In what is a blow for competition and freedom of expression, video hosting platform Vidme has decided to call it a day, telling users that the site will shut down on December 15th with all videos being deleted.
Vidme started in 2014 as a competitor to YouTube, which, under the influence of anti-free-speech groups like the ADL and the SPLC, has shown a disturbing tendency towards demonetization, shadow banning, and outright censorship of content creators.
As Vidme said in a press release:
"We were confident we could create a new type of video platform — one that was more community-oriented, more transparent, and more equitable to creators. Inspired by reddit’s crowd curation, we also saw an opportunity to improve the experience for both viewers and curators by allowing the community to surface trending content. Given the large market opportunity (video ad spend is $84B in the US alone), and the impending shift from linear television viewing towards digital video, we believed that we could create a sustainable platform to accomplish these goals."
However, the new platform ran up against the entrenched monopoly power of existing social media.
"8 of the 10 most popular apps are owned by Google and Facebook. Both companies also have many other apps that continually pull users back into their networks.
Advertisers want to target specific audiences, which means a new platform that doesn’t store troves of personal user data is at a severe disadvantage relative to Facebook and Google, which combined control 60% of online ad spending in the U.S.
Most advertisers want their ads to complement 'brand-safe' content. Unfortunately this is a subjective designation, which is difficult to define and enforce. Content, therefore, must be thoroughly reviewed and moderated — an expensive prospect.
Few advertisers are willing to negotiate direct deals with platforms that don’t have enormous scale, meaning ad-revenue rates are lower for newer platforms. In turn, there’s less overall revenue to be shared with creators, which means creators are less likely to support newer platforms for a sustained period of time."
They also found that costs remained high:
"Videos are often massive files, and making them globally available at any time is expensive. YouTube sold to Google (just 18 months after launching) partly because of YouTube’s high burn rate, and to this day is still likely operating at a loss.
When we launched in 2014, we projected that infrastructure costs would decline due to increased competition in the CDN and data storage industries. While marginal prices have fallen dramatically over the past few years, our aggregate costs still outpaced our ability to generate meaningful revenue."
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| The skeleton in the group photo proved to be prophetic. |
Support all alternatives to Big Social Media, especially ones that are based outside the USA and Europe, as they are likely to have their own funding and apps while being impervious to Western SJW activism. Also consider supporting a site like BitChute, a bit-torrent-powered, peer-to-peer platform with a declared mission to "put people and free speech first," although the site lacks the ability to generate embedding code.
