From Creation to Consumption: IGTV Vs. YouTube Explained for You

IGTV VS YouTube: Should Video Content Creators Use One Platform or The Other?

Shanoon Cox

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

IGTV receives quite a lot of attention from marketers and content creators alike. Some even go so far to compare IGTV to YouTube, currently, the largest video sharing platform in the world that hosts 300 minutes of video each minute. IGTV may have fewer users than YouTube, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to use it effectively for a wide array of different purposes. So, in this article, we are going to take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of each platform in order to help you discover how you can utilize each of these social networks to broaden the audience for the content you share online.

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IGTV VS YouTube: What’s the difference

Comparison between IGTV and YouTube is somewhat unfair towards the former since IGTV is a much younger platform that still needs time to develop. YouTube, on the other hand, has a reputation as one of the most reliable video sharing platforms ever created that enables people from all walks of life to upload and share music, movies, gaming videos and virtually any other type of moving images. Even so, let’s take a look at major differences and similarities between IGTV and YouTube.

Have a Quick Glance of the Differences

01 Interface Differences

02 The Upload Process

03 Discovering New Content

03 Monetization

03 Analytics and Insights

1. Interface Differences

Despite the fact that you can access IGTV from a web browser, this platform is predominantly dedicated to videos that are going to be watched on mobile devices. This also means that the thumbnails of the videos you uploaded to your IGTV channel are going to be displayed differently than those on your YouTube channel. The interfaces of these two social networks are entirely different, but if you are a newcomer to each of these platforms you won’t have much trouble getting used to them.

2. The Upload Process

The fact that you can only upload vertically oriented videos to IGTV somewhat limits your options because you either have to record a video for IGTV specifically or you must edit a horizontally oriented video and change its aspect ratio to 9:16. You can upload videos to YouTube and IGTV directly from your computer or you can use iPhone and Android-based apps to capture videos with your phone and upload them to either of these platforms. The maximum duration of an IGTV video can’t exceed sixty minutes, while the default duration of all videos on YouTube is set to 15 minutes. Nonetheless, if you own a verified YouTube account, you can upload videos that have 128GB and last up to 12 hours.

At the moment the videos you want to upload to your IGTV channel have to be saved in the MP4 file format because the platform still doesn’t offer support for any other video file format. YouTube grants much more freedom in this respect as it allows you to upload videos saved in AVI, FLV, MOV, MP4 and other commonly used file formats.

3. Discovering New Content

IGTV is more than a decade younger than YouTube, so you shouldn’t be surprised if you’re having trouble discovering new content. Moreover, IGTV’s search engine is still relatively new and it is much less powerful than the one used by YouTube. This is the reason why the videos you upload to your YouTube channel are going to be much easier to find via a simple Google search than those you shared on IGTV. Besides, YouTube offers much more new content on a daily basis than IGTV, and it is clear that the Instagram’s new brainchild still has ways to go before it reaches the point when it can challenge the largest video sharing platform in the world in terms of diversity of the content that it delivers to its users.

4. Monetization

At the moment, views and likes can’t be monetized on IGTV, so most influencers rely on sponsorships from brands. Things may change as the platform grows, but for the time being IGTV doesn’t provide the content creators with any compensation for the work they are putting in. YouTube allows content creators to monetize their videos through Google Adsense for years, and some of its most prominent users like PewDiePie or Logan Paul have earned hundreds of millions of dollars by posting new content on their YouTube channels. Keep in mind that you are going to need at least a thousand subscribers and 4,000 hours of viewing time before you can enable YouTube’s Monetize feature.

5. Analytics and Insights

Knowing how many people watched the entire video or how many likes and comments certain types of videos get can help you produce content that attracts a larger audience on all social networks. The metrics such as engagement or view-through rates can be essential during online marketing campaigns as they can suggest how many people are watching your videos and for how long. The analytics tools YouTube provides are much more diverse than those offered by IGTV that only lets you see the audience retention graph and the number of views and comments a video currently has. YouTube is an obviously a much better option for anyone who wants to conduct an in-depth analysis of their content’s performance, although the tools on IGTV are still powerful enough to indicate which type of content your audience likes the most.

Why Shouldn’t You Use YouTube and IGTV For the Same Purposes?

You shouldn’t assume that you can post the same type of videos on your YouTube and IGTV channels, just because they are both video sharing platforms. The content you create for your IGTV channel needs to be dynamic and entertaining in order to captivate the audience’s attention. Posting tutorials or hour-long gaming videos on IGTV won’t attract as many viewers as on YouTube, which is why businesses who want to use IGTV to promote their products and services need to choose the content carefully. Furthermore, the videos that last between two and five minutes are still by far the most popular on IGTV, so even though technically you can upload a video that lasts one hour to your IGTV channel, the chances are that such long videos won’t get a lot of views.

IGTV is probably best used as a tool that can help improve the engagement with your followers on Instagram, but if you want to become an established video content creator, then running a YouTube channel is simply a much better option. It still remains to be seen how will IGTV evolve in the years to come, but at the present moment this platform doesn’t really have any chance of challenging YouTube’s position as the world’s leading video sharing platform.

However, no matter which video platform you choose, you need to ensure the videos you create are of high quality. A good video editing software like Filmora can help you acheive this goal.

Useful Features of Filmora

• Cokor Matching: Apply color correction setting to multiple clips on one-click.
• Effects: Create blockbuster videos with preset effects.
• Motion Tracking: Track moving items and add elements to it at ease.
• And more waiting for you to discover.

Shanoon Cox

Shanoon Cox is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Shanoon Cox

Put a Stay to Unsolicited YouTube Trails

YouTube Recommended Videos - Block the Videos I Don’t Like

Richard Bennett

Oct 26, 2023• Proven solutions

0

YouTube is forever recommending videos for you whether it’s in your dashboard or next to the video you’re already watching. In theory, these recommendations are based on your viewing habits and you’re only directed to videos you’re interested in.

Except we all know that’s not always what happens.

YouTube’s recommendations are based on more than just what you’ve watched and searched for, and sometimes even the data on that can get skewed over time. Not all your searches reflect your real tastes, and as your search history builds up the algorithm can start having trouble with all that data.

Here’s what you can do about it:

1. Manage Your Watch History
2. Tell YouTube You Aren’t Interested
3. But Why Does It Recommend Stuff I Don’t Like?

Manage Your Watch History

Scroll to the bottom of any page on YouTube and you will see a button marked History with an hourglass icon. To access this feature using a mobile device, go to the Account tab and tap History.

You will be able to completely clear your watch history, remove specific videos from it, or pause your history while you look at videos you don’t want a record of you visiting. By taking control of your history, you can make sure nothing you looked up on a random whim is reflected in your recommendations.

If you are being recommended more things you aren’t interested in than things you are, you might want to clear your history completely and start fresh. Maybe your tastes have changed since YouTube started keeping track of them.

Tell YouTube You Aren’t Interested

Based on your watch history, YouTube knows what you like. However, they have no way of automatically collecting data on what kinds of videos you’d rather not see.

What they do have is a system for you to flag recommendations you don’t like.

Hover over the thumbnail of a video you don’t want to be recommended to you and a small icon that looks like three stacked dots will appear next to the title. Click on that, and then click Not Interested.

When you tell YouTube you aren’t interested in certain videos they use that data to adjust what they recommend for you.

But Why Does It Recommend Stuff I Don’t Like?

Your search/watch history is not the only thing that determines what YouTube recommends for you. Nobody outside of Google knows exactly how the algorithm works, but we do know one of the major factors influencing it is to watch time.

Watch time refers to how a video effects the session time of a viewer. If a video has proven it can keep viewers on YouTube for longer it is more likely to get recommended, even if it isn’t closely related to the interests of individual viewers. The ultimate goal of the algorithm is to keep you on the site longer. Part of that is recommending things, surely, you’ll be interested in, and part of that is trying to get you interested in things that’ll keep you around.

A video that is simply watched for longer, because it is engaging and can hold viewers’ attention for a long time, will have a high watch time. So will a video that is short, but which leads into a playlist which holds peoples’ attention. If a video is a frequent session starter – people see it outside of YouTube (i.e. in a Google search) and get to the site through it – then its watch time will be high because it is given credit for all of the time viewers are spending on YouTube watching other videos after they get there.

The only way to stop certain types of videos from being recommended for you is to take advantage of the ‘not interested’ feature.

Are you usually happy with YouTube’s recommended videos?

What video editing software did YouTube suggested videos are used?

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett