With a growing user base of 2 billion logged-in users per month and the home of the second-largest search engine in the world, it’s easy to see why YouTube Live is such a popular platform for live streaming virtual events.
For marketers this means that they can reach a broad range of audiences while ensuring that their video content stays evergreen and more findable than it would be on Facebook or Instagram. To explore this further, let’s take a detailed look at how to run virtual events on YouTube Live and more importantly, how it compares to event management platform Eventtia.
What is YouTube Live?
YouTube Live is a live streaming platform that offers an easy way to manage your stream and interact with viewers in real-time. To get started, however, you need to be aware of a couple of essential requirements.
- If you want to embed your stream on an external site, you need to link your YouTube account with an approved AdSense account (this is what makes it possible to earn money and get paid, something that we’ll get on to later).
- If you want to live stream on a mobile device, you need to have at least 1,000 subscribers.
For the live stream itself, you have two options. The fast and easy ‘Stream now’ which requires just a connected device with a webcam, or the more complete ‘Events’ feature which allows you to schedule a time, invite viewers, create multiple live events, and then stream them all simultaneously.
What sets YouTube Live apart from other streaming platforms is its searchability and SEO. Compared to Facebook and Google Meet, YouTube videos show up in search results, and they rank highly, making them much easier to find.
What is Eventtia?
Compared to a streaming platform which is all about broadcasting live video content, Eventtia is a cloud-based event management platform (online and physical) that makes planning and running events easy. With intelligent user interfaces and straightforward planning tools, Eventtia makes it easier to manage events with an all-in-one tool that covers each part of the event lifecycle. By giving marketers and companies more control of their online events, Eventtia helps them to promote their brand, interact with leads, and strengthen their community.
Features:
- Use website builders and email campaigns to communicate with your ideal audience.
- Create your event in a few clicks and then manage all of your logistics through one dashboard.
- Connect people and businesses with one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many networking formats.
- Seamlessly integrate all of the major streaming and webinar tools into a main virtual stage and connect with a worldwide audience.
- Scale your online events and make informed decisions with real-time data and analytics.
Eventtia vs. YouTube Live: The differences?
Live stream monetisation vs. Being able to monetise your event
Compared to other live streaming platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, YouTube Live does give you the option to monetise your live stream. And there are a few ways of doing this such as through mid-roll advertisements, a Super Chat (where fans pay to have their messages highlighted) or by offering a monthly subscription fee for channel memberships.
The amount of money you can expect to make depends on what features you go for and how many views you get, something that can make calculating your revenue quite complicated. In terms of the elements themselves, Super Chat can earn anything from $1 to $500 for each message, and 1,000 views of ads gets you roughly $4.18.
In comparison, Eventtia lets you monetise your event and not your live stream. In other words, you don’t have to rely on attracting thousands of viewers, nor do you have to detract away from the attendee experience by having ads. With Eventtia, you get to decide how you want to monetise your event. So whether that’s charging for attendance, for post-event content, or for specific sessions, the choice is yours.
Lack of branding
Anytime you broadcast or upload content, YouTube gains access to use your material in its own advertising. In turn, this has some significant implications for branding your virtual event because you lose control over your content and your branding.
As event marketers, we know that powerful branding depends on consistency and providing attendees with a persistent message. Yet, if you’re running your virtual events on YouTube Live, your branding options are much more limited.
That’s because the only form of branding comes through your channel, which means changing the banner at the top of your page, having a channel trailer and changing the channel layout. In the grand scheme of things, this offers very little to showcase what your brand is all about.
In contrast to this, Eventtia plays a big part in providing your events with uniformity. Factors such as having standardised websites, automated email campaigns, and a strong presence on social media go a long way in communicating your brand to attendees with a clear and consistent message.
Attendee experience
YouTube Live is simply a channel to broadcast your live event. You can stream anything from an interview to a product launch to a Q&A session. However, any engaging virtual event will require more than just a channel with a live chat to broadcast your video content.
This is mainly for your attendees, who will be expecting more than just a one-dimensional event focused on content. With YouTube Live, the event experience just isn’t there for your attendees. There’s no option to build a virtual stage, offer simultaneous sessions, or have networking.
Yet these are all features that come with an online events platform. For example, Eventtia has its own online networking software that allows attendees to book meetings as part of the virtual event’s agenda. The point is that when you combine all of these features, you give your attendees the complete event experience, offering them more variety and more engagement.
You can’t broadcast your videos wherever you want
Another point worth considering is that if you’re going all-in with YouTube as your virtual events platform, then you won’t be able to broadcast your video content to other platforms. If you do try and do this, you’ll find yourself disconnecting from YouTube Live. Now, as obvious as this sounds, it’s still an important point to make.
With Eventtia and the use of live streaming software like StreamYard or OBS, you can broadcast your video content wherever you want, YouTube included. Not only does this provide you with some much-needed flexibility, but it also means that you’re not over-reliant on one live streaming platform to broadcast your video content. In other words, you can run virtual events outside of any platform and drag them to your website and community that you have complete control over.
Less control over your audience
With YouTube Live, it’s a lot harder to identify who your attendees are. You’ll only be able to identify your audience by your subscribers and the metrics that you collect from each live stream video. However, there are no metrics collected before or after the event making it much more challenging to get the full picture of your event.
Without the right data, this makes subsequent communications very difficult. And in situations like this, you’ll have no option for email nurturing with the end goal of integrating these attendees into your community. This doesn’t happen with Eventtia because the platform not only helps you to launch your event, but it also gathers the emails of your attendees, so that you can continue to engage long after the event and nurture your community.
Deciding what’s right for you?
This is a big question, and the reality is that it all comes down to you and your needs. There is no one size fits all approach, and that’s why it’s worth asking yourself a few questions so that you can identify what’s best for you.
- Does your virtual event need to have more than just video content with networking, a virtual stage, and a website?
- How important is it to monetise your event? Am I happy to have YouTube control how I do this?
- Are you looking to broadcast your event to multiple platforms?
- How much branding do my virtual events need to have?
- How important is my events data? How well do I need to know my attendees?
To summarise, YouTube Live is predominantly a streaming platform. It’s great for attracting large audiences and ensuring that your video content remains findable and evergreen. However, you’re never going to be able to provide the complete virtual event experience which comes from all of the add-ons that you get with Eventtia.
