Vidme

» see vid.me as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i missed vidme entirely. by 2014 youtube already owned the consumer-video question and the only place a competitor could land was niche. vidme tried to be that niche product: a video host that paid creators directly through user tips and a reddit-style upvote feed instead of an algorithmic feed driven by ads. for two years it actually worked. by 2017 it was clear it would not keep working.

warren shaeffer and alex benzer launched the los-angeles-based service on january 22, 2014. the early product was a quick gif-to-video uploader for reddit, and that origin shaped the rest of the platform. vidme grew its first user base off reddit traffic, which meant the creator base skewed toward gaming clips and meme remixes rather than the lifestyle/music/entertainment cluster youtube was starting to optimize for. by april 2015 the site had crossed 30 million monthly unique visitors, with a 3.2 million dollar series a from upfront ventures and a follow-on round that included reddit cofounder alexis ohanian. press coverage in 2015 and 2016 framed it as the indie-creator alternative for the post-adpocalypse moment, which was exactly the right framing for that year.

then the math stopped working. on december 5, 2017 shaeffer and benzer posted a public farewell saying they could not find a sustainable business model, and that competition from youtube, facebook and instagram had become impossible to outrun. the site shut down december 15, 2017. user uploads were given a fortnight to be exported. giphy quietly bought the technology for the gif-to-video tooling that had been the original product. about three years later, in 2021, the vid.me domain itself was sold to a pornography company and every embedded vidme link in old news articles became porn embedded in news articles for several days, which is its own kind of cultural footprint.

~ the case file ~

~ what it tried to be ~

vidme's actual pitch to creators was a deal youtube could not match: a flat 70% revenue share on tips and subscriptions, with the platform taking 30% and no separate ad network skimming on top. for a small youtuber this looked good on paper. the problem was that tips and subscriptions are far smaller revenue streams than ads-and-cpm-on-100m-views, and vidme could not run ads at the scale needed to subsidize the difference. the creators who needed an alternative to youtube the most were also the ones whose audiences would not actually pay them.

~ the founder note ~

shaeffer's farewell post named the actual problem in plain terms. he wrote that the team had run an "indie video platform" play that worked while it was small, and that the platform-wars era had ended by 2017. youtube had recovered from the 2017 ad boycott, facebook had launched watch in august 2017, instagram had launched igtv work that became the june 2018 product. there was no oxygen left in consumer video for an indie alternative outside of patreon, which was the next-step home for many of vidme's better-known creators.

~ the long tail ~

vidme's most-cited legacy is not the creator economics or the reddit-shaped feed. it is the cautionary case for "we will be the ethical youtube alternative", which has been retried by peertube and rumble and a half-dozen others since 2017 with mostly the same outcome at smaller scale. the site that did most of what vidme tried, and survived, is twitch, by being a different category of video product entirely. vidme tried to be a small youtube and discovered that no small youtube can exist.

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