-
Youtube – ‘private’ versus ‘unlisted’ videos?
I have to post videos on our Youtube channel, that we want to be visible to a select but not small group for a time, before we make them public. And until then I’m trying to decide between making them ‘private’ and ‘unlisted.’ I’d be grateful for any advice here. In the past, I’ve felt like ‘unlisted’ videos could still be seen on our channel. But for ‘private’ videos, I believe you have to designate people’s emails who you want to be able to see them, which may not be practical in this case. What do people recommend? And if it’s ‘unlisted,’ are they really not visible anywhere on one’s channel, such as in the ‘uploads’ section? From my end I can often can see these unlisted videos on our channel page, but it’s our channel so maybe that’s why?
Thank you,
Neil -
8 Replies
-
For our clients we post the video as Private, and then we give the client the YouTube web address for their particular video. So only people that have the video’s address can watch the program. We do not post the video on our own channel.
-
Neil, I think you’re right in that you only still see them because you’re in your own account, but I use “unlisted” all the time for confidential review/approvals, as well as for free automated captioning sessions.
While the “private” setting is yet more secure, the few times I’ve used that, it wasn’t worth the extra hassles and complexity for the end users. I suppose a capable hacker could find a way to locate unlisted youtube videos, but my take is that 99 percent of the user base would never find it, not even accidentally. Do id you know, people upload something like 300 hours of content to YouTube every sixty seconds? Your unlisted clip is less than a drop in the ocean on that scale.
Another option for you is to skip youtube and use a free FTP service like wetransfer.com, where you only give the link out to specific people, and the link and upload both expire in a week. The problem with FTP transfers is, you’re never sure what kind of media player the end user has and what their level of skill in opening and manipulating the transferred file is. I once dealt with a person who had never used a web browser directly. The way they did anything on the internet was to create a Word document and type a URL into that, then click on it. And I’m not talking that long ago.
-
Much appreciated, Graham. But you still have to specify their email addresses, right? I hadn’t used the ‘private’ setting before a recent upload, but when I did, Youtube required I set ‘who can view,’ like in the attached screenshot.
And other people, not on the list, couldn’t view, even if they had the link. Has that been your experience? That’s one reason I’m not sure ‘private’ works in this case. We’re planning to release a series of videos that we want to share with reporters before making them public, and that could be a large and fluid list. Thus specifying their emails like this may not be practical. But your approach would work great if, as you said, anyone with the link could view, and I was certain the video wasn’t visible on our channel. -
Thank you very much for that guidance, Mark! That’s a big help as usual. ‘Unlisted’ seems a lot easier, so I’ll plan on doing that.
Much appreciated,
Neil -
Neil-
As usual I fully agree with Mark. We also use unlisted YouTube all the time. We also delete the files after they’ve served their review purpose.
-
A related question on this came up, on ‘public’ versus ‘unlisted’ Youtube playlist settings. We have a series of videos to make public Monday morning that I’m prepping in advance, and they want to make sure I don’t accidentally release them early. In addition to setting the video’s public/unlisted/private designation itself, I believe you can do it for the playlist too, right? So I want to make sure I follow the correct process and sequence. I once had videos I wanted unlisted that I unwittingly made public on our channel because, I believe, the playlist itself had a public setting. So just to confirm, I need to make sure both the individual videos and the playlist have an unlisted setting, correct? And then when we’re ready, I make first the playlist and then all the individual videos public? Does the sequencing matter there? For most videos, I wouldn’t care too much about this but a lot of people are watching on this one.
Grateful for any tips!
Neil -
I can’t speak much to that, but would point out that there are general/ advanced settings for publishing that will automatically notify subscribers of new content and push the video to a playlist, so you’ll definitely want to go to the advanced controls tab and un-check all those options.
YouTube understandably is defaulting many of those kinds of options to maximize exposure of your new video, which is a logical assumption in most cases, but not so much your specific situation.
-
Got it, and thanks for flagging that Mark!
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up