How can you easily share a private video safely with your audience?

Sharing a private video safely with your audience can be vital to any business. For example, you may wish to share knowledge with your clients and customers, share personal memories with friends and family, or share exclusive behind-the-scenes videos with your patron donors or superfan subscribers.

Private videos can be a great way to provide extra value to your subscribers and show that you care about them as a creator.

You may want to share training videos with colleagues and employees of yours without the videos being shared outside of your business. There are countless reasons for needing private videos for any individual, creator, or business.

So how do you share a private video safely, securely, and without worrying if thevideo will be shared without your knowledge?

What are private videos?

Most people and businesses look to YouTube to solve their need for private videos, which is a good solution for some cases.

Private videos on YouTube can be shared ONLY by sharing with specific emails of people you choose. You cannot share the URL with anyone, unlike with other methods. Private videos are not findable on search engines, YouTube itself, recommendations, and related videos. They are well and truly private.

To make a video private on YouTube, you must sign in to your YouTube Studio account and click on Content. After this, select the content you wish to make private and then click the Visibility box to Share Privately. You can then enter specific emails to share this video with privately.

This method can be time-consuming, especially when you are trying to make a series of videos private or send out particular videos to specific people.

In some cases, you may want your private YouTube videos to be findable in the search results as part of a marketing strategy. For example if you make a video course private but still want it to be discoverable, it can be a detriment to your business to use private YouTube videos.

Entering individual email addresses can also be a slow process. For businesses, it would be simpler to just share the video with any email of a specific domain. Unfortunately, YouTube does not offer these options for access on their privacy settings for your YouTube account.

So does YouTube have any other solutions?

What are unlisted videos?

Unlisted videos are very similar to private videos but with added sharing features.

Like private videos, unlisted videos on your YouTube channel cannot be found via their search function or other search engines.

Instead of being only shared via sending to specific emails, unlisted videos can be shared directly by sending out the URL link for the video. This works well for sending video access to your email list or a group on social media.

However, the issue with this method of sharing video files with others is that you cannot control who they share the link with. The URL you share is a direct link to your content. As such it is incredibly risky to share content this way as you do not know who they may share the content with online, especially if this content is sensitive, meant to be private, or something that is given out to those who have paid you directly for it.

Many creators will use unlisted videos as a solution to sharing paid videos with their patrons via Patreon, yet,they then run this exact risk of the links being shared with those who do not have your permission to view this content.

What other solutions are there?

Unfortunately, YouTube does not offer a password-protected video solution; however, Vimeo does offer password-protected videos. While this may seem like it adds a second layer of protection to your content, it actually just means that those you share the password with can also share that password with the public. In the anonymous world of the internet, it can be difficult to trust anyone online with private content.

Patreon is often used by creators to share private content with their subscribing superfans. However, Patreon does not have any video hosting technology built in on its platform. Meaning that you have to again resort to private, unlisted, or password-protected videos on YouTube or Vimeo - users of Patreon are still able to share this content as they have the same problems we discussed above.

As well as this, Patreon only offers 200 MB file attachments to your posts. This means you'd need to severely compress longer videos you may wish to share as downloadable attachments. Having these videos as downloadable attachments also implies that your Patreon subscribers need a dedicated video player on their device, which can be challenging to have one that is compatible on mobile devices.

Should you wish to monetize their content on Patreon, its service takes a revenue share of between 5-12% of your subscribers' payments to you.

YouTube does offer a 'channel membership' feature that allows you to monetize your audience and premiere public videos earlier than your release to the general public through subscription payments. It is more than a footnote that YouTube takes a whopping 30% of your revenue from these subscriptions.

There are several other private video hosting platforms out there and some other solutions for you to consider:

• Facebook Groups - Using a private Facebook group allows you to share videos, photos, and links privately with those you specifically invite. However, this can be difficult for businesses to use as Facebook accounts are personal, and you’ll be asking your customers, subscribers, and fans to pass on their personal information to access your videos.
• Wistia - Wistia allows businesses to share videos privately with select individuals by designating them as 'viewers.' However, with a limit of up to 250 subscribers to your channel and a limit of 10 videos on your account, this platform is not for dedicated content creators as they charge you for each extra video you upload every month.

How can you safely share a private video with your audience?

At SupaPass, we've seen how far digital content platforms have come over the last 10 years we've been around - but they haven't come far enough for creators to safely share private videos and safely monetize their content through this.

That's why we've been busy for the past 10 years developing the tools creators need to share private and exclusive video, audio, and written content with their audiences all on their own stunning website and powerful native mobile apps for iOS and Android devices.

More versatile than a private YouTube video, SupaPass provides creators the ability to upload their videos, add a description, let their audience leave comments, and make it completely private through a paid (or unpaid) subscription. Requiring a sign-in to access and view the content gives you more options than what YouTube or Vimeo provide while hosting your content on your own branded mobile app and website.

Better yet, SupaPass allows creators who make podcasts, music, blogs, video courses, and newsletters to offer this same functionality with their content too. Our technology provides site-wide audio players for your podcast or music; blog functionality uploaded via your RSS feed or manually; and a cutting-edge user interface and experience which gives your users the 'look and feel' of Netflix or Spotify while letting you privatize and monetize your content easier and safer than ever before.

We started SupaPass to empower every content creator to monetize and control who views their content and how they view it.

We've helped creators all over the world achieve this without any coding or custom development work needed.

Now you don't have to rely on a handful of other platforms to achieve this single goal! With SupaPass, you can replace your Patreon page, YouTube channel, website, blog page, and more. All while having all of your content safely and securely in one place on a beautiful mobile app and website.