Here are all of the ways you can share your content with your audience from your Wistia account.
Get started sharing your videos with Wistia
Now that you’ve crafted that perfect video or podcast — and customized it to your liking — it’s time to share it with the world (or maybe just a few close friends and coworkers).
Sharing out a direct link to your Wistia account is one of the easiest and most direct ways to share your content with others, without sharing it with the whole of the internet. Check out our section all about sharing out a direct link.
If you’re looking for a bit more security, we have the option to invite Viewers and/or Collaborators to your folders. Get the highlights of private sharing below, or check out the full guide over on our Private Sharing page.
You also have the option to share your videos in email with your favorite email marketing providers, and even track their success!
And last (but certainly not least), you can embed your media, which is super easy thanks to Wistia’s flexible embed codes, and is the most common way to share your content.
Note
Wistia accounts aren’t indexed by search engines, so your account (and the media within it) will never come up in a Google search. All content uploaded to Wistia remains private within your account; it is only available to the extent that you embed and share it.
Share a direct link
You can quickly copy your public media page URL by clicking the link icon next to the "Share" button.
Your public share link will look something like this: https://bloomhq.wistia.com/s/c8ur9k3216u0hf6
Note
Your public share link is different from the Manage URL used to access your media customizations when logged in. Manage URLs are denoted by /manage (e.g., https://bloomhq.wistia.com/medias/isn557vwk9/manage).
For more options, open the Share modal and click "Copy link". Here, you may also link to a specific time, generate an expiring link, and manage access settings.
You can further customize the media page by turning comments on or off, and uploading your logo to your account to make the space your own.
Tip
We recommend embedding your media for more control over your viewing environment. This way, you can bring traffic to your own site and still benefit from Wisita's analytics.
Any changes you make to your video will appear immediately on the Wistia media page —no new links necessary.
Private sharing
If you’d like to limit how your viewers access your account and your media, you can lock your folders to require a login to see your content. From a folder page, click "Share" and then select "Share a link" to update this setting.
You can also click the pencil icon from the Access section of your Folder details panel.
Inviting collaborators in Wistia allows you to control exactly who has access to specific folders in your account.
If your viewer chooses to share any direct links to videos they have access to, your content will remain secure. Even if you're logged in to Wistia, if you're not invited to an account (or a specific folder), you won't have access to the content.
Private sharing is great for keeping your media secure, selling content, and having more direct access to how viewers are interacting with your account.
Tip
User activity in your account is logged in the Team Activity dashboard in your account settings.
If you’d like to give viewers a bit more access to your media (customizing, analytics, and further sharing), you’ll want to invite them as Collaborators to the folder. Check out the full details on our Folder Permissions page.
You can control who can access a folder by clicking "Share" and then selecting “Invite collaborators.”
Embed your content
The most common way to share your videos is to embed them on your website. There are two types of embed codes at Wistia: inline and popover.
Inline embeds are pretty much exactly what they sound like — they’ll play right on your webpage, “inline” with your other website content.
Popover embeds will play in a lightbox over your webpage when a viewer clicks a thumbnail or text link.
In most cases, adding your video to your website is as easy as grabbing an embed code from the Embed modal (just click "Embed" on your video’s page) and popping it into your site. Check out our page all about embedding.
If you’d prefer that your embedded videos remain completely unindexed by search engines, we recommend using a no_index tag in the head of your page or blocking site crawlers in your robot.txt file.
You can also choose to uncheck the "Inject SEO metadata" option in the Embed modal, which will tell Wistia not to inject the video’s metadata into the <head> of your webpage.
Visit our video SEO page for a more in-depth walk-through.
For even more added security, you can also lock your Wistia folders. Wistia account URLs aren’t part of your embed code —if you’ve shared around the initial link to your video, you can still go back and lock the folder so only added users have access to it, and your embedded content will remain visible on your website.
To restrict a folder to only invited users, click “Share,” select “Share a Link,” and change the Access to Locked:
Share in email
Sharing your content with a direct link is easy and quick, but it often doesn’t provide the detailed analytics that an email provider offers. That’s where Wistia’s Email Campaign link feature comes in.
We provide email merge tags for a ton of your favorite email marketing systems. These merge tags can track your viewers' Wistia sessions with an associated email address, so you can keep up with your leads' activity and track the success of your emailed videos.
Note
Email campaign links are not compatible with podcast episodes.
Social sharing
Just like a direct link, sharing media socially is a great way to get your brand out there and get some plays.
For many social sharing platforms, you’ll just need to drop your Wistia URL (e.g., https://support.wistia.com/medias/h1z3uqsjal) into the post you want to share.
Most platforms will pull in all the necessary information about your video, and you won’t need to do a thing. To share a podcast episode, grab the episode URL from your Channel.
Allow viewers to download content
You can further share your content by allowing your viewers to download your videos. You can do this in a couple of ways.
You can allow all visitors to download from your Wistia media page (like we did for this video). Click "Share" on a folder page, then select "Share a link" from the dropdown menu, and toggle "Allow download" to on.
With this enabled, the download option will appear in the header of your media page.
Alternatively, you can allow your viewers to download the video from the Share buttons within the player. From within the Customize panel, navigate to the Share menu, check off the "Download" button, and you’re good to go!
With this turned on, the download option will appear in the share menu from the play bar.
You can read more about customizing the share buttons here.
Resumable video and audio
Have you ever left a page and wished that you could pick up a Wistia video or podcast right from where you left off? Good news, our resumable video and audio feature does just that!
When returning to a media page, embedded media will have the option to resume from where you left off, or start the video over. Channels will have the option to pick up from the specific time and video or podcast you were playing!
Resumable video and audio will not work if:
You are logged into Wistia
Your video or podcast is less than 5 minutes long
Your video or podcast is set to autoplay
There are fewer than 5 seconds remaining in the video or podcast
The play bar is disabled
Resumable video and audio are enabled for all Wistia embeds by default. You can disable this feature using Embed Options for individual videos or a Channel.
Link to a specific time
Want your media to start at a specific time? To share your video at a specific time, navigate to the media page and click "Share." Then, select "Share link."
This will open up the "Share Link" tab, and under the URL, you'll see an option to "Link to a specific time." Checking this box will allow you to set a specific timestamp for where playback for your video should start.
You can do this to any Wistia link by adding the wtime= string.
Here's a link that brings you 30 seconds into the video:
Sharing your content FAQ
Can I make a link expire?
Yes, you can make your Wistia media links expire! To set up an expiring link, head to the video you'd like to share and click "Share," then select "Share link." From there, select "Generate expiring link."
You can read more about this option on our Expiring Links page.
Can I password-protect my videos without requiring a login?
Absolutely! We have an in-app password feature that lets you add a password at the beginning of your videos. No Wistia login needed!
Give the feature a try over in the Customize panel. Check out the Require Password page for details and instructions.
If the Password feature isn’t up your alley, we recommend embedding your video behind a login with a third-party website provider.
Note
You cannot password-protect an audio file.