still a very powerful tool that is worth investing in, as we will see in the next section.

In order to help us understand how valuable the vooPlayer Pro license is, I’ve created these set of criteria after considering a number of video hosting platforms. They are as below.

• Main Features
  • Analytics – Would you be able to get detailed analytics on your video playback and improve your video marketing efforts?
  • Call-to-Action – Can you drive the desired action at cleverly placed CTA overlays?
  • Lead Generation – Can you collect leads?
  • Customisable – Can the video player be adjusted to your site’s look and feel?
  • Monetization – Can you make money from the video? Either via ads, paywalls or tips?
  • Video SEO – Does the video player/hosting generate the necessary Video SEO for you to rank with search engines? Or do you need to manually place them yourself?
• YouTube Features
  • Works with hosted YouTube Videos – Can we use YouTube to host our videos but play it on our video player?
  • Removes YouTube Ads & Links – Can we remove traces of the YouTube logo, ads and related videos?
• Other Features
  • Custom Start/End Time – Can we select custom start/end times? This will help us use other people’s videos which might have an introduction or a finishing.
  • Floating Videos – Can we configure the video player to float alongside the reader as he scrolls?

Let us see how vooPlayer performs compared to selected competitors below.

vooPlayer Review: How Does vooPlayer Compare?

As you can see for the criteria chosen, vooPlayer actually does quite well except for storage. This brings us to the next question. Should you get more storage?

Do you need more storage for your vooPlayer account?

For a very short period of time, you can permanently increase your permanent storage allowance by buying multiple stacks of vooPlayer codes during this lifetime deal period. Or you would just use vooPlayer’s Hybrid Video Hosting and host your videos for free on YouTube minus all the distractions that comes with it.

But the bigger question is, do you need it? Before we continue, perhaps we could divide the vooPlayer Pro users into two types:

• Needs Extra Video Protection – e.g: Blogs, Online Courses, Private Forums
• Don’t Need Extra Video Protection – The others

Needs Extra Video Protection

If you fall into the first category, the next question would be, how much space would you actually need long term? If you run something like Lynda or Udemy, you might find yourself running out of storage really fast.

Stacking a terrabyte (1TB) of storage would cost you a cool $7,900! Rather than investing so much upfront, perhaps you should not bother with the encrypted storage like the other online learning portals.

Personally, the online learning portals I subscribe to (LaraCasts, Front End Masters and Scott’s Bass Lessons), all have easy to download videos. But subscribers like myself see the value of staying on, because of the fresh content and the community.

However, if you see yourself running niche online courses with a limited amount of videos (e.g: Clickminded SEO), investing in extra storage would make more sense long term.

vooPlayer vs Other Online Video Players

In creating this review, I checked out a number of video hosting platforms for business. This includes Brightcove, Vidyard, Oolaya, Sprout Video, vzaar and JW Player.

I also checked out online video players/wrappers for YouTube videos to find out viable competitors to vooPlayer using the criteria above. If you’re keen, read on the next part for our comparison.

vooPlayer Review: The Comparison

1) vooPlayer vs Wistia / Vimeo Plus

I like Wistia and Vimeo. Other than fulfilling most of my criteria, the two video hosting platforms are much more affordable than players like Brightcove and JW Player. In fact, with Vimeo Pro ($20/mo), you get a total storage of 1TB per year. Way cheaper than vooPlayer.

However, vooPlayer’s hybrid hosting means that I would rather host my videos on Google Drive ($9.99/mo), Dropbox ($9.99/mo) or even YouTube (free) as an unlisted video.

2) vooPlayer vs Julbul / EmbedPress

Julbul and EmbedPress are YouTube video wrappers. They place your YouTube videos in a custom video player that removes all signs of YouTube. Unfortunately, they don’t do anything else.

Why waste real estate on your screen when you can do much more with vooPlayer?

3) vooPlayer vs FV Player Pro

Foliovision’s FV Player Pro does well against vooPlayer Pro though. Although FV Player Pro is WordPress only and charges by domain, it allows you to have powerful features such as pre-roll video ads and VAST Feed Support (Video Ad Serving Template), which helps you serve ads before your videos.

It is a tough call, but due to vooPlayer’s unlimited domain vs Foliovision’s limited domain, my vote goes for vooPlayer.

vooPlayer Review: Strengths & Weaknesses

vooPlayer Pro is an amazing online video player, if it suits your need. But it is not without its weaknesses.

Its main strengths are the ability to play from various video sources including YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook and powerful marketing capabilities of the platform. This includes gateways, CTAs and enhanced analytics.

However, the lack of support for video ads, means you might want to upgrade to vooPlayer Enterprise as your traffic increases.

vooPlayer Review: The Verdict

As a long term AppSumo customer, I was pleasantly surprised with the lifetime deal for vooPlayer. It is easily the best deal of the year, alongside MalCare.

If you are hesitating due to the limited storage or lack of protection for hybrid hosted videos, don’t. You can easily be protected if you host your videos with Amazon S3.

Rather, with the rise of video marketing and increasing consumption of videos daily, a small investment on vooPlayer Pro will bring you a long way in securing your digital future.

Of course, you could save your money and code everything up manually. But what happens if you publish a couple of videos weekly? Would the time spent be more than your hourly rate?

Personally, I tried out more than ten video hosting solution as well as a number of YouTube video wrappers, and I still like vooPlayer. It is easy to use and videos are up within minutes.

Grab your vooPlayer Pro license today. And if you could afford it, please grab two more licenses for the floating video option and the custom start/end time. They add extra capabilities to your vooPlayer Pro.

These add ons are from the Enterprise tier and will only be available for this deal.

1. Is it Time to Add Video Marketing to Your Content Marketing?, Is it Time to Add Video Marketing to Your Content Marketing?, https://neilpatel.com/blog/is-it-time-to-add-video-marketing-to-your-content-marketing/
2. The State of Video Marketing in 2018 [New Data], The State of Video Marketing in 2018 [New Data], https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/state-of-video-marketing-new-data, Adam Hayes
3. Google’s Push for Dominance Brings Big Change to YouTube | Digital – Ad Age, logo, http://adage.com/article/digital/google-asks-media-partners-adopt-youtube/309969/
4. Why YouTube isn’t enough for publishers – Digiday, Why YouTube isn’t enough for publishers, https://digiday.com/media/youtube-video-tech-publishers/
5. Why YouTube isn’t enough for publishers – Digiday, Why YouTube isn’t enough for publishers, https://digiday.com/media/youtube-video-tech-publishers/
6. The 7 Best Video Hosting Sites | Biteable, The 7 Best Video Hosting Sites, https://biteable.com/blog/tips/the-7-best-video-hosting-sites/