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Share Privately

Private Sharing allows you to upload media, add Standard and Limited users, and give them specific access and permissions to your content.

Caroline F avatar
Written by Caroline F
Updated over a month ago

Private Sharing requires any invited users to log into Wistia. If this is not what you’re looking for, check out our require password feature. All your viewers need to do is enter in your secret word to the video’s password gate — no login necessary!

What is private sharing?

Private sharing in Wistia allows you to add users with varying permission levels to your individual folders and Channels, and give them specific access to your content. Wistia medias in your account aren’t crawled by search engines, so until you share them (via direct URLs, or embedded on your website) they will remain private.

If you’d like to share your content with a few people (but not the whole world), you can share a direct link.

Private sharing may be right for you if you want to:

  • Review and approve content before it goes live

  • Share instructional videos with your team

  • Create internal content that contains sensitive information

You will only need to privately share if you want to further restrict access to your content, invite users to add or update content in your folders and Channels, or share and monitor internal content.

Note

Keep in mind that the number of users you can add depends on what's included in your plan. Check out the Overview page in your Account Settings, or our plans page for more details.

Private sharing

Wistia private sharing is structured around allowing access to Wistia folders and Channels and granting permissions to users or groups of users.

User roles

When it comes to adding users to access your account and view content, there are a few different options, including Managers, Standard users, and Limited users. Managers can access all content in an account, while Standard and Limited users have more restrictions.

For a full breakdown on user roles, check out this page.

Manage team

The Manage team page is where you can see all users in your account, update their permissions, make changes in bulk, remove users, and more. You can access it by clicking into your account dropdown menu and selecting "Manage team."

To learn about managing your team from the Manage team page, head on over to this article for a full walkthrough.

Folder permissions

Account Owners and Managers can add existing and new users to folders, and select their permission level directly from the share modal there.

To set up users in a folder, click the "Share" button to open up the share modal.

From within the modal, you can add, remove, and manage user permissions in that folder.

Check out the page on folder permissions for a full breakdown.

Channel permissions

You can give users access to a Channel from the permissions page in it.

From within a Channel, click "Permissions" from the sidebar. From the Permissions page, click "Add User" to get started.

You can add new and existing users to a Channel. For a full breakdown on Channel permissions, head on over here.

Live event permissions

Account Owners and Managers can users to a live event for them to customize, manage, and even host them. Any user added to a live event has full access to edit any details and customizations for that event.

To share a live event with a new user, click "Share" from the live event's Overview page. Then, click "Invite collaborators."

From here, type in the email address or username of the user you'd like to add. You can add an existing user to the live event, or add a new user from this modal as well.

For a full walkthrough, head on over to the Live Event Permissions page.

Private User Sessions

Any action that a user takes within an account will be visible in Private User Sessions. This includes viewing data as well, so as to separate this from public viewer data.

To access Private User Sessions, head to your account dropdown menu and select "Settings." In the Settings sidebar, click into "Private User Sessions."

From here, you can sort by most recent or oldest sessions, click to view details for a specific session, see all sessions for a user, and more.

Note

Only Account Owners and Managers can access Private User Sessions.

Private Sharing FAQ

Why don’t I set a password for my viewers?

If you are looking to password protect your media rather than sharing privately to users on your account, check out our require password feature. All your viewers need to do is enter the password to the video’s password gate rather than be signed in as a User on the account.

Can my users see all of the same menus and options that I do?

Users can only see content that they've been added to. Every Wistia user will see different menus and options available to them based on what they have been given permission to access. Managers, Standard, and Limited users cannot change any billing information, including your plan type.

Can I export Private Viewer Sessions?

At this point, no. If you’d like more analytics around your viewers' experience, but would still like to limit viewers, we recommend embedding your video behind a paywall or login on a third-party site. This will give you access to all of Wistia’s core analyitcs features, and keep your content private. Private User Sessions will only show user heatmaps.

I need access to a folder, can Wistia help?

To maintain account security, we cannot add users to Wistia accounts. You should contact whoever originally invited you to the Wistia account to request more access. Both Account Owners and Managers can add users to an account. Standard users can add users to folders, Channels, and live events that they've created.

Can I entirely ignore my own stats?

Yes! We have IP Filtering functionality for that.

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