Vessel

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

~ the goodbye ~

the first time i actually noticed vessel was when verizon shut it down. the model was clever on paper. jason kilar's bet was that you could get youtubers to give vessel a 72-hour early-access window in exchange for a $2.99 monthly subscription that paid them better than youtube. it never reached scale. the launch was in march 2015. the verizon acquisition closed twenty-one months later, and the lights went off five days after that.

vessel went public in march 2015 after a few months of invite-only beta. jason kilar had spent the prior year out of hulu, where he was founding ceo, and he raised about $77 million from benchmark and ivp among others to build vessel. the bet was simple and odd at the same time. youtube's payouts to creators had been getting worse for years. if you could get the most-watched creators to put their new videos on a different platform first for a 72-hour window, you could charge subscribers $2.99 a month for that early access and split the revenue better with the creators.

vessel launched with a small lineup of creators willing to do exclusive 72-hour windows. casey neistat and shay carl headlined the early roster, and casey would later sell beme to cnn in an adjacent failure. vessel's pitch was that creators got better revenue economics than youtube, and subscribers got 72-hour early access plus an ad-free tier. the freemium model meant most users could just wait three days and watch the same video on youtube for free. that was the structural problem nobody had a clean answer to.

vessel never reached the user numbers it needed. youtube's network effects were too strong. by 2016 verizon was assembling go90, its mobile-video-for-young-people property, and saw vessel as a quick way to acquire technology and a creator-payment model. the acquisition closed october 26, 2016 for an undisclosed price. five days later, on october 31, vessel.com shut down. go90 itself died in 2018, taking the vessel platform with it for the second time.

by 2016 i was deep into engineering work and not the target audience for a us-only youtube competitor with a paid early-access subscription. it was the kind of product i would read about in techcrunch the day it died and forget about within the week. the part that has stuck with me is jason kilar's career pattern. he ran hulu before vessel and warnermedia after. each post was a different bet on what mainstream video should look like in the youtube era, and the bets did not quite land.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the early-access bet ~

vessel's product idea was simple. creators would upload to vessel first and gate their new videos behind a 72-hour paywall. once the window expired, the same video posted to youtube. subscribers paid $2.99 a month for that head-start window plus an ad-free experience. creators got a better revenue split than youtube was paying at the time. the math worked if a critical mass of creators agreed to delay their youtube uploads, and if a critical mass of viewers agreed to pay rather than wait three days. neither critical mass arrived. by mid-2016 vessel was burning cash on talent deals while subscriber growth flatlined.

~ the verizon kill ~

verizon was building go90 in 2016, a mobile-video service aimed at younger viewers that competed nominally with youtube and snapchat. they wanted vessel's technology and creator relationships. the deal closed october 26, 2016. two days later vessel emailed users that the service would close, and on october 31 the site went dark. five days total. that is one of the cleanest shutdown timelines in modern internet history. there was no try-to-keep-it-running phase or migration path. the service simply closed.

~ the inheritance ~

the technology and the team rolled into go90, where it had two more years of corporate life before verizon shut go90 itself in july 2018. that was the second death of vessel, in a way. jason kilar moved on to run warnermedia for a couple of years through the at&t-discovery merger and is still working in streaming-adjacent roles. the early-access subscription idea did get tried again later by other platforms, with nebula and patreon early-access tiers most visibly, and worked at a smaller scale than vessel attempted. vessel's mistake was treating the model as a youtube replacement instead of an addition.

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