I love it when visitors e-mail me with questions. They usually turn out to be excellent blog posts! Here’s one such example:

I am thinking of putting some videos that I make of the youth on our church’s website. Is you tube the best way to do that? Do you have any reservations about youth videos being on you tube?

I think there are several advantages of putting your youth group videos on YouTube.

1. It’s free web hosting for your videos. You don’t have to worry about bandwidth costs, hosting space or anything. Plus, it converts your videos to Flash, which almost every web browser supports. You sometimes run into compatibility issues between Mac, Windows and Linux when you use other formats.
2. It’s free publicity to other students in you area. Hundreds of thousands of teens are on YouTube every day, so in a sense this is an opportunity to put your content on “their turf.” Make sure you tag the videos with your town, church and youth group name so it’s easily found by anyone searching for videos in surrounding community. You may attract new visitors to your events this way.
3. It’s easy for students share the videos with their friends. By using their site, students in your group can easily display your youth group videos on their own blogs or MySpace profiles with YouTube’s simple “embed code.” This allows kids to easily share your promo videos with all their friends. Plus, YouTube users can also mark a video as a “favorite” to add to their personal YouTube profile allowing them to, again, publicly share the video with friends who subscribe to their lists.
4. It provides tools for interaction with the video. Probably the best part of this is the ability to post comments on each video. As students interact with the message communicated in the video clip, its message cements in their minds. And, every time they return to the clip to read follow-up comments, they again see the video and are reminded of it has to say.

If you’d like to check out my youth group videos on YouTube.

[tags]YouTube, youth group[/tags]

Posted on November 21, 2006