Remember when I kept telling all the brilliant business geniuses who were waxing entrepreneurial about the pressing need for someone to compete with YouTube that they were clueless idiots who didn’t understand the first thing about that particular business?
This farewell message from Vidme I received in my email this morning was exactly the result I expected from any would-be YouTube disruptor:
We’re writing to let you know that after careful consideration, we’ve arrived at the difficult decision to suspend the Vidme site and apps effective December 15th.
What this means for you:
- New sign-ups and uploads will be disabled effective today.
- Existing videos will be playable and exportable from your video manager until December 14th, at which point they will be permanently deleted from the Vidme servers. If you want to backup any of your videos, be sure to sign in and visit your video manager and click the export button (displayed below). After a few minutes, you’ll receive an email with a link to download your exported video.
- All paid channel subscripitions will be suspended immediately, and subscriber-only videos will be exclusively accessible to their video owners.
- Any outstanding earnings will be paid out upon verification within 60 days.
- All Vidme paid subscriptions will cease as of today, and subscribers will no longer be billed.
Thank you for giving Vidme a chance, and we’re very sorry that we won’t be able to continue to support you on the next stage of your creative journey. It has truly been a joy to watch people from all over the world connect, collaborate, and make new friends in this community, and we’re happy to know that many of those relationships will long outlast Vidme itself.
Wishing you the best of luck.
There is a reason I chose Infogalactic as the Alt-Tech priority. Notice that, thanks to the support from a relatively small Burn Unit, the site not only remains fully viable and operational, but the Techstars actually continue to make progress towards the Stage Two engine. Infogalactic is far more efficient and less expensive than Wikipedia and does not rely upon increasingly scarce online ad revenue, and Wikipedia is not a subsidized venture allowed to operate at an annual loss that is measured in the billions.
You can’t just leap into these things and try to do what others are doing, only less SJW. You have to analyze the situation, figure out the strengths and weaknesses of what the prospective competitors a) are doing, and, b) have the ability to do, and then figure out if there is actually any productive territory that can be legitimately taken and held.