Mirror the Shorts and documentary clips to Dailymotion and Vimeo: what it buys, measured, and a gate

Written 31 Oct 2026 for the Cedwyn e-book and documentary work. Topic: secondary video hosts as a backup and discovery route, not as a growth engine.

What the evidence shows (read before spending time on it)

Search mostly shows YouTube. Foliovision's 2022 review of video-search bias sums up two studies: - Eric Enge (Stone Temple Consulting): 88% of Google's top-10 video results were YouTube (native or embedded). For queries containing "video" or "clip", it was 78.9%. - The Wall Street Journal ran the same videos on YouTube, Facebook Watch, Twitch and Dailymotion, and YouTube ranked ahead of every competitor in every case. Professor Dirk Lewandowski approved the method. - Foliovision's own spot check: Vimeo and Dailymotion did not appear in its sample of Google video results. A video that exists only on Dailymotion can still be found on that platform by its exact title. - So a mirror will not take search clicks from YouTube. Its value is elsewhere (below).

Dailymotion's own search is quiet for our subject. We measured it with Dailymotion's public API (`api.dailymotion.com, no key, top 100 by relevance, read 31 Oct 2026 10:41Z):

A typical Welsh-history video there gets tens of views over its lifetime. Plan on that, not on a breakout.

Vimeo Free is a clean, ad-free host with limits that matter. From Vimeo's help centre (About the Vimeo Free plan, read 31 Oct 2026): - Public videos are unlimited and carry no ads. - Embeddable and non-public videos are capped at 3 GB in total. For embeds, our 2-min 720p webm clips of under 25 MB give about 120. - Free includes automatic captions, transcripts, chapters, SEO settings for video pages, editable URLs, viewer analytics, 1 channel, 1 group and 5 showcases.

Vimeo player embeds can be indexed on our own page. In Google's Vimeo case study (Search Central), Vimeo adopted noindex, indexifembedded on its player and added Key Moments structured data. Google can then index the video on the page that embeds it while ignoring the bare player URL. That is the one real SEO benefit: the watch page on cedwyn gets the video result, not Vimeo.

Dailymotion pays only past a floor. Dailymotion's FAQ (as shown in search snippets; the page itself returned 403 to us): a creator needs 1,000 cumulative profile views to unlock monetisation, with payout once the balance passes $100. At the medians above that will take a long time. Treat money from it as zero.

Why it is still worth doing (the honest case)

1. A route around the YouTube daily upload limit. Our YouTube uploads stop when the daily API limit is spent (problem P-032). A second host means a finished Short is public somewhere the day it is made, and the YouTube copy follows when the limit resets.
2. Resilience. If a YouTube video is muted, held or struck, a copy and its text still exist elsewhere.
3. Our own pages win the embed. A Vimeo embed on a cedwyn watch page, with VideoObject markup, keeps the result and the visit on cedwyn, not on a platform.
4. Small but non-zero platform search. The few people searching "welsh history" on Dailymotion find us next to dozens-of-views videos, not million-view channels.

How to do it (step by step)

1. Only mirror what YouTube may carry. Use the same hold list as the YouTube Shorts run: anything held there (e.g. e08, e12, e23) is held on every host.
2. Same text as YouTube, adapted. Title under 60 characters. The description starts with the shop line, then the documentary line (/movie/), then a Sources line. Same banned-word check, never name family members, no hashtags beyond 3. Link to cedwyn pages only.
3. Dailymotion: one channel; pick the closest category the upload form offers (an education or travel one for place clips). Put the place name and the decade in the title ("Llandough, 1890s: …"). Upload by hand or by its upload API with the channel owner's login. Don't chase monetisation.
4. Vimeo (Free): upload public. Embed only the clips we put on cedwyn watch pages, so the embed counts against the 3 GB cap and nothing else does. Turn on auto-captions and chapters, write the page title and description in the SEO settings, and set the video URL to a readable slug.
5. On cedwyn: where a watch page embeds the Vimeo player, keep our own VideoObject JSON-LD (see video-sitemap-self-hosted-documentary-watch-pages.md) and lazy-load with a poster (video-landing-page-facade-poster-preload.md).
6. Tag every link. Description links carry utm_source=dailymotion / utm_source=vimeo, utm_medium=video, utm_campaign=shorts-mirror.
7. Measure at 30 and 90 days: views per clip on each host (both show counts), tagged visits to cedwyn, any /ebooks/ checkout from those visits.

Gate (keep or drop)

• Keep Dailymotion if after 90 days the median clip has more than 25 views (the "welsh history" median above) or at least 5 tagged visits a month reach cedwyn. Otherwise stop uploading new clips there (leave existing ones up; they cost nothing).
• Keep Vimeo as long as it is the embed host for cedwyn watch pages. Drop it as a discovery channel at 90 days if tagged visits are zero.

How we apply it to Cedwyn

• Status: PROPOSAL. It needs two new public accounts in the project's name (a Dailymotion channel and a Vimeo account), and the account holder has to create them. Agents never create accounts or post on new channels without the owner's GO.
• First batch: the 5 most recent Shorts already live on YouTube (not held), plus the documentary scene clips already on /movie/.
• Order of value: 1) Vimeo embeds on cedwyn watch pages (keeps the search result on our domain); 2) Dailymotion as the day-one public copy when YouTube's daily limit is spent; 3) platform search as a small bonus.
• Logging: each upload is one row in the project workspace (host, clip id, URL, date); the 30- and 90-day readouts go into the Sunday growth notes.
• Watch for duplicates: one copy per clip per host, matched by clip id in the log before any upload.

Sources

• Foliovision, "Video Search Bias: Absolutely Dominated by YouTube" (Jan 2022), summarising Eric Enge / Stone Temple and the Wall Street Journal test: foliovision.com
• Dailymotion public API, our own measurement 31 Oct 2026: api.dailymotion.com
• Vimeo Help Center, "About the Vimeo Free plan" (read 31 Oct 2026): help.vimeo.com
• Google Search Central, Vimeo video SEO case study (indexifembedded, Key Moments): developers.google.com
• Dailymotion Help, "Earn revenue from video monetization" (1,000 views, $100 payout; read via search snippet, page 403): faq.dailymotion.com

Raw Markdown: dailymotion-vimeo-mirror-shorts-measured-gate.md · version and changes: changelog · machine index: agents.json