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.
After Google's extremely heavy-handed demonitization and de-platforming of content producers that simply violate their increasingly puritan ideas of Political Correctness (viz, Dennis Prager's Prager U, etc.), I was really hoping to see the alternative video sites like Vevo start to take up the slack.
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? (Seriously, I want answers/suggestions here...)
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
As per all Youtube articles the past few months, we NEED a competitor.
I do very much wish, these smaller groups would band together with a porn group or something and make an alternative. Youtube continues to censor people who don't fit the current groupthink narrative.
While "SJW values" are infact generally a positive thing for the world, heavy handed pushing of them, 'opposite racism' (fuck whitey) and what have you is becoming quite excessive across the Internet. Main issues being people like Twitter, Youtube are /almost/ *entirely fine* with people outright saying deplorable things about whites and or males, but if you say something even remotely controversial in another direction you're taken offline. It need not even be harmful or racist, just to be perceived as against the current hard left groupthink.
Youtube is regularly censoring people like this. CountDankula for example made a particularly hysterical mockery video of his pet Pug doing a nazi salute when he says "seig heil" to the pug. Is it dark humour? Hell yes. Is it utterly hilarious? I believe so.
Monty Python, Mel Brooks would've done that kind of thing without an issue.
Long story short is people on the Youtube platform, who have built an ongoing living and income can be destroyed at the drop of a hat, due to algorithm changes and censorship. Be it the visibility of your videos or just outright de-monetization (but Google will gladly still run ads on the video, just the person who created it, doesn't get a thing)
I don't think we need a group of gentlemen (or women) in white bedsheets saying "we must kill all the " but there's certainly a line of centrist (not even right wing) talk which is being suppressed. Because if you're not far left nowadays, YOU'RE A NAZI.
Long story short. We need a competitor, to keep Google in shape and that's going to require some serious resources unfortunately.