Zoomby.ru

» see zoomby.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Russian-language video is invisible from Turkey in a way English-language video is not. The wall is not distance and it is not politics. It is that a rights deal for Russian television covers Russia, and every other property of the product follows from that one fact. I have no memory of Zoomby and could not have had one. It is worth writing down anyway, because the way it died is a clean version of a failure you can watch happening somewhere else right now.

Zoomby opened on 19 May 2010, built by WebMediaGroup with VGTRK, the Russian state broadcaster, as both partner and shareholder. The pitch was the sensible one for that moment: Russian television was already all over the pirate sites, so put it up legally and free the day after broadcast, and take the advertising. No account, no card, no wait.

It worked for a while. By December 2013 Zoomby was drawing 9.8 million viewers and running around a million video plays a day. In a market where free and illegal was the default setting, getting that many people onto a rights-cleared catalog was a genuine result and not a small one.

~ the dossier ~

~ the licensing trap ~

The structure that made Zoomby possible is the structure that killed it. VGTRK owned a quarter of the company and supplied most of the catalog, which meant the content arrived with an invoice from a shareholder attached. Advertising revenue on Russian video in that period was thin and getting thinner, and licensing costs do not care what the ad market is doing. WebTV, the operating entity, booked around 50 million rubles of revenue in 2015 against a net loss of 30 million.

VGTRK eventually sued its own investment. The court ordered payment of 46 million rubles in unpaid licensing fees with roughly 7 million more in penalties. There is no clever way out of an arrangement like that. A free ad-funded service cannot outgrow a content bill set by the party that also owns a piece of it.

~ what really happened ~

The audience had already gone. From 9.8 million in December 2013 the number fell to 1.2 million by September 2016, which is a collapse rather than a decline. Subscription services had reached Russia by then, and a free ad-funded catalog loses on depth to anyone willing to charge for the same shows.

The site stopped being reachable on 29 March 2017. Gazprom-Media, which had ended up holding the asset, formally froze the project in February 2018 and put its attention into Rutube instead. The domain changed hands after that. The thing worth taking from it is that Zoomby did not lose to piracy, which was the enemy it was built to beat. It lost to a paid competitor and to a supplier who wanted to be paid, and nobody had written either of those into the plan.

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