Pau statements experts, YouTube traffic in Russia has fallen by half. This means that far fewer people will see the videos, especially if your audience is far from blocking services, GoodBuyDPI, and other technical features. However, the law of conservation of matter says that if it leaves somewhere, it has arrived somewhere. This is somewhere — domestic services.

My name is Igor Ozherelyev. I am a marketing expert, film director, entrepreneur and founder of the Let's See You marketing agency. One of our services is creating videos that help promote online and develop personal and company brands. In this article, I'll talk about Russian alternatives to YouTube and why they are better suited.

I've collected five the most popular services to watch and upload videos:

• VK Video.
• RUTUBE.
• Yandex Zen.
• NUUM.
• Kinescope.

All platforms have their own peculiarities: you can't choose one and upload videos to it in the hope of catching global fame. We'll have to combine it.

Universal platforms: VK Video and RUTUBE

VK Video

The service is suitable for both sales and brand promotion. In recent months, VK Video has been rapidly nears to YouTube by number of users, and coverage in the short video service equalized with TikTok. Now tens of millions of people visit the platform every year — it's foolish to ignore this audience.

VK Video works in much the same way as YouTube: anyone uploads videos, comments, a system of likes, categories, trends and recommendation algorithms. Painless migration: you can transfer all content from your YouTube channel with one button

Contrary to stereotypes, VK Video is not only suitable for teenagers. For example, I found case with an advertisement for an expensive dental clinic. The audience is 22-50 year old women. The campaign collected leads at a price of 399 rubles per share with a minimum cost of 15,000 rubles.

So you can also sell expensive goods for older people on the site — not just masks for ATVs.

RUTUBE

Hosting is similar to the competition: the same breakdown by category, built-in recommendation algorithms and trends, and you can like or dislike. Videos are also imported from YouTube. There's even a short video service, but for some reason it's shyly tucked away at the bottom of the homepage.

RUTUBE's audience is much smaller than that of YouTube and VK Video — nearly 5 million daily users. In theory, this has advantages: for example, you can gain an audience before the big players arrive. Now RUTUBE's top videos are from a Moscow State University teacher talking about physics — it's hard to imagine on VK Video and even more so on YouTube.

Therefore, formally, RUTUBE has a chance to carve out a niche and grow together with the platform — as was the case with YouTube bloggers 10-15 years ago. So you can use the platform to build your own brand, but it's far from certain that the platform will eventually become popular. After all, RUTUBE has been on the market for 16 years, but all this time it has been languishing in the shadow of its Western counterpart.

As for sales, this can be done in a native format, but I haven't heard a single successful story about this. If you promoted your product on RUTUBE and are happy with the result, tell us in the comments, it will be interesting!

For working with search engines and age audiences: Zen

Yes, Zen has not only texts about everything in the world, but also videos. The main advantage is that records are indexed in the Yandex search engine, so if you know how to do SEO, you can collect good traffic from search engines. Algorithms will also notice the increasingly popular video and start promoting it within the site.

At the request of “cosmetics review video”, Yandex released a corresponding video in Zen

There are no paid mechanisms for promoting videos in Zen, so rely only on virality. Also, keep in mind that Zen has enough age-related the audience is 54% of visitors over 45 years old. In addition, this is a female-oriented platform; they account for 59%. Therefore, recipes, cosmetics and travel are the best places to visit the site.

It will be difficult to build a personal brand at Zen through video alone; after all, it is a text-oriented platform. However, if you want to advertise your product, you can do it natively. For example, talk about it yourself in videos or negotiate with a blogger. This format is found in the film, but it's hard to say how effective it is.

For male and gaming audiences: NUUM

The service is like a mix of YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch: long videos mixed with short ones, lots of streams and entertaining content. At the same time, NUUM grew on the basis of WASD.TV, a streaming platform for gamers.

Therefore, the audience is still a) young, b) male, c) loves games — there is a separate tab for streams. So you can promote entertainment blogs or review youth products on the platform. The platform is also suitable for a personal brand — for example, you can stream. But consider the audience — going to NUUM with a review of mortgage products would not be a good idea.

Numerically, few people visit NUUM (by their words — 5.2 million per month), but this is the same case as with RUTUBE — you can grow with the platform.

On the main page, in the “recommended” tab, there is a channel with 222 subscribers. If NUUM were more popular, the blogger would hardly get such an advantageous position.

To store and display videos: Kinescope

Sometimes videos don't need to be advertised, but simply stored somewhere to show them to customers, students, or ordinary viewers. For example, if you have a portal with online courses or you want to create a video portfolio. Usually, Vimeo is used for such purposes, but it requires a paid account, and it is difficult to register it in Russia. There is a domestic analogue — Kinescope.

The video is uploaded to the hosting and the player is inserted into the site. It can be used for regular videos, vertical videos or stories. However, the recording itself cannot be downloaded — an important advantage for projects with educational courses.

Kinescope is now being used by educational projects, large agencies, and retailers. In general, if you need a video hosting and a player for your site, then the service is suitable for your tasks.

There are many well-known companies among Kinescope's clients, for example, in the Netology screenshot

A similar result

It turns out to be a simple layout:

• If you want both sales and a personal brand, go to VK Video.
• If you are ready to work “for the future”, you can try RUTUBE and NUUM
• If you need sales, post native videos in Zen, but the result is unpredictable.
• If you just need a hosted player, Kinescope will do.

As for the industry, it is difficult to recommend a specific platform. Of course, you can target your audience — for example, young animals at NUUM are unlikely to be interested in B2B services. However, in general, I would recommend launching at all sites at once and then seeing which platform fires.