Videolog.tv

» see videolog.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

videolog's peak years overlap with mine but in a language i never had to type in. by 2006 i was in university in ankara, on a ttnet adsl line at home and on cafe machines in between classes, watching youtube clips in the same browser tab i used to read donanimhaber. portuguese video had no path into that loop.

ariel alexandre and edson mackeenzy started videolog.tv in may 2004 from sao paulo. back then. honestly. the youtube launch in the us would not happen until february 2005, so for a stretch the brazilian product was actually older than the model it later got compared to. the offer was the same shape any user-upload video site offered in those years: a page to drag a file in, with a flash player on the playback side once the upload finished.

in 2006 uol signed a partnership that put videolog inside the largest brazilian portal's traffic funnel. that was the headline deal of its early life and it lasted until november 2010, when the partnership ended and the operation slid over to r7, grupo record's news portal. each handover came with a smaller cash position and a thinner growth story than the last.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

in fairness, by 2006 videolog reported about 170 thousand registered users and 190 thousand uploaded clips, with 1.5 million monthly unique visitors hitting the front page. the upload ceiling was 25 minutes per file at 400 megabytes, with a 700 megabyte premium tier. close enough, those were respectable numbers against the brazilian portion of youtube's audience at that exact moment.

this happened more in the portuguese-speaking internet than where i was. either way, the platform held a meaningful chunk of brazilian creator output through the late 2000s. a handful of brazilian video personalities cut their first audiences on videolog before crossing over to youtube once the google product localized properly. in those days. that exact creator-bench was the asset uol and r7 were betting on each time they renewed.

~ what really happened ~

this part you had to be in brazil for, and i was not. in late 2010 samba tech announced an acquisition for an undisclosed sum. honestly, the deal got called off about a month later. r7 picked up the partnership instead. the operating loop kept narrowing.

in january 2015 mackeenzy closed the site. he wrote a long post-mortem on tagarela.co titled "rip videolog, da epifania ao epitafio" and laid out the failure modes himself. five months of promised funding from a financing partner had not arrived. some partner-side decisions had eaten into the cash runway. close enough, by the time he wrote the post the database was already offline.

~ what got buried with it ~

but yeah, what disappeared was a decade of portuguese-language user-uploaded video that had been hosted nowhere else. some of it had been mirrored to youtube by the original creators. plenty of it had not. the videolog clips that made the small-creator early-2000s brazilian internet exist as a category lived only on the site servers and went dark when the servers did.

mackeenzy moved into imasters and into broader brazilian tech-press writing after the closure. the videolog.tv domain still resolved for a while as a redirect, then stopped. the brazilian video market consolidated into the brazilian portion of youtube, plus a small uol-side video product. the home-grown video portal era was over for the country at the same time it was over for most of the rest of the world.

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