Just like sharing videos on your social channels, sharing videos on your practice website is a great way to help attract more visitors and turn more of those visitors into clients.
According to research by the cognitive search and insight platform Attivio:
- Video attracts 300% more traffic.
- Video doubles the time visitors spend on a website.
- Video increases website page views by 63%.
To help put such numbers to work for your practice, all LifeLearn WebDVM websites include the ability to display and play videos from external sites like YouTube, and to alleviate any misinformation that you may have heard, you can safely post someone else’s YouTube videos on your website, provided you know and follow a few things.
Usage Granted By Embed Codes
According to YouTube’s Terms of Service (which applies to all users, including content providers), YouTube grants permission to access and use the site, provided that “you agree not to distribute in any medium any part of the Service or Content without YouTube’s prior written permission, unless YouTube makes available the means for such distribution through functionality offered by the Service (such as the Embeddable Player).”
Said another way: When anyone uploads a video to YouTube, the person enters into a royalty-free licensing agreement with YouTube that grants certain public usage rights, depending on how a creator enables a video.
If a video creator leaves the embed functionality enabled for a video, that person has agreed to allow other people to share that video on other mediums (including websites) without YouTube’s prior written permission according to YouTube’s Terms of Service.
If a video creator, on the other hand, disables embed functionality for a video, that person does not grant public use of a video, and per YouTube’s Terms of Service, anyone wishing to share that video on any medium would require prior written permission from YouTube.
To sort which videos you can use, simply click a video’s Share button to see whether the embed functionality has been enabled. After that, YouTube still has a few more usage conditions.
- You agree not to access YouTube content through any other technology or means, other than a video’s embed code, the video playback pages of YouTube or any other authorized means that YouTube may designate.
- You agree not to modify, build on or impair any of the embed functionality, including the links back to the YouTube website.
Copyright Restrictions
While YouTube grants certain public usage of videos through its Terms of Service, YouTube acknowledges and supports copyright ownership by video creators.
Falling under Intellectual Property Rights, copyright is a legal right existing the U.S. and Canada (and many other countries around the world) that grants exclusive rights to the creator of an original work, including the conditions under which a work may be used. While video creators relinquish certain usage rights after uploading a video to YouTube, video creators remain the owners of their work. As such, video creators retain economic rights (the right to sell their work, either outright or in residual fashion such as paid access through streaming) and moral rights.
Moral Rights
Also known as authorship rights, moral rights comprise a creator’s rights to three things:
- The Right of Credit or Association guarantees that all creators receive authorship credit in any future presentation of their work.
- The Right of Integrity guarantees that a creator’s work shall fundamentally remain in the same state in which it was created. The right further guarantees that a creator can stop a work from being distorted, mutilated, modified or used in association with a product, service, cause or institution while also guaranteeing a creator’s right to change a work at any point.
- The Right of Anonymity or Context guarantees that a creator can decide how a work is used—even if the creator is not the copyright holder.
Moral rights stand independent of copyright and remain with the creator of a work even after the transfer of copyright. The rights cannot be divested, sold, licensed or given away by a third party to whom an author may have sold or given away copyright ownership, and the rights last for the duration of copyright:
- In Canada, copyright lasts for the lifetime of a creator, plus 50 years.
- In the U.S., copyright lasts for the lifetime of a creator, plus 70 years.
Related Videos
If you watch YouTube videos, you’re likely familiar with how YouTube displays related videos (or, “suggested videos”) at the conclusion of any video. Prior to September 2018, website owners could disable this YouTube function in the interests of avoiding videos that may not be in keeping with brand message and/or image. After September 2018, YouTube changed their embed code. So, it’s no longer possible to fully disable related videos.
In summary, here are the guidelines for finding and displaying someone else’s YouTube videos on your WebDVM website to help attract more visitors:
- Find a video you like on YouTube, then click the Share button to see whether the embed functionality has been enabled.
- Do not alter that code when displaying videos on your practice website.
- Show the video non-commercially.
- Credit the creator of the video.
- Do not edit or otherwise change the video.
- Should a video creator contact you and ask you to remove a video from your website, do so immediately.
- Monitor what related videos appear after a video plays to ensure recommended videos are in keeping with your practice image and message.
For more about LifeLearn WebDVM websites and their full range of features, including LifeLearn’s ClientEd pet health article library and add-on features like after-hours telehealth triage service PetNurse, contact LifeLearn today to book your free WebDVM demo.
