I didn't try to sell them myself, but I did consider it...HEAVILY.
However, fpr me there were a lot of big wins for going with a publisher like Pluralsight. For one thing, they take a lot of things that are not really related to video production off of the table so you can focus on content. For example,
- distribution (i.e, an LMS platform with video hosting that actually works across the globe)
- payment processing, especially if you want to do subscriptions since that entails a whole other level of PCI compliance
- dealing with video piracy, which can be a bigger problem than you'd ever imagine
Now, I'm actually a software engineer by trade so I could eventually build all of this infrastructure myself if I really had to. But once I realized that I'm in the business of producing content and not creating an LMS that path made much less sense to me than it did at first. Basically I just asked myself 'what would be my differentiator?'. Was it doing video hosting? No. Doing PCI-compliant payment processing? Nope. But, making sense of all of the mud around agile techniques in a way that normal developers could actually use start using them day to day was. So, why not focus on that an outsource the rest.
On top of all of that though the biggest win with going with an established publisher is being able to tap an already existing audience. As I mentioned previously I didn't have an established brand going in so any attempt to launch videos myself would have likely launched to the sound of crickets. Launching on Pluralsight immediately gave me exposure to a large audience who were already paying for this type of content. I'm not sure if Pluralsight makes their subscriber numbers public but, as an example, their twitter account has over 200K followers. Now while not all of those followers are paying subscribers you can assume that those who aren't are at least prospects since they've expressed an interest in hearing about which videos are being released. Getting immediate access to that audience, as well as a marketing channel to reach them, can be huge for getting you started...especially when you don't already have a brand of your own.
Does that mean that I'll never release a video under my own brand? Probably not. There are a lots of LMS as a service providers now on the market that make it much simpler to launch my own video distribution platform than it would have been previously. In addition, one of the biggest drawbacks of using a third party publisher is that you lose visibility into the entire sales funnel. For example, I can track people through my funnel through twitter, to a post on my blog, to a CTA at the bottom of that post that directs people to a related video available on Pluralsight, but I don't have visibility into whether or not they actually convert...which is the most important part. Distributing under your own brand gives me visibility into the entire funnel which would help give me the ability to really grow the business. But, before that's a viable option, I need to have a more established brand than I do now. Otherwise...I would simply launch to crickets :)