I have been playing around with adding a video library to my other site Evolving Photography and have explored the use of video galleries that use video stored on my host versus uploading the video to YouTube and embedding the video from there.

There are benefits to both but at the end of the day I have decided to go with using embedded video from YouTube for the simple reason that  it can be a great way to market yourself outside of your normal audience.

For example, lets say you want to run a web site about golfing.  You have all your articles, news and more on the site - but you want to add some videos of how to pick the best putter or the best ways to get out of a sand trap, I would suggest you upload these videos to YouTube and then embed them onto your own web site.  Why?

1. You don’t have to worry about disk space or bandwidth from the huge or not so huge video.
2. YouTube has recently started hosting HD content, so crappy video quality is no longer a concern.
3. Toss your logo and URL on the video somewhere and you have built in marketing.  People searching about “insert topic here” will see your video, and might check out your URL to learn more. (example)

The lesson to be learned is don’t be afraid to take advantage of the tools out there you can use for free.  They can often times be better than the tools you have to pay for.