I am relatively new to webinars, I only conducted half a dozen of them so far.
I started from free webinars with YouTube live streaming, and it was a positive experience. I liked how just recorded webinar automatically appeared on YouTube in high resolution, with me doing nothing at all. It took some manual labor to create a page to host the webinar on one of my websites and to put a chat box hosted by one of the free services alongside it, but it wasn't too bad. I also had to manually collect the emails of those interested in the webinar, and then send those people notifications. But I wouldn't mind doing that if I could figure out how to do paid webinars with YouTube.
I then looked around for a paid webinar platform, and decided to try Webinar Ninja, mainly because their support with live chat was far superior to their competitors (I also considered Webinarjam and Easywebinar. The former came back with an inadequate answer to my questions, the latter didn't bother to answer at all).
So I've conducted four live webinars with Webinar Ninja so far, but I am going to leave them (WN). Their strong side was that they took care of collecting email addresses of those interested in webinars and sending them notification emails automatically. They have a good studio, with a chat box, polls (very cool) and offers (clumsy), the overall experience was quite positive.
The worst thing about Webinar Ninja was their lack of support for UTF-8 encoding. I have a substantial Russian audience, so I am running the same webinar twice: once in English, once in Russian. For the Russian webinars, I translated the notification emails into Russian (the platform gave me this opportunity, which was good). Unfortunately, when these notifications were sent, many of them (although not all) came to their addressees distorted, full of gibberish instead of my insightful translations. I contacted their (rather competent) support using their fabulous chat service and was told that they are aware of the problem and are working on it but can't promise anything. Which sealed their destiny for me. I was showered by emails resending me that gibberish and honestly, I think UTF-8 support is a must in the 21st century.
The other problem was that Webinar Ninja, with their supposedly cutting edge technology, limited the live audience to only 100 attendees. Quite surprisingly, I had 270 people registered for a webinar, so most of them were left out, and that was damaging to my business.
Yet another problem was that the recorded webinars were only available in a very low resolution (something like 640 x 480). I planned to use those recordings to create a course but they weren't good enough.
So I have to move on. I will have a phone call with a sales representative from GoToWebinar on Monday. I've looked at Zoom.us and contacted their support to figure out whether they support paid webinars. I was unable to figure that out myself and their support threw at me some complex info about a third party integration which I found too laborious.
Ah, yes, another negative thing about Webinar Ninja was the way I could make my webinars paid. They didn't give me any good instructions for that but I found decent instructions at their competitors' Webinarjam website, and they use a similar approach. Basically, it's about creating a PayPal button, redirecting your users to PayPal, then, after the payment, sending them to the registration page. I will be brief: that didn't work well. Instead, it kept us very-very busy for a few days trying to help our struggling customers to make the payment. I will never try this again.
So my question is: can you recommend me some good platform, preferably with an integrated payment system, to conduct paid webinars?
I started from free webinars with YouTube live streaming, and it was a positive experience. I liked how just recorded webinar automatically appeared on YouTube in high resolution, with me doing nothing at all. It took some manual labor to create a page to host the webinar on one of my websites and to put a chat box hosted by one of the free services alongside it, but it wasn't too bad. I also had to manually collect the emails of those interested in the webinar, and then send those people notifications. But I wouldn't mind doing that if I could figure out how to do paid webinars with YouTube.
I then looked around for a paid webinar platform, and decided to try Webinar Ninja, mainly because their support with live chat was far superior to their competitors (I also considered Webinarjam and Easywebinar. The former came back with an inadequate answer to my questions, the latter didn't bother to answer at all).
So I've conducted four live webinars with Webinar Ninja so far, but I am going to leave them (WN). Their strong side was that they took care of collecting email addresses of those interested in webinars and sending them notification emails automatically. They have a good studio, with a chat box, polls (very cool) and offers (clumsy), the overall experience was quite positive.
The worst thing about Webinar Ninja was their lack of support for UTF-8 encoding. I have a substantial Russian audience, so I am running the same webinar twice: once in English, once in Russian. For the Russian webinars, I translated the notification emails into Russian (the platform gave me this opportunity, which was good). Unfortunately, when these notifications were sent, many of them (although not all) came to their addressees distorted, full of gibberish instead of my insightful translations. I contacted their (rather competent) support using their fabulous chat service and was told that they are aware of the problem and are working on it but can't promise anything. Which sealed their destiny for me. I was showered by emails resending me that gibberish and honestly, I think UTF-8 support is a must in the 21st century.
The other problem was that Webinar Ninja, with their supposedly cutting edge technology, limited the live audience to only 100 attendees. Quite surprisingly, I had 270 people registered for a webinar, so most of them were left out, and that was damaging to my business.
Yet another problem was that the recorded webinars were only available in a very low resolution (something like 640 x 480). I planned to use those recordings to create a course but they weren't good enough.
So I have to move on. I will have a phone call with a sales representative from GoToWebinar on Monday. I've looked at Zoom.us and contacted their support to figure out whether they support paid webinars. I was unable to figure that out myself and their support threw at me some complex info about a third party integration which I found too laborious.
Ah, yes, another negative thing about Webinar Ninja was the way I could make my webinars paid. They didn't give me any good instructions for that but I found decent instructions at their competitors' Webinarjam website, and they use a similar approach. Basically, it's about creating a PayPal button, redirecting your users to PayPal, then, after the payment, sending them to the registration page. I will be brief: that didn't work well. Instead, it kept us very-very busy for a few days trying to help our struggling customers to make the payment. I will never try this again.
So my question is: can you recommend me some good platform, preferably with an integrated payment system, to conduct paid webinars?
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