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Vid.me to Shut Down on Dec 15th 2017

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday December 05 2017, @01:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the vid-off dept.

jonathan writes:

Vid.me has announced that they are shutting down on December 15th 2017, saying that they could not find a path to sustainability.

This news should be of concern as content creators have been getting increasingly frustrated with Youtube's algorithms that demonetize their videos and this means they have one less alternative to turn towards.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Wootery on Tuesday December 05 2017, @02:03PM (6 children)

    by Wootery (2341) on Tuesday December 05 2017, @02:03PM (#605619)

    I'm surprised Vimeo haven't done more to pick up the slack here. There's plenty of reason to move away from YouTube. Vimeo already have the infrastructure.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday December 05 2017, @02:21PM (4 children)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Tuesday December 05 2017, @02:21PM (#605631) Journal

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/266201/us-market-share-of-leading-internet-video-portals/ [statista.com]

    It says:

    Leading multimedia websites in the United States in November 2016, based on market share of visits

    YouTube 78.8%
    Netflix 8%
    Hulu 2.1%
    bing Videos 0.8%
    Vimeo 0.8%
    Crunchyroll 0.8%
    Daily Motion 0.6%
    Apple iPod & iTunes 0.6%
    Yahoo! Video 0.6%
    blinkx 0.4%

    So two likely challengers to YouTube, Vimeo and Daily Motion, are #2 and #3 in the user video hosting segment (bing videos [wikipedia.org] appears to be just a search engine). And their combined view share is a whopping 1.4%, with YouTube getting 56 times more visits. Maybe you can find better data somewhere else, but it would probably look similar to this.

    Never even heard of blinkx.

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    • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:53PM (3 children)

      by Wootery (2341) on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:53PM (#605677)

      I hadn't even thought of Netflix, but there's no obvious reason they couldn't branch out into ad-funded services. Perhaps paying subscribers could be spared the ads.

      Quite surprised Amazon video apparently didn't make the top 10. I figured they'd be comfortably in third place.

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:58PM (2 children)

        by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:58PM (#605680) Journal

        YouTube has ad-free subscription options such as YouTube Red [wikipedia.org]. Only a fraction of viewers pay and it doesn't cover the costs of running the site.

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        • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:16PM

          by Wootery (2341) on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:16PM (#605685)

          YouTube Red is where you pay to not have any YouTube ads, right? What running costs are there, over ordinary YouTube videos?

          I see no reason Netflix would be any less able to monetize freely-viewable videos than YouTube (modulo advertiser enthusiasm), and I see no reason they wouldn't be able to remove the ads for their paying subscribers.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:24PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:24PM (#605690)

          Of course if your options are

          1. paying for an ad-free YouTube, while giving Google even more information to collect on you, or
          2. installing an ad-blocker for free, while not giving Google any additional data over what you already provide by simply visiting the site,

          it is not hard to see which option will generally win.

          Oh, and the name "YouTube Red" probably isn't exactly the best advertising either. At least I think immediately of porn when reading that name, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. So those who don't want to see porn will probably not even go as far as researching what it actually is (indeed, it may not even reach the level of a conscious decision), while those who do want to see porn might research it, but then turn away after finding out that it is, indeed, not about porn.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2017, @02:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07 2017, @02:48AM (#606582)
    I remember being eager to use Vimeo mainly because it isn't YT/Google/Alphabet. But they explicitly forbid game recording videos. I have no idea why. YT has demonstrated there is nothing wrong with videos of that nature, for the overwhelming majority of them at least. There must be millions of them on YT. Given the significance of communities like Amazon's Twitch acquisition, you'd think that Vimeo is foolishly losing a lot of potential with this groundless prohibition.