This isn’t a thorough explanation of all the various reasons I use YouTube over other video uploading and hosting services, but its one of the basic, underlying reasons that if nothing less, is good for piece of mind. It appears that Jumpcut, a website purchased by Yahoo in 2006, is going under:

The guys at TechCrunch found this blip on their website, although I couldn’t track it down after a few clicks here and there:

We’re sorry to announce that we are no longer accepting uploads to Jumpcut.

We will be keeping the Jumpcut site up and running for the foreseeable future so you‘ll still be able to play, remix and share your existing movies – you just won’t be able to upload anything new.

If you’re looking for a place to upload and share your video, we recommend that you head over to Flickr: http://flickr.com/explore/video

So basically, Yahoo’s own video uploading, editing and sharing platform is now recommending you use Flickr instead. But what will happen to all that hard work?

There are a ton of video uploading/hosting/sharing sites out there such as Vimeo, Viddler and others that arguably offer better quality than YouTube. But I still use YouTube. Why? Because YouTube isn’t going anywhere and it offers the largest immediate audience with the most familiar layout.

• I don’t want to ever deal with having all my uploaded videos on a service that somehow goes bankrupt, sells out or anything else and lose access to the videos that took me so long to create. You could argue that the content would get transferred or that I should be backing up my videos (I do) but I prefer the path of least resistence. Of all the video sites out there, uploading to YouTube is the safest in the long run.
• More people use YouTube than any other video service on the planet, and while there are also more videos to compete with, you will simply get better mileage out of YouTube than the others… all else being equal.
• People are familiar with YouTube and know YouTube. Perhaps one more person will send that link to a friend and that friend will click it because they know where that link will take them. Or perhaps even the dunciest of webmasters know how to embed that video into a forum, or their own website and you get a few more views that way. Again, this points to better mileage.

That being said, there isn’t any reason you can upload to YouTube AND other services as well. I mean, why not, right? If its all about getting the most mileage out of your videos, why not put that video you took time to create and stick it on every half-decent video site on the web?

Most would say time. And with that a quick Google Search found two pretty reputable looking sites – TubeMogul & HeySpread – that does exactly what you may want: allows you to upload your video and automatically spreads them out to various video sharing sites you have accounts with. It supports 24 different sites as of this here ‘lil article – not bad!

If videos are a main component of any of your websites or you hope them to be in the future, its time to start mapping out a strategy. I’m in that phase now and right before your eyes, I found TubeMogul which I THINK I’ve crossed paths with before and perhaps even bookmarked on my laptop.

Next up: time to get those video watermarks ready!