I am just in the process of creating a screencast/product intro for a landing page but don't know where to host it.<p>Should I host it myself or with a provider? Which provider is good? Are there any good tools to track the views of the video and maybe at what time people stopped watching?<p>I would think having a YouTube logo or something similar on the video looks unprofessional, but maybe it also increases conversions? Is there any data about this?
I have no data on this. But I don't find using YouTube unprofessional. Also, I'm not sure how embeddable your video will be, but as a blogger, I much prefer people using YouTube so those videos can be embedded easily, and playable on iOS devices.
S3 + Cloudfront. Many people use Vimeo as well, which has minimal branding and supports high quality.<p>I haven't actually used them myself, but Wistia does deep tracking of plays.
Vimeo all the way! Simple to use, looks great, comes up well in natural search results.<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/plus" rel="nofollow">http://vimeo.com/plus</a>
I have always used Vimeo on the past for this sort of thing.<p>I definitely prefer it over youtube based on quality of video, bandwidth (a lot of youtube videos that I try suffer from playback issues), and branding.<p>Hosting on S3 or some other CDN is also an option if you don't mind paying a bit.
I've used YouTube for some video hosting on my website and don't believe it to be unprofessional. In fact, when requesting feedback on a landing page which showed the video, I never received a comment that would have implied YouTube hosting was anything other then acceptable.
I personally hate vimeo because of their horrible fallback & lack of some forms of IE support.<p>If you're using IE without flash installed (in my experience), it defaults to a black background with black text on top. great user experience.