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.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday December 05 2017, @02:21PM (4 children)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266201/us-market-share-of-leading-internet-video-portals/ [statista.com]
It says:
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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:53PM (3 children)
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)
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.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday December 05 2017, @04:16PM
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
Of course if your options are
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.