Embedding YouTube Videos on Your Website (What You Need to Know)

 

(This blog has been updated from an earlier blog to include even more useful information.)

 

Just as videos posted on social can substantially improve engagement, sharing videos on your website can dramatically attract more visitors and convert more of those visitors into clients. 

According to WordStream: 

• Video drives a 157% increase in organic traffic from search engine results pages 
• The average person spends 88% more time on a website that has video 

• Businesses that use video grow their revenue 49% faster than businesses that don’t use video 

To help you achieve such numbers for your practice, all LifeLearn WebDVM websites come with the ability to display and play videos from external sites like YouTube. And to dispel any myths that you may have heard, you can safely post another person’s YouTube videos on your practice website. You just need to know a few things first. 

 

Embed Codes Determine Usage

According to their Terms of Service (applicable to all users, including content providers), YouTube gives permission to access and use their service, provided users 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).” 

In simpler language, here’s what that means: 

When someone uploads a video to YouTube, that 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 creator leaves embed functionality enabled for a video, other people can share that video on websites and other mediums without YouTube’s prior written permission. 
• If a creator disables the embed functionality for a video, the creator does not grant public use of that video, and anyone wishing to share the video on any medium must first get YouTube’s written permission. 

To find videos you can use, click a video’s Share button to see whether the embed functionality has been enabled. If it has, YouTube has a few more usage conditions: 

• You cannot access YouTube content through any other technology or means, apart from a video’s embed code, the video playback pages of YouTube, or any other means that YouTube may designate as unauthorized. 

• You cannot modify the embed functionality, build on it, or impair it, including the links back to YouTube’s website. 

 

YouTube Supports Copyright

Even though YouTube allows certain public usage of videos hosted on their site, YouTube supports and acknowledges that video creators own copyright to their videos. 

Falling under Intellectual Property Rights, copyright (existing in the US, Canada, and other countries around the world) is a legal right granting exclusive rights to the creator of an original work. This includes any original work: videos, artistic and musical works, literary works such as novels and articles, movies, computer software, and architecture. Copyright does not protect facts or ideas but may protect the way that they’re expressed. 

Copyright includes the conditions under which a work may be used. Although video creators surrender certain usage rights when uploading videos to YouTube, they still own their works and retain economic rights—the legal right to sell their work in outright or residual manner, such as paid access through streaming. Video creators also retain moral rights. 

 

Moral Rights Exist Independent of Copyright

Distinct from copyright and economic rights, moral rights (a.k.a. authorship rights) comprise a creator’s legal rights to three things: 

1. The Right of Credit or Association guarantees that all creators have the right to be associated with their work and be named as author in any future presentation of their work. 

1. The Right of Integrity guarantees that a creator’s work will remain in the same state in which it was created. Characterized as a right to reputation, the Right of Integrity supports this by guaranteeing that a creator can stop a creation from being modified, distorted, or used in association with a service, product, cause, or institution. The right also guarantees that a creator can change a work at any point. 

1. The Right of Anonymity or Context guarantees that a creator has the right to choose how a work is used, even if the creator has sold copyright. In other words, even in a work-for-hire situation where a creator typically relinquishes copyright in exchange for pay, a creator still has the right to decide how a work is presented or used. 

All moral rights remain with the creator of a work, even if they sell copyright. Moral rights cannot be divested, licensed, sold, or given away by a third party, and last for the duration of copyright: 

• In Canada, copyright lasts for the lifetime of a creator, plus 50 years. 
• In the US, copyright lasts for the lifetime of a creator, plus 70 years. 
• In the UK, copyright lasts for the lifetime of a creator, plus 70 years, except for certain types of works like broadcasts (50 years from when it was first broadcast). 

 

Related Videos

If you watch videos on YouTube, you’re familiar with how related videos (or “suggested videos”) pop up at the conclusion of any video. Before September 2018, website owners could disable this function in the interests of avoiding videos popping up that aren’t in alignment with a brand’s message or image. Then YouTube changed their embed code. Now you can’t fully disable related videos. 

While other hosting sites like Vimeo and Dailymotion have YouTube-style related videos that pop up, they provide options to shut them off. But before you opt for such hosts, you should weight the trade-off.  

YouTube has 2 billion users worldwide and is the second biggest search engine after Google. While Vimeo and similar sites have respectable numbers of users, they don’t come close to YouTube. And they barely make a blip on any list of the most-used search engines—and that’s a big consideration when choosing video to increase discovery and traffic to your practice website. 

 

In Summary

Here are the guidelines for locating and displaying another person’s YouTube videos on your WebDVM website to help attract more visitors and turn those visitors into clients: 

• Find a YouTube video that you like. Then click on the Share button to see if the embed functionality has been enabled. 
• If it has, do not alter the code in any way when displaying videos on your website. 
• Show the video for free. Never charge people to watch it. 
• Credit the creator of the video. 
• Do not change the video in any way. 

• If a video creator happens to contact you and ask you to remove a video, you must do so immediately. 
• Monitor the related videos that pop up at the end of a video to ensure they’re in alignment with your practice message and/or image. If they’re not, consider removing a video from your website. 

While videos are a powerful way to help attract visitors to your WebDVM website, WebDVM includes a suite of features designed to increase your online presence, boost appointments, and set your practice apart from the competition. 

For more about WebDVM websites, including LifeLearn’s ClientEd pet health article library, VetScribe custom digital content, and more, contact LifeLearn today to book your free WebDVM demo.