Video Service Vidme Is Shutting Down
Posted by: Timothy Tibbetts on 12/04/2017 08:46 AM
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Video service Vidme is shutting down with co-founder Warren Shaeffer blaming Google and Facebook for their short four years in existence.
Personally, we never heard of it, but apparently, 25 million people had, a fraction of YouTube's 1.5 million users. VidMe has already suspended new registrations, uploads, and paid subscriptions.
Vidme was designed to be a Reddit meets YouTube platform with the goal of allowing the small guy a chance to make money. You could upvote videos, and those could rise to the top so no matter who you are, you had a chance of getting attention.
We were surprised that we never heard of VidMe, or at least we don't recall it, but it's not hard to see why it failed. To go up against YouTube, you're going to need hundreds of millions of dollars and a lot of that will need to go into advertising, not to mention the cost of running a YouTube competitor.
As we know here, advertising has become increasingly difficult. VidMe had to target specific audiences on a video website and that required enough users to provide numerous genres to target for ads. While 25 million sounds like a lot, if you broke down all the possible advertising genres and divided it by 25 million, then figured out a buck to 5 bucks (guessing) a thousand, that's not the hundreds of millions needed to get your name out there. Not to mention the day to day costs. Not even close. Add in the fact that getting financing at this point required someone with deep pockets and willing to risk millions.
But, we give them props for trying. Your odds going head-to-head with YouTube, Facebook and a handful of other gigantic video streaming websites is an epic undertaking.
We're always trying to think of another website to create and for the most part, it's been done and done well. We believe the miscalculation here was thinking that millennials would come running. But the millennials do the same thing all generations do - watch videos on youTube.
Ironically, towards the end of Mr. Shaeffer's blog post, he offers suggestions on how newcomers can survive should they want to start a video sharing platform.
We expect to see VidMe back in some form eventually.
Personally, we never heard of it, but apparently, 25 million people had, a fraction of YouTube's 1.5 million users. VidMe has already suspended new registrations, uploads, and paid subscriptions.
Vidme was designed to be a Reddit meets YouTube platform with the goal of allowing the small guy a chance to make money. You could upvote videos, and those could rise to the top so no matter who you are, you had a chance of getting attention.
We were surprised that we never heard of VidMe, or at least we don't recall it, but it's not hard to see why it failed. To go up against YouTube, you're going to need hundreds of millions of dollars and a lot of that will need to go into advertising, not to mention the cost of running a YouTube competitor.
As we know here, advertising has become increasingly difficult. VidMe had to target specific audiences on a video website and that required enough users to provide numerous genres to target for ads. While 25 million sounds like a lot, if you broke down all the possible advertising genres and divided it by 25 million, then figured out a buck to 5 bucks (guessing) a thousand, that's not the hundreds of millions needed to get your name out there. Not to mention the day to day costs. Not even close. Add in the fact that getting financing at this point required someone with deep pockets and willing to risk millions.
But, we give them props for trying. Your odds going head-to-head with YouTube, Facebook and a handful of other gigantic video streaming websites is an epic undertaking.
We're always trying to think of another website to create and for the most part, it's been done and done well. We believe the miscalculation here was thinking that millennials would come running. But the millennials do the same thing all generations do - watch videos on youTube.
Ironically, towards the end of Mr. Shaeffer's blog post, he offers suggestions on how newcomers can survive should they want to start a video sharing platform.
We expect to see VidMe back in some form eventually.
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