You really can find anything you want to see, and even more that you wish you never had, at YouTube. There are some amazingly cool videos available, and some that make you want to push a wire brush through your ear and scrub the memories out of your head. Really. Actually, there are a few videos I wish I could scrub away right now.

Aside from the brain-scrubbing videos, YouTube rocks. It’s packed tight with entertainment, training, video blogs, promotional videos and more. You can’t ask for a better deal as a viewer: YouTube rocks.

For the people providing all that tasty content, YouTube’s ultra easy-ness means that you don’t need a rocket science degree to figure out how to get your message, entertainment, or drunk videos out to the world. So what’s not to love?

It’s the branding. Every time someone views a video you upload, they see the YouTube logo — great branding for YouTube, but not so much for you because your content is branded as YouTube and not just you. That’s not a big deal to everyone, but if controlling your brand, even if it’s a video podcast, is important to you, then it’s time to pay attention to your branding. Viewers should remember your logo, and not YouTube’s logo.

If I’m going to steer the brand conscious away from YouTube, the least I can do is offer some alternatives. How about Vimeo or Viddler. I especially like Viddler because they make it easy to embed your own logo in your videos, but both offer simple ways to add video content to your own site.

Here’s a great example of controlling your brand: Don McAllister’s ScreenCastsOnline. I don’t know who hosts his videos, and it doesn’t matter. Everything carries the ScreenCastsOnline brand, and there’s never any doubt who is in charge of the content.

Of course, there’s always a trade off because life sucks that way. In this case, the trade off is that while you have more control over your own branding, you’ll probably have to work harder to get people to find your work. YouTube is pretty much ubiquitous, so that’s where everyone goes first when they want to find a video. Yeah, I do it, too.

Think about who gets the branding benefit from your hard work. It might be YouTube, but it could be you.

And now I’m heading over to YouTube for some 2 Hot Girls in the Shower time. No, it’s not what you’re thinking. Get your mind out of the gutter.