CrowdCast vs. YouTube

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Patreon offers CrowdCast for livestreaming, but I can’t really see a reason to pay for it (it is not free) when YouTube is. I would like to support the smaller company but not if the service isn’t actually worthwhile etc.

Does anyone have experience with it, or have any feedback you don’t mind sharing? Thanks!

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Hey @westeroshistory, thanks for making this post. Here are some other threads about Crowdcast you may want to check out as they have a lot of good nuggets in about feedback and use cases.

  1. Crowdcast alternatives?
  2. Crowdcast Livestreaming Forum
  3. A Livestreaming Experiment to Inspire Fans to Become Patrons
  4. Crowdcast Live Streaming Integration
  5. This video

If you have any specific questions, I’m sure @natemaingard would be happy to answer them :slight_smile:

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I love Crowdcast! I’ve been using it for years.

Crowdcast is so different from YouTube.

With Crowdcast, you get the email addresses of your registrants so you can follow up. You can make your events public or unlisted or password protected or paid.

The Q&A and chat functionality is excellent. The interface is great. You get a nice landing page for events. There are no ads anywhere. Your registrants get email reminders. Support is top-notch.

Crowdcast provides an interactive experience with your participants. YouTube is more… distracting.

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Thank you so much for sharing your insights, @dataschool! Happy to hear it’s been working for you :slight_smile:

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I just added crowdcast for our Patreon bonus videos. We do them once a month and it was way better than what we were doing before using unlisted YouTube videos.

  1. The crowdcast link is public so I can promote it all across my social media and have folks share it for me. I had my unlisted Patreon video links shared on Facebook more than once and had to create all new video events for those to get a new link. Then share it with my patrons again. So now I don’t have to worry about the link being shared.
  2. Only patrons can actually watch from the link (it asks them to sign up or login). So there is potential to pick up new patrons there.
  3. I can invite my moderators and anyone else to watch for free. This was my biggest pain point with using the Patreon/Youtube livestream integration because it was all on Patreon and the viewers could not chat with my moderators like on YouTube. Plus I had no way of sharing the bonus videos with them without having them login to my account.
  4. It has polls and question sections so viewers can interact much more directly with us.
  5. It was very easy to set up the live event and the system is made for livestreams so it is way more intuitive than the YouTube system.
  6. You can create multiple sessions under one lesson. For me that worked great. We did 2 two-hour painting lessons working on the same painting with a small break in between. I can do a whole series of painting lessons now and have them all organized under one title. Makes it much easier for subscribers to find things.
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Happy to help in any way I can, though I’m certainly not the using crowdcast as well as some others :yum:

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regarding 2) above - have you seen new patrons join in order to access the livestreams?

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Interesting, I’ll have to check crowd-cast out.

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It does not tell me how many new, non-patrons signed up. But it does say that 47% of those who went to the link then went on to register for it by signing into a Patron account.

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If you don’t mind, how much does it cost?

Their pricing is not listed anywhere, because apparently it depends on how many users attend your streams.

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Here is Crowdcast’s pricing page. I use the “Lite” plan, which is $49/month if paid monthly.

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