Advertisement
Photography
LifestyleTravel & Leisure

YouTube or Instagram? The best place to launch a travel channel, and how to maximise your views and likes

  • You may get more views on YouTube because of its inclusion in Google search results, but IGTV on Instagram is an ideal platform for vlogging beginners
  • Videos up to an hour long can be added, and soon influencers will be able to make money from their IGTV uploads the same way YouTubers do

Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
Forget competing with all the other travel vloggers on YouTube, and start your video blogging journey on Instagram and IGTV instead. Photo: Getty Images
Steve Thomas

Starting an online travel video channel might sound like a daunting task, but if you have old travel clips on your phone, now is the ideal time to learn the basics for when international borders finally reopen.

Advertisement

The process can be as simple as you make it. Where you want your channel to go, and the amount of time and resources you want to spend on it, are things that will influence your approach, too.

Instagram’s video sharing platform, Instagram TV (IGTV), is a worthy launch pad for a travel channel thanks to its relative ease of use.

IGTV versus YouTube

YouTube (which is owned by Google), began life as a video hosting platform and is the second largest search engine behind Google. When you input a search query on Google, you also get YouTube results (as well as the option to search for video/photo results only).
Now is the ideal time to learn the basics of vlogging for when international borders finally reopen. Photo: Getty Images
Now is the ideal time to learn the basics of vlogging for when international borders finally reopen. Photo: Getty Images

YouTube receives 3 billion searches a month, which makes its search-engine optimisation value (the higher the value, the more traffic or hits you get) hard to beat. The site is saturated with travel vloggers, but it is still the best place to get your videos seen and to make money from them.

Advertisement
Instagram, owned by Facebook, is focused on photo and video sharing. It’s a mobile app that many of us scroll through – perhaps far too frequently – which makes it a platform with a huge but fleeting audience. This makes Instagram a great platform for short-form travel content, while YouTube is a better fit for in-depth material.
Advertisement