AllMyVideos

» see allmyvideos.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In 2014 the Digital Citizens Alliance published a report on how much money piracy-adjacent hosting made, and it put AllMyVideos.net at $997,587 a year in profit on an 85 percent margin. Two years later the person running it told TorrentFreak that the real figure was a profit margin of minus 20 percent. He was selling roughly five premium subscriptions a week, which came to about two hundred dollars, and the advertising nobody else would sell him did not cover the bandwidth bill.

The homepage on 23 October 2016 carried the whole thing in two sentences. We are sorry to inform everyone that effective October 23/2016 Allmyvideos.net will stop accepting new uploads and the site will close fully at the end of the month. We would like to thank all our loyal users and uploaders for their service over the years. That slash in the date is theirs, and it is about the level of care the site ran on.

Underneath the notice the upload form was still sitting there, still offering a Flash uploader next to a remote URL field, 500 MB per file and two files at a time. The page title promised reliability and speed with a comma missing after the first adjective. Nothing about the operation had ever suggested it would survive a bad quarter.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually was ~

AllMyVideos described itself two different ways on the same page. The title said video hosting. The meta description, which is the part written for machines and therefore the honest one, said free file upload service. The upload endpoint pointed at a numbered subdomain running a cgi-bin upload script, which is the signature of the off-the-shelf filehost software that every locker of the era rented rather than wrote.

Its interface offered twelve languages, and the list is the clearest evidence of where it landed: English, Russian, German, French, Arabic, Turkish, Polish, Thai, Spanish, Japanese, Hungarian, Indonesian. No single market big enough to name, and a dozen small ones large enough to translate for.

~ the bracket ~

The archive dates the ending to the hour without anyone having to announce it. At 15:59 UTC on 23 October 2016 the homepage was 5,521 bytes, which is what it had weighed all month, notice included. On 28 October it came back at 3,854 bytes. The missing 1,667 bytes were the upload form and the farewell, both stripped out in the same edit.

What was left behind at 3,854 bytes was a shell that said Watch Streaming Video on allmyvideos.net and asked you to disable your ad blocker to see a video that was no longer there. That page kept serving for another several months, slowly shedding bytes, before the host gave up on it too.

~ nobody's destination ~

Half the comments under the Slashdot item about the shutdown were people saying they had never heard of it, under a headline calling it one of the most popular video hosts on the web. Both things were true at once. You did not go to AllMyVideos. You clicked a play button on somebody else's page and a player opened, and the domain in the address bar was a detail you never read, which is exactly how a service with a Turkish interface option can be invisible to the people using it in Turkey.

That is also why the death produced no wake. A locker is infrastructure for other people's links, and when it goes the links break somewhere else, on sites that quietly swap in the next one. The thousands of videos that went with it were already gone from everywhere they had been mirrored from.

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