Yesterday Episode 6 was featured on the homepage of Viddler, I had only created a Viddler account just before I left for SXSW, so I was surprised and excited to see Pedal get attention so quickly on the site. From their blog:

Today’s featured video is Episode Six: 64 days – Part 1 from Project Pedal and the visuals are amazing, the production quality is excellent, and I can now say I’m addicted. Video podcasts aren’t generally known for their high-quality, high-production values but more and more we’re starting to see better examples.

If Project Pedal does this nice a job for their video podcast, I’m really excited to see what they are able to produce for their upcoming documentary. It is obvious the making films is a very trying experience, and we here at Viddler wish them well in their obvious effort to make a great, lasting film.

In the day that it was featured, we got a good amount of views, around 4,000 – but I’ve been noticing something… the number of video hosting and community sites I try out is always growing, I’m always trying to see how they compare.

I (begrudgingly) have a YouTube account, despite the terrible video quality and lazy user-interface… also lately I haven’t been able to upload episodes to YouTube because they are too long time-wise, and I’m having trouble getting that limit lifted. My main hosting service is Blip, cause they are just amazing.

Although, I have to say, my favorite video-related site that I love to spend time on is Vimeo. I also use TubeMogul to bounce videos to Veoh, Revver, MySpace and Metacafe.

It’s been interesting though seeing which sites generate the most feedback, interaction, conversations, etc. YouTube gets no traffic at all, with the exception of one short raw-footage clip, which hit 29,753 views for some reason. Everything else hangs around 100 views… yea. More importantly YouTube attracts almost no comments and even fewer followers back to the site. MySpace, Metacafe, and Revver fall into the same situations.

Blip gets a decent amount of hits, but it’s not really a community site, it’s mostly a tool for video creators, and it does that job very, very well. So I can’t hold the lack of comments against it, it’s not it’s real purpose.

Vimeo on the other hand, is a whole other story. It’s the one site where I get a flood of comments, a flood of feedback, a flood of viewers who follow the video back to this site and read deeper into the project. The videos I upload to Vimeo get re-posted the most to other people’s Tumblr accounts and personal blogs. A fair percentage of people seem to find one episode interesting and they actually go looking for the other episodes to watch. Somehow the team at Vimeo have done an amazing job of creating an actual community of supportive and creative people… I hope that never changes.

The reason I thought about this post was because of the feature on Viddler, compared to the number of views the episode received, we received very few comments (most of the 18 or so comments came from 3 people). From the looks of my FeedBurner stats, Google Analytics and Cpanel, we got about 3 hits from Viddler to the site. All the other episodes on Viddler have had no increase in views. I’m going to continue using Viddler though, because I like a lot of the video-player’s features, and like I said, I just created the account two weeks ago.

I’m not bashing on these sites – I know Pedal isn’t a good fit for the YouTube crowd, and that’s fine with me. I’m just curious what people’s thoughts are on what makes a good video hosting and community site? In all my searching the last few years, Vimeo seems to be the best by a huge long shot when it comes to video-quality, user-interface, community and support. What sites do you use that seem to have a base of users who are active and supportive?