If you have uploaded YouTube videos at all recently, you know that there are four options for the status of the video that you can select: Private, Public, Scheduled, and Unlisted. The first three options are probably pretty explanatory, but how would a blogger, church, or other video producer use this option? Who would want to upload a video that is able to be viewed, but does not come up on your homepage or search results? We have a couple of options that are perfect for you this video status.
Two Ideas for Unlisted Videos
Here are two options we have for wanting to use unlisted videos on YouTube. I have personally taken advantage of unlisted videos for both of these ideas and they work great.
- Personal Videos on Professional Accounts
Before Google+ became fully integrated into YouTube, I was uploading personal videos of my son playing or doing swim lessons. Obviously I did not want to muddy the waters of seventy8 Productions with personal videos, but I did not want to have a second YouTube account. Now you can switch between themes, but even then, I love the idea of one account and personal videos being unlisted. - Exclusive Content
If you have a subscription service website with videos and you want to use YouTube, obviously you do not want to freely share them. Maybe you have a newsletter with exclusive video content and sharing it with the public is not an option. Unlisted videos are perfect for this.
No doubt there are more use cases and we would love to hear what you think. How else can you use unlisted videos to your advantage?
David Heys says
Good post Jeremy.
I have used unlisted before on my personal account and I think we should begin to use it as a church more, especially in the area of Small Groups.
I think that having YouTube video content that is not public, with the link sent to small group leaders, would be a good way of the minister/pastor being able to provide a video message or encouragement. Similar in a way to your ‘exclusive content’.
Also, unlisted could be used for those ‘what’s on this week’ videos which you show in church and embed on the website but don’t want to have them throughout the channel feed.
This has got me thinking… Thanks again. 🙂
seventy8Productions says
Love the idea of this. Maybe a more generalized version of this is for training, coaching, devotionals, announcements, and inspiring. Great idea, if you come up with someone, I would love to see it and if okay, show it off to others.
paula says
I know this is an old post, but I have been using unlisted videos to share our small group Bible study videos with our class. This allows us those in my class to view the teaching video whenever it is convenient for them during the week, or even listen while driving. This also means that we can use our entire class time for instruction and discussion and not have to use any of it for viewing the videos that go along with the study. We have done this with at least three studies so far and it has been great.