With YouTube being in the state it is currently (something I’m long overdue for addressing) many video creators online have been looking for an alternative, and for the past few months it looked like a certain little website known as Vidme would be a good alternative – it looked to work about as well as YouTube, to have a better attitude, and certainly seemed less restrictive. What’s not to love?
Well, perhaps the fact that the site couldn’t find a way to be financially viable.
That brings us to today, after quite a few months of people really pushing for the site to be something, and after a few years of vidme itself actually operating as a video hosting service, they are pulling the plug (for now) on the whole operation as it is on December 15th. See the link at the end of the article for details.
This isn’t surprising – even YouTube is thought to run at an overall loss, even with Google having the dominance it does in advertising and sheer monetary gain, the overhead of video hosting is such that profits are tiny, if present at all, and as such it’s difficult, if not impossible to actually create a successful business model for such a service. Honestly, I don’t know how vimeo and the few other somewhat successful sites that allow end-user uploads manage to survive, but given the limitations on file size and video length they have, that probably helps keep overhead costs down; ironically those limitations also keep people from moving to those sites, beyond the obvious fact that “no one will see my videos” which if you have a decent social media presence is somewhat a moot point… but I digress.
Vidme was thought to be a possible YouTube killer, and it could have been, given how it worked. However, there just wasn’t as much of a drive for people to migrate completely over to the site. YouTube is just too damned dominant, which is why they can get away with doing what they have been, and will continue to do, to content creators.
I’ll go more into the absolute fucking nightmare that YouTube is for content creators now as time goes on. Adpocalypse, censorship, hate for hates sake and more… I’ve been avoiding it for reasons I don’t even know, so sometime this month and going into 2018 I’ll finally throw my thoughts on all of it out there.
Back on the subject of Vidme I think the team behind it did the best damned job they could. I would have switched to the site fully had I been making much video content this year Still wouldn’t have been enough, but that shows that the fact that some people have just stopped with video content all together, those same people being the ones who would want to use an alternative, is a problem. People get tired of the process and when a new option comes around, they are too sick of dealing with it all for no perceived reward to bother using the new service which eliminates those problems they had with the prior one.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, I guess, on filling a niche.
I’ve got more to say on the video on the web end of things – stick around.
Here’s the article that I learned of this from. I mainly skimmed around, check it out and see what you think. https://medium.com/vidme/goodbye-for-now-120b40becafa