December 14th and 15th seemed to be just full of internet deaths. If AIM was your friendly grandmother, who was always there for you but you saw less and less in the latter years, Vidme was the baby among the group, born weak with a health issue that you knew might take it away from the family early on.
Okay, that’s a seriously dark and intense analogy, but it does work to get the point across. Vidme, a video sharing site that apparently had a been going a few years and since the YouTube Adpocalypse it had begun to grow usage. However, as I symbolize above, it was fighting an uphill battle against the nature of video hosting being as expensive on its own, and getting people to use Vidme as opposed to YouTube is obviously a challenge. A total uphill battle and one that they couldn’t win.
They had announced on the 1st of December that the site would be shutting down, and upon that announcement they disabled uploads and several other features on the site. Users had till Noon Pacific time on the 15th to download any unique content from the site and then that was that – it was all being deleted. And it was.
I’d say the site was, on a whole, pretty damn good. For one, it had a more positive feedback design to it, which is something I always appreciate. It had ways for content creators, once they reached a pretty reasonable size on their channel, to monetize more directly through the site via fan funding and while that’s nothing new, it was debatably better implemented than the system YouTube had. The interface was good, video quality was fine, upload limits weren’t anything too stupid – it was just nice.
I never did get to experience it to its fullest though, as I’ve only recently gotten back into video making after several years of minimal content (yeah, YouTube has sucked for a long time now, honestly), so aside from trans-posting a few of my more popular videos to the platform, I mostly let it pass me by. Still, I liked what I saw, and hope they can bring it back in the Future.
Thanks for trying, Vidme. Good job in what you did.
