Slashdot Mirror
Vevo To Shut Down Site, Giving In To YouTube Empire (rollingstone.com)
Vevo, the video-hosting service founded in 2009 as a joint venture between the big three record companies, is shutting down. The company announced in a blog post Thursday that it is shuttering its mobile apps and website, and that "going forward, Vevo will remain focused on engaging the biggest audiences and pursuing growth opportunities." Vevo is almost entirely succumbing to YouTube. Rolling Stone reports: The major record labels set up Vevo -- an abbreviation for "video evolution" -- in 2009 as a designated streaming service for music videos that would ideally bring in greater revenue from more high-end advertisers. Via a distribution deal with YouTube, it received a cut of revenue from putting its music videos on the Google-owned site. But YouTube's might has grown: The video-streaming service recently took Vevo's branding off its music videos, while also securing permission under a new licensing deal to sell Vevo's clips directly to advertisers, cutting out the smaller company's sales force. Though Vevo has been trying to peel away from its dependence on YouTube by touting its own suite of apps and offerings for years, it seems those efforts haven't been met with much success. "Our catalog of premium music videos and original content will continue to reach a growing audience on YouTube and we are exploring ways to work with additional platforms to further expand access to Vevo's content," the company said in its blog post. Vevo users on its website and Android, iOS and Windows Mobile apps will receive a tool to migrate their playlists to YouTube.
Whenever a service shuts down somebody always has to post that they've never heard of it. In this thread I shall be that person.
Vevo had a video-hosting website? Never heard about it.
With the death of Vevo, which was clearly one of YouTube's largest viable competitors, does a free and open video platform alternative to YouTube even exist anymore?
What about Vimeo?
#DeleteChrome
Vimeo's guidelines impose some practical problems. The biggest is a ban on "commercial content". I failed to find a bright line between permitted "showcase your creative work" and prohibited "Product demos and tutorials". Another is that only a video's author can upload it, not just someone with permission to upload on the author's behalf. This means videos created by a minor or by someone behind a harshly capped Internet connection can't be uploaded at all.
Vevo is not a competitor to YouTube.
It's actually a site that the music industry created to host music videos. Yes, the music industry. Presumably they had plans for it, probably some sort of subscription thing, but it never panned out.
Its a music industry thing because on YouTube, you'll find lots of "VEVO" titled channels (usually like ArtistVEVO), which are the "official" music videos of the artist.
Here's a nice video that explains what Vevo actually was:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
As for your other stuff - there is plenty of competition - Vimeo and DailyMotion are the bigger competitors to YouTube, and have been around just as long. There's also LiveLeak and others. And there are plenty more that launched since the "adpocalypse" started.
The only thing you need to know is the problem is not YouTube. YouTube censored few videos, the vast majority of them are de-monetized. As in the creators no longer make money from them, and the simple reason for that is because no advertiser is willing to advertise on those channels.
Back before the President made it his personal goal to find new ways to offend people, nobody cared. But it all changed when raping became "not a big deal" or "everyone throws themselves at me" and the like, and then advertisers suddenly gave a big crap about where their ads ended up. It caused YouTube to lose a LOT of big name advertisers (often with the "we're re-evaluating our online marketing strategies" comment, or "we're not happy with our online marketing return on investments").
Then it happened again, and YouTube lost even MORE advertisers.
It's caused the entire internet industry to have to re-evaluate and make tough decisions because you have to remember ad people have the thinnest skins around, and unless you're charging money from viewers directly (like some of the new sites do), or using those smaller scammy ad sites (you know, the ones that advertise on torrent sites and bring plenty of pop ups and malware and fake download buttons), there really isn't much to go around
Yes, there are a few that charge per view - even one I think is blockchain based.
You might call it the YouTube bubble bursting - the era of any content on YouTube and monetizing it all is over. YouTube has to implement even more rules because the few advertisers left over has to support the site, so the rules for monetization have gotten stricter.
Unfortunately, it also had the side effect of some reputable channels chasing "easy click bait" money now too, which I really hate.
This is true, the 'adpocalypse' has indeed made a huge dents in the income of many youtubers. But keep in mind that's what's behind this: the advertisers themselves.
Google is an advertising company that happens to own a video platform and a search engine and a bunch of other stuff to help spread those ads, but at the core of the revenue is ads. What's happened with Youtube is that they got instantly scared when they lost advertisers because companies that are strict about their imagine do not want to be affiliated with content that they deem damaging to their brand. This is why they apparently chose to be extra-paranoid and demonetize everything that's could be perceived as 'problematic', but not by themselves or even the consumers but the advertisers. That's who their paying customer is, and that's who they care the most about.
Behind all of this is a conflict between the way advertising has traditionally been done and the way it's evolved online. If I buy ad-space on a tv-network or a newspaper, I have a good amount of control over what kind of content my ads are shown. However online the targeting is done based on the audience and not the content itself. So instead of saying: 'I want this ad to run for 3 weeks in this timeslot" companies can now say: 'I want to show this ads to men aged 20-35 who're interested in X, Y and Z." This is obviously better in the sense that it allows for a more fine-grained targeting of the campaign, but the tradeoff is that it surrenders all control of the content the ads are played next to. A person in your target demographic might be watching music videos and cute cat videos or they might be watching some radical political content and this is scaring the marketing people who want to protect their brand and avoid 'Coca-cola advertising next to ISIS videos' -'scandals'. This is in fact close to what started the so called 'Adpocalypse' last year: a bunch of big.brand advertisers got spooked because their ads were being run over racist content. Quoting from the link:
Know what that meant? Revenues dropping across the board, money being lost. And with big brands like these, we're talking about more than just a few bucks.
This is why it has to be understood that this problem is not Google/Youtube-specific, it's advertiser specific. Obviously Google or any online platform would like to run as much ads on whatever content that they could, because more ads=more money. If you think the guys over at Youtube are excited about decreasing monetization think again. But the customer is always right, and if the hand that feeds you says either you do something about policing the kind of content the ads are getting played next to or you lose their business, what do you think they're going to do? A competing service on its own will not help because it will run into the same problem once it becomes big enough: if you want your platform to be profitable and ad-supported, you're going to have to kiss the ring of the advertisers or see them take their business elsewhere.
Before advertisers start trusting consumers to understand that they have not hand-picked the videos that the ads are played next to, this will not change. In the meanwhile, what Youtube could at least do is give the advertiser the choice of opting-in to the algorithm. There are plenty of companies out th
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead