Sevenload

» see sevenload.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

sevenload was a german product for the german web. it had cologne-headquarters energy and a relationship with burda magazines, and the homepage was in deutsch. honestly, i never opened it. by 2006 youtube had already won in turkey and pretty much everywhere else outside of china and a couple of asian holdouts.

the founding lineup was ibrahim evsan, thomas bachem, axel schmiegelow's venture firm dw capital, and a small berlin studio called k2 interactive. for whatever reason, the launch month was april 2006, which was already late by global standards (youtube had been live since february 2005, was bought by google in october 2006 for $1.65 billion). sevenload's pitch to the german market was that it was a local company with local moderation and local content deals.

that worked for a while. by 2008 sevenload had twelve language portals across europe and parts of asia. you could upload up to 1.5 gb at hd resolution. the licensed-content tier brought in universal music, mtv, national geographic, and a handful of german regional broadcasters that did not want to negotiate with youtube directly. in those days, the case for a non-google video platform was easier to make in europe than anywhere else.

hubert burda media bought the majority through its dld ventures arm in december 2010. by then the founders had largely stepped back. burda ran it for three more years, then tried to sell it in spring 2014 and found nobody wanted it. on april 4 2014 the site went offline. the cologne office was closed.

~ the record ~

~ what it became ~

the burda years were the strange ones. the company had been a venture-backed startup with a recognizable founder (ibrahim evsan was a regular at german tech panels in the late 2000s) and a clear pitch as the european answer to silicon-valley video. after the burda majority it became one of many properties inside a holding company whose other assets were magazines and tv. the staff turned over, the strategy drifted, the public profile faded.

this is the pattern for most european web-2.0 companies that got bought by old-media holdings. for some reason the holding companies did not want to keep funding the unit-economics losses that came with running a youtube competitor, and they did not have the platform reach to push the property in any direction that would make it pay back. sevenload sat in burda's portfolio for three years, not growing, not visibly closing, until someone made the decision to stop.

~ the fall ~

the structural problem was bandwidth costs. sevenload was paying for petabytes of video delivery in europe without google-scale ad infrastructure. youtube could absorb the cost because the unit economics worked at google scale. sevenload could not match those numbers, and the licensed-content tier (the part that paid for itself) was always competing with the user-generated tier (the part that did not).

~ what got buried with it ~

the german-localized video web mostly went to youtube anyway after 2014. the only meaningful european alternative left by 2026 is dailymotion, which is also a permanent second-place. sevenload's archive of german regional content was not migrated anywhere. when the cologne servers were shut down on april 4 2014 the eight years of uploads went with them.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »