Hi news just came through that Vid Me: the YouTube alternative is shutting down. They just couldn't find a way to sustain themselves financially and it's basically gonna be Gonski Um, let's have a look at the it's a medium post by Warren Schafer Who's the Vid Me co-founder of Vid Me goodbye for now, Vid Me came a long way as an independent platform, but we couldn't find a path to sustainability. We're building something new and I'll link to this down below. It's actually quite comprehensive and they go into all sorts of stats and things, so we'll go into a bit of detail on this now.

I haven't read it all yet, by the way. so I'll read it and I'll give you my reaction to this. Now is this surprising? Unfortunately, not really. look I was a big supporter of Big I was a supporter of Vid Me as I am for all the alternative platforms out there I've done a video on this on alternative platforms I'm on Vimeo I'm on shoes I'm on library I Oh, I'm on Steam it I Monday well kind of was on dailymotion, but they kind of yeah.

I dropped off on that. but like I've got 800 videos on there and so I'm on pretty much every alternative platform you pretty much can be. R So I definitely supported Vid Me and it's a shame that they're gone. but is it surprising? Not really.

Unfortunately, The one thing I really liked about Vid Knee is that when I when I go to upload a video here uploading disabled see I can't even upload any more videos now. but I could just cut and paste my Youtube url and it would copy everything. It'll be it a copy the video over in slightly less quality, but it was still acceptable. It is just copy it all over.

so I didn't have to re-upload the original content. it would copy over the description, the title, the thumbnail it did copy over I think it did copy over keywords son but a copied over like everything all had to do is that one post it was like two clicks I just go upload paste enter boom and it was done it. A few quirks with that it didn't automatically post to the tech thing, it wouldn't automatically suck in videos which I thought was a shame. it wouldn't allow me to bulk upload and then publish all my old videos.

was a bit painful but you know they would get in there and you know I was getting some views on there. you know 20 views like you know, like it's nothing spected. but I was getting up votes and I was getting comments and a few people kindly used the tip jar was it to word donate some money so you know it was kinda sort of on its way. but I was never blown away by it in terms of what it offered me as a content creator like because creating content and maintaining it online respire, eating the comments, responding to the comments and you know like doing all the stuff that a content creator has to do to maintain their audience in connect with their audience.

It's it's practically a full-time a job, even for someone who doesn't do it as a full-time job. and supporting multiple platforms real like at the level you need to to build up an audience is is really difficult. So I pretty much on these alternative platforms are pretty much only focused on YouTube So yeah, but if they just wasn't the incentive there to move over, there wasn't the wasn't any financial incentive at all. it was more of like a yeah I Support you here you go.

I'm uploading my content on there I'd be directing people there sometimes if they didn't like YouTube but it didn't offer anything like remarkable in terms of search capability, categorization and you know other things like that. Now one of the big things about YouTube is that half of my views more than half of my views come from YouTube searching and suggested videos. I'll show you that this is for the last month like 42 percent of my views came from suggested videos on other people's videos and then 27 came from the Browse features people just browsing around the place and YouTube searches like 8% or something. and but basically YouTube is like that.

the world's second biggest search engine apart from Google of course. and it's the world's biggest by orders of magnitude videos search engine. Nothing even comes close. So for a content creator to move to another platform and fully support another I Get this all the time.

Like like every time I post a D monetization thing, one of my videos is demon monetized. I'll post on Twitter Everyone will go oh, go to VP Just quit YouTube and move to Vid. Me. Only a complete and utter fool would move from YouTube because it is the place where audiences find you, there is simply no other competition and this is where I think it's I Hate to say it, but it's probably going to be next to impossible for another platform to actually come up and compete with that.

Maybe you know it'll like serve I don't know. Amazon or somebody like that could potentially do something like that. but I like it. it's just not there.

YouTube is the platform of choice and there's nobody else that even comes close. There's lots of night, you know. video and vineos are nice. For example, the villain video quality is higher than YouTube but it's like it like and I get some views on my Vimeo page and stuff like that, but there's no interaction and it's just nobody.

Searches for videos on Vimi Vimi. Oh, and stuff like that, there's just no contest really in that regard. So for Vid Me to actually entice content creators like myself over, they would have had to have provided some sort of financial benefit to do So And I know it. You know it doesn't always come down to money, but at the end of the day, full-time content creators who are doing it full-time as their business right, have to pay their bills, they've got to eat, and at the end of the day, they're going to go for the platform that pays the most money.

And if platforms want to compete with YouTube, they have to, especially with like exclusive content. rather than just be an alternative where you also upload your material is like a backup or secondary thing. If they want exclusive content like Netflix and other places pay big money for to give exclusive content, then they have to actually entice content creators over financially to produce independent content for them. Otherwise, it's just just being out.

an alternative platform isn't enough. There needs to be some more. You know, some greater financial incentive there for content creators to move over. Anyway, let's go into what they say: After careful consideration, the Vimy team has arrived.

A difficult decision to suspend Vid Me site and apps effectively. December 15th at noon. We'll use this blog post to explain what this means for users. New signups and uploads will be disabled effective today.

Existing videos will be playable and exportable until December 15 will be permanently ditched. point permanently deleted from the Vid Me servers Wow Ok, so it's all Gonski Lucky it's just backup content I Haven't uploaded any exclusive content. They're all paid. channel subscriptions will be suspended.

Subscriber only videos are only available to the video and there's any outstanding earnings will be paid. Paid subscriptions will cease. The good thing is they like just when we're done. we're just going to stop it as of today, so that's really good.

No subscribers going to be billed. Fantastic Why we started Vid Me: we started Vid Me before we could afford the shorter descent him in 2014 with the mission of helping the next generation entertainers find their audience and earn a living. At the time, YouTube was the only major platform that provided revenue sharing. a system which neglected creators was small or niche.

Audience was confident we could create a new type of video platform when there was more community-oriented more transparent, and more equal to creators. I Unfortunately, I didn't see any of that. They said you can monetize content, but it's just if you don't get that search views is there's not that critical mass of views coming in even if you've got a high CPM figure. even if you have $50 a CPM that's a thousand views you know, like the views I was getting on Vimeo were tiny.

right? though? you know, like 1350? Like, even if it was 50 or $100 per CPM which has cost per thousand views it? It's just the money is not. the financial incentive is not going to come in there to do it unfortunately. So yeah, It's a what's the chicken and egg kind of thing. You gotta have that critical mass before you could start.

Or as I mentioned, pay the content creators to produce exclusive content for your channel, which they as far as I'm aware they didn't really do that or not on a big scale that I heard of. anyway. I certainly didn't approach me, but I'm just some small tech channel you know, niche thing so it's not like I was had a big mainstream audience. you know? I'm not a food, a pie or a Phil DeFranco or someone like that.

We were confident we could create a new type of video platform more and in there I've done that now. I Curators both viewers and Cura allowing the communities surface trending content. I'm not sure the trending thing ever worked I think there was a lot of criticism for that, but I never really used it hugely myself. So I don't know I give him a large market opportunity.

video ad spend his 84 billion in the US alone. Wow and the impending shift from linear television viewing towards digital videos we believe could yeah I mean it's yeah. I Get so many comments from people saying YouTube is the only thing they watch that they just don't watch television anymore. on-demand content YouTube or Netflix or something like those.

The only thing they watch What we accomplished. Our first feature is one-step video publishing tools. simply drag and drop. no need, no account required I never use that I don't That's kind of like the what is it the inner model for images like I Love Em Gog.com I don't need an account I just cut and paste my image into there and I can get a link which then I can put somewhere else but that doesn't make money for them so I'm not sure.

Anyway, at time video sharing was more difficult Facebook Twitter Reddit and Overload didn't have the native video as often impossible to send large files over SMS Yeah, well, that's all change now. We hosted millions of videos, delivered over six billion views to audiences around the world, and unfortunately six billion. It's like some like one. YouTube Channel alone has like a big popular one, has six billion views.

I think it's scary Anyway, I'm a bit there. small team. yeah they did well good on them. Well there you go some.

Our creators were earning thousands of dollars a month using Vid News Fan Patreon JH Patronage tools. Well yeah, that tip jar thing or whatever it was. Um, and that Patreon Just completely like everyone's using Patreon every one. especially in 2017.

The ad pocalypse happened and it decimated like eighty ninety percent or more a hundred percent of the revenue or some YouTube channels which was solely dependent upon the YouTube ad revenue they'll just wipe out Totally. And they just had to go to Patreon to get the donations to actually keep the channels going. And now I Quite a lot of them are only more on Patreon than they ever did using the YouTube monetization thing. And that's yeah, that's fantastic.

I've got a patron and Patreon side. I'm not way up there, but it's It's quite a few. It's a couple of thousand. what am I? Three thousand dollars a month or something, which is awesome.

Thank you for everyone who supports me on Patreon. They had less than a dozen full-time employees. That's great. They weren't able to find a path to financial stability.

Here are the major obstacles we encountered: This will be good: monetizing. User generation content is increasingly challenging. Advertisers want to target and target specific audiences, which means a new platform that doesn't store troves a personal user data It as A is that a severe disadvantage relative to Facebook and Google They control sixty percent of online ads spending in the US Wow, that's huge. Not surprising the whole.

in fact. I Thought it might even be higher than that. But yes, that is the case. The huge number one incentive of advertising on Facebook and Google is that you can target exactly who you want.

Advertisers who want to advertise on my channel. They can just target my channel. They end ads will be shown on nothing else except my channel or just they can even I Believe they can even target a specific video on my channel if they absolutely want to in Google Say yes, we can do that. Or, but in most cases, it's like we want to target people who search for oscilloscopes.

We want to target people who search for you know, test equipment or electronics, tutorials, or you know, engineering or something like that, people who are searching for those keywords and Google's always tracking you. It knows what you want whether you have an account with them or not and Facebook are doing the same thing. And by the way, no, Facebook is not a video platform. It's just it's you know, just one-off things.

It's not designed to be searchable. It's not a competitor to YouTube. It's just no way it is. Most advertisers want their ads to come compliment brands safe content.

Yeah, well. this was the whole D monetization ad Pocalypse thing of 2017 and it's a lot of. It's just complete and utter. But you know you can understand companies not want in their content against you know, anything that might be deemed that they don't agree with or whatever.

You know it's their right. It's their money. They can spend it however they like. But a lot of the ad pocalypse was just completely not a perpetuated by the dinosaur media.

But let's not go there anyway. Few advertisers are willing to negotiate direct deals with platforms that don't have an enormous scale. Meaning the ad revenue rates are lower than your platforms. Yeah, that would be tough.

If you're an upper coming like vid me trying to get those brand deals from the major companies, you would They, as I said, they have more than what lesshan like went like 20 staff I Don't know how many would have been brand people, but you would have needed hundreds of full-time staff. probably at least dozens of full-time staff just dedicated to you know, brand generation, our brand. You know, getting the getting the brand deals from the major, you know, the players who want to advertise, the ones with the big bucks you know, who are spending like a billion dollars a year on advertising or hundreds of millions or tens of millions on advertising. You want to entice those in.

and how do you entice them in when you don't have the views and all the you know and the rest of it and all the user data and without tracking people? Yeah, it's no surprise that they couldn't that they didn't survive. Unfortunately, that's just the way it online over - that's the vicious world that online advertising is. Although we introduced direct fan, patronage is additional. Yeah, profit margin wasn't sufficient to cover that.

Yeah, it's just everyone's on Patreon. That's it. Now with regards to the brand deals, I'm one of the few channels out there I'm not sure of any other channel that does it that I went full-time I've done a video on this full time when I had 10,000 subscribers six and a half years ago and the way I did that is because I have on my I have a very popular website and a very popular forum. and luckily yeah, I built that up and the advertisers come to me directly all the major advertisers.

so these ads you see up the top here and down the side and the ads you see at the top of the forum here and here these are the ones that pay the majority of my bills. It's not. It's never been the YouTube advertising revenue even today with half a million subscribers, hundred thousand views a month, a hundred million views total, and you know, quite a decent audience. I Still could not make a full-time living from just the YouTube ad revenue.

Unfortunately, most content creators are not like me. They don't have a popular website and forum where they can do that sort of thing. And and by the way, the other area where I get a huge chunk of my income Once again, more than YouTube is from product sales and things like that. Hence why you know I've got a shop on there and you buy my stuff and I make a big cut and well I make a reasonable income from that and it keeps helps pay for the blog.

So even if YouTube completly demonetized me I'd be safe. Unfortunately most content creators are not in that same boat so that's really that's really hard for them. Story and Delivery: Your video is becoming less expensive, but remains extremely cost. Me: Videos are often massive files.

Yeah, no kidding. My average video I've got here here we go. I'll pull it in. Look here we go like you know, these are the file sizes like mailbag 9 gig.

You know the LCD when I just uploaded two gig ml/cc you know like they're there. They're large files and making them glow available globally via the couldn't CD ends the content delivery networks. Massive. They thought, yeah, YouTube was sold to Google Because they just couldn't sustain themselves, they had to find a big buyer that had the infrastructure to deliver the content into behalf of the content and create the content delivery networks required to distribute all this video.

People don't realize how much effort is involved, how much expense is involved in delivering the video on demand instantly that they take for granted. and hundreds of millions of videos. However, billion videos they've got. It's like boom.

It just works like that. People don't realize how much of an effort that is. They thought that the infrastructure costs would decline due to increase in competition of CD ends. Yep, they've fallen dramatically, but still outpace our ability to generate meaningful revenue.

So yeah, it just didn't become cheap enough. You know everyone thought our cloud storage is becoming free. You know there's companies out there that like there's almost no companies left offering free unlimited cloud storage. They've removed all their unlimited plans just because it's not as cheap as they think it's cheap.

But it's not zero. And when you're playing back video. Wow. The definition of scale has changed and attracting audiences away from his listing platforms is harder than ever.

Eight of the 10 most popular apps are owned by Google and Facebook. Both companies also have many other apps yeah Facebook the YouTube app Facebook Messenger don't use any of those that a bit Search maps Instagram Snapchat I don't know what Snapchat is Pandora What the hell is that? Gmail I Know Yeah, so many creators with millions of subscribers in YouTube and Facebook We were initially attracted to Vid MS model, but face difficulty transitioning audiences from their home platforms. Convincing people to use and keep using new platform is hard, leaving many creators locked in both Facebook and YouTube also actively deprecated content shared from. oh, do they from our competing platforms, right? Yeah, that's the thing.

I As I said back at the start, you've got to financially incentivize content creators to produce content for you and exclusive content. Otherwise, if it's just the same content it, there's a case to be had for the same content. but maybe a week in advance. Like you know, one of the there was some startup with a model like that that I think it's it's not going.

great guns now but you like it would share the content on there first and you can do that on Patreon. You can upload to YouTube or wherever any platform you want to use and then release to your patrons first before it becomes available in YouTube and stuff like that. But really, the the thing has got to be exclusive content and there's no financial incentive there to do it. unfortunately.

Yeah, it's like how can you go, how can you establish yourself, spend a decade establishing yourself on YouTube and then go well. Oh here's you know, YouTube have been pissing me off with all these d monetization and here comes this: YouTube competitor vid me and or whoever it is in the future and they say hey, come over here like convince your audience to come over. Why you late late? What's the incentive for me to convince my audience to come over? It's a huge thing and as I said, like half of my views every month. more than half come from just organic YouTube searches and things like that and that's how you grow and sustain an audience.

Are you any YouTube Creator who's built up their living on YouTube is a fool. If they go anywhere else with without being fully financially compensated for doing so, it's just you've got to eat. Unfortunately, that's the practical reality of content creation. Lacking a critical audience, we struggled to attract direct advertiser to help offset infrastructure cost.

Yeah, this is all standard like you could see this coming. Anyone could have predicted this. Unfortunately, And it, unless they offer something drastically different, a new competitor offers something drastically different. They're probably going to go the same way as FID me.

unfortunately. Um, you know they cut. They've been getting lots of, you know, venture capital funding and stuff like that, but that our money only lasts so far. If they're not turning a profit in the face of mounting competition and moving goal posts are achieving sufficient scale, the timeline for Vid Knees sustainability as an independent platform became uncertain.

Yeah, raising additional capital or continuing operate? Yeah, it became untenable. They just couldn't get any more money. They couldn't entice investors anymore. Anyway, insight for newcomers: This will be good for new startup video alternatives if you're considering building your own video platform here.

A few suggestions: Monetization: Plan to operate at a loss for an indefinite period of time and all be operated by a deep pocketed business with multiple revenue streams. Give users of your existing products incentives to engage with your audience. Engage with your video platform. They're admitting the same thing they probably.

You know that's a mistake they made. They didn't offer financial incentives. They mean financial. And be wary of monetizing with advertisements prior to achieving massive scale infrastructure costs.

Explore emerging technologies, peer-to-peer storage. There's a few companies doing that now. like as I said library IO steam it doing that. The bit shoot one and others are you know, using cryptocurrency and you know things like that Library on Steam A cryptocurrency based thing peer-to-peer so there's new things there do I Think there's a huge future for those? Maybe not.

I It's gonna be hard to break away from that YouTube model YouTube Handling all that, having distributed things sounds great in theory. I Not convinced it's gonna work in practice though. it's worked for, you know, BitTorrent And you know torrents and things like that, but ultimately like how many people are you average Joe is not their seed in Torrance everyday. it's just not happening.

It's you know, it's major players with major servers doing that own as much as the physical infrastructure as possible year. Don't just rent it from Amazon Web Services You know there's probably half a dozen pitch decks right now at venture capital companies. We're gonna start a YouTube alternative because there'd pocalypse and we're gonna just rent the server space from Amazon And yeah, we'll make billions and we'll be the next. YouTube Leveraging existing audience and or incentivize all platform participants by issuing a native currency.

Our blockchain. Yeah, there you go. So they talk about blockchain. You know, giving its money, blockchain is just money Bitcoin Etherium.

Whatever. While we're disappointing to close something we put so much of our hearts into, we're excited and eager to ply with new product announcing next year. Unfortunately, not ever. every member of the VB team they're looking.

you can hire them away. Great Excellent! I'm sure they're very television same to see them go. It's good to see that they're trying to get new jobs for them. That's great anyway.

Thank you thank you thank you thank you Viv Me for trying hard to be a an alternative to YouTube It's sad that it didn't work out, but unfortunately that was like, how can you compete with YouTube I There's got to be something dramatically drastically different. YouTube keeps shooting themselves in the foot and every opportunity and they still like it is still by orders of magnitude. not just a single order orders of magnitude. The platform of choice compared to anything else in terms of video content creation, hosting, building an audience, the content delivery network, everything else is it.

You know, those companies that compete on the content delivery network side of thing, but on the community side of things? Nobody competes at all. The community and search is just the number one place to search. It's like saying I'm gonna take on Google in web search? Yeah, good luck, you know Bing and other ones who ever you know like it just. you can't beat the incumbent player for something like that.

It's just where people go. If they want videos they go straight to YouTube and trying to break that is Wow. It's gonna need some really deep pockets and deep commitment to hiring content creators to produce exclusive content for them. I Don't think I There's probably I'm not gonna say it, but no.

Well, maybe there are some who only earn their revenue from YouTube You probably could get them to quit YouTube and cut some a lot of content creators to quit YouTube and come on over. but they know that that popularity side of things, even if they're getting paid right. Let's say you're getting $100,000 a year as a YouTube content creator now. and let's say then a new platform comes along.

We'll give you half a million bucks a year. We'll give you five times more if you come and quit. YouTube Bring your audience over and make exclusive content for us if they do it. Yeah, they're going to get their half million dollars a year.

But where's the new audience going to come from? Only a small percentage of their audience are going to move over. Let's say 5 10 %. It'd be tops maybe 20% if you were. You know, if you're really lucky, but it's like it's most likely going to be in that single-digit percentage audience.

Move over. And where's the new audience going to come from and they might eventually tire of that platform and move back to YouTube and go. Oh I Can't handle juggling views on two different platforms so they might slowly just fade it. They might initially come over.

You might get a huge sushi audience, but then you gonna just dissipate into the ether and you might still be owning your half a million bucks until they go bust. -. Oh man, it's so hard. I So want to see somebody win and and take on YouTube And like a real solid competitor that has like a good like, it's probably always going to be that 80% 20% you know, share of the market kind of thing.

It's like there's all this you know, market theory and stuff like that economic theory that you know someone will have 80% So I want to have 20% or something I forget the name of all that sort of stuff. but that's most likely you know YouTube will always be the 80% in terms of video place to go to get video. but if somebody else can really be a soul an alternative for you know, a 20% or something like that, then yeah, that's great. but at the moment YouTube's the only game in town.

the only game unfortunately. So yeah, sorry Vid me, thanks for trying and maybe you know people could argue that well I should have put more commitment behind Vid me, but I already don't have enough time to support YouTube as well as I'd like in terms of replying to every reading. every comment I tried and to keep up but you know trying to do that across many different platforms is just a ridiculous like you know it's a 24. Being a YouTube content creator is a 24/7 job.

You never stop thinking about it. You never stop reading. You know you get so addicted to reading the comments, looking at the you know how your videos are going, searching for stuff and watching other content and see how they're doing and you know things like just get so addicted to being in there it's hard to commit to another platform as seriously as you would to YouTube So unfortunately? Well yep, that's it. Vid me Gonski all my videos I think will be deleted in like 15 days.

Oh well, thanks for trying Vid me, but catch next time.