Vidme recently announced that it will shut down on the 15th of December and I
think I'm going to have a heart attack and die of not surprise. with no offense
meant to vidme but we've been here before
Vidme started in 2014 as a user-generated video site in 2015 it
raised a seed round of 3.2 million dollars in venture capital funding in
2016 it raised a further six million dollars of venture capital funding and
now it's 2017 and we're done so long and thanks for all the fish. nine
point two million dollars sounds like a lot of money and it would be if you were
a person but video sites have three big issues they need to address and they are
expensive issues. in the medium article they put up explaining their decision
the vidme team said they were closing because we couldn't find a path to
sustainability yep sounds about right.
first problem just having a video site is extremely expensive not just because
you need a lot of bandwidth so you can serve a lot of users simultaneously but
also because you need to store extremely large files and so hosting is very very
very expensive so you have to find some way of paying for that an alternative to
this would be something like bitchute which uses torrents but even if that is
viable in a technical sense you're still going to run into the next two problems
second problem YouTube has a billion visitors a month and it's still
struggling financially it has all of the big creators it has a huge audience and
yet neither of these things is a panacea new video sites start with zero
audience and zero creators. to entice an audience you need content which is going
to appeal to them which means you need creators to make that content. To entice
those creators you need to offer them something better than they're already
getting but you can't offer creators a large audience because you don't have
one and you can't offer the audience vast amounts of content because you
don't have that either not to mention the fact that you have to make people
aware of the platform in the first place and then entice them on to it
advertising is expensive and if they get to your platform and they don't see
anything they like chances are you're never gonna see them again so how do you
get people? well you could start by having a product that solves some of
YouTube's major problems: Dan Olson's video entitled Vidme and why platforms
aren't your friends has some good points as to the, you know, security issues of
YouTube and the collaboration issues that you have with YouTube and I'm not
gonna retread those here but I'll put a link to it in the doobly-do. Regardless
of which of YouTube's faults you address though you better offer something
substantially different. you almost certainly can't offer better money to
creators in YouTube unless you have seriously deep venture capital funded
pockets you definitely can't offer a bigger audience and while the path to
monetary success on YouTube for creators is now rarely just from ad revenue but
more from patreon and other fan funding sites or brand deals and sponsorships
you still need the audience that makes that viable. you still need an audience
big enough that 1% of them can give you money via patreon or an audience big
enough that a brand would actually be interested in sponsoring your video yeah?
yeah. so what's being offered right now? seems to me that the main YouTube
competitors currently are offering either monetization which probably
doesn't amount to anything substantially better than you can get on YouTube
currently or on patreon... or freedom of expression as in we won't demonetize
your videos even if you're talking about Syrian refugees or the crisis in the
Middle East or current US legislation Woo, no demonetization on a platform which
probably doesn't have a lot of advertisers
not really selling it to be honest I mean if you have been demonetised by
YouTube because you're talking about controversial things even if you're
doing so in an even-handed or interesting or intelligent way you're
not magically going to become more palatable to advertisers just because
you switched platform if someone's been banned from YouTube and they want to
make videos then they're quids in I guess but then that just means that your
platform is full of people who have been banned from YouTube and that probably
includes some very very toxic people who will bring their very very toxic
communities with them. YouTube already has this massive problem with our
comment sections being a cesspit and that's just not going to fly if you're a
new video platform looking to expand your audience you are just not going to
be able to entice great aunt Jennifer or school-aged Suzy to your platform if
everyone knows that it's just a hellhole of rape jokes and links to pornography
oh yeah and advertisers don't like small up-and-coming platforms and they don't
like controversy and they don't like not knowing who their ads are being served
to. Yeah so that's a problem
thing is ad revenue is the way that YouTube makes most of its money
it has YouTube Red yes but ad revenue is the bedrock of how YouTube sustains
itself and to do that they have to provide an absolute metric ton of
user-generated content which brands are happy to put their names next to or in
front of or at the end of there's theoretically a lot of money to be made
in online video but theoretically is not the same as actually especially if your
model is mostly or even partially reliant on advertisers as vid me will
tell you the profit margins to be made from subscriptions to a small video site
where the tiny user base are in no way reflective of the actual costs of
hosting video the reason YouTube videos are free is that Alphabet has deep pockets
and that ultimately you are the product you sitting here watching this on your
phone or laptop or tablet or whatever and even if YouTube red becomes a bigger
thing in the future it's only saleable because it has exclusive content for
subscribers and ad free access to every video on YouTube and I'm thinking
YouTube red is going to become a major source of revenue from YouTube for
creators once they actually manage to roll it out to more countries I mean
simply because ad rates have not really taken off on YouTube and every time
there's a crisis like the adpocalypse ad buyers use that to negotiate prices
down and that impacts on YouTube's bottom line and it impacts on the bottom
line of creators which is why most full-time youtubers don't rely solely on
ad revenue and also sell products or have a patreon or do brand deals and
sponsorships so there you have it YouTube and Facebook have the money to
host a lot of video and so can afford to host everything from the sublime to the
ridiculous thus giving their viewers vast amounts of choice YouTube and
Facebook are where the audiences are and so as a creator if you want to get money
from ad revenue or you want to get money from fan funding or you want to get
money from brand deals you still need an audience and so that's where you gotta
go and the big video sites are the places where millions of person hours of
work have gone into algorithms and machine learning and all that jazz to
make sure that your ads go on videos that you would like them to which target
the kind of audience that you want to have new video sites will find it almost
impossible to compete with YouTube unless they are A) attached to a much
larger company with very deep pockets looking at you
Facebook and Amazon or B) the video site in question is offering something
substantially better than that which is offered by YouTube and not only that but
provide a far superior product which is also financially viable. and to the best
of my knowledge no one's done that yet so vidme is going the way of blip
of vine, of Revver, and no one but no one is really very surprised who knows
though maybe someday a plucky upstart company will do something really really
different to not get screwed over or bought out. but I gotta tell you I'm not
holding my breath thanks for watching if you would like to support this channel
there is of course patreon and my patrons or at least some of them are
appearing on the screen next to me as we speak things you should expect in the
next couple of weeks are a stuff you like extra episode about the RPG mashup
game best game try it at parties and maybe just maybe a vlog about the last
Jedi as well see you soon!