What's the best way to share my presentation slides online?

I typically post my slides on my website as pdfs. On the title page of my slides, I have started adding a line that says something like "slides available on my preprint page", and sometimes I'll mention this at the start of my talk. On my website, I have a page for all my slides and I also link to the relevant slides on my preprints page. Personally, I prefer when speakers make their slides available as pdfs, because I like being able to download them and file them away, rather than needing to bookmark a website. Similar to my preprints, I'm excited to have folks download my slides (so I don't see any reason to control their distribution).


From what I can see, some key issues to think about are:

  • Social media integration and analytics. These sites will help you advertise your presentation and gather data on who views it.

  • Downloading. You can make it inconvenient or impossible to download the slides. That's an advantage if you want to control the presentation and keep anyone from archiving a copy or extracting figures (you can't stop someone determined and knowledgeable, but you can stop casual users).

  • Accessibility on devices. My smartphone cannot view Present.me presentations at all, and it has a little trouble with SpeakerDeck and Slideshare presentations. (I can view them, but they are awfully small and I cannot zoom in.) I don't usually view slides on my phone, but I do every so often.


I agree with Anonymous Mathematician, but I want to add an additional key issue:

  • Rendering Compatibility: Can whichever method you choose properly render all of your content? I have had trouble converting PowerPoint files containing chemical structures drawn in ChemDraw (which are vector graphic objects). Creating PDFs seems to be hit or miss depending on the method I use. Notably, Office is better at it than Adobe software. Slideshare will not render these objects at all. I do not have experience with Present.me or SpeakerDeck.