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Online video service Vidme shuts down

Online video service Vidme shuts down

Online video service Vidme is closing its doors, despite claiming to reach an annual audience of more than 200 million people.

The company launched in 2014 as a way for people to easily upload videos and share them online. It had since expanded to offer features including subscriptions and tipping for its community of creators.

In a blog post announcing the shutdown, Vidme co-founder Warren Shaeffer wrote that the company hosted millions of videos, and delivered more than 6bn views, as well as signing up B2B clients like Huffington Post, Mashable, Sports Illustrated and USA Today.

The problem? Making money out of all of this.

“Although we still believe that the world would greatly benefit from a creator-first video platform, we weren’t able to find a path to financial sustainability,” explained Shaeffer.

Among the reasons he cited: the difficulty of bringing in ad revenues for user-generated content, especially without the kind of targeting that Facebook and Google can provide; the costs of storing and delivering video; and the difficulty of attracting viewers away from rival platforms owned by, guess who… Facebook and Google.

“Many creators with millions of subscribers on YouTube and Facebook were initially attracted to Vidme’s model, but faced difficulty transitioning audiences from their home platforms,” wrote Shaeffer.

“Convincing people to use (and keep using) a new platform is hard, leaving many creators locked in. Both Facebook and YouTube also actively deprecate content shared from competing platforms.”

Vidme was supported by venture-capital investment, but Shaeffer admitted that given all of the above, raising more funding proved to be “untenable” as a survival strategy.

“When we started we knew that we were taking a calculated risk, but in hindsight we underestimated the speed with which the competitive landscape would change.”

The service will shut down on 15 December.


Contributing Editor

Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)