Vidme
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Vidme (vid.me) was a Los Angeles-based video hosting service founded in January 2014 by Warren Shaeffer and Alex Benzer, aiming to combine the functionalities of YouTube and Reddit into a creator-friendly video community. Its one-step publishing tool let users upload videos without an account and share them via shortlinks. It surged in popularity after YouTube's 'Adpocalypse' drove creators to seek alternatives. The company raised $12.2 million in total, including a $3.2 million Series A in April 2015 and $6 million in December 2016, from investors including Upfront Ventures, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, First Round Capital, Initialized Capital and NEA.
02 / Vidme FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Vidme's core problem was monetization: without the vast user-data troves of Google and Facebook, it could not target ads the way YouTube could, and it lacked the resources to manually review videos to ensure ads ran on appropriate content. Expensive content delivery networks and the struggle to retain creators compounded the problem. The team concluded it could not find a path to sustainability as an independent platform.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Vidme was founded.
- Operations ended
Vidme ended operations.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
On December 1, 2017 co-founder Warren Shaeffer announced the difficult decision to suspend the Vidme site and apps effective December 15 at noon PT.
- 02
New sign-ups and uploads were disabled immediately; all paid channel subscriptions were suspended and billing stopped.
- 03
Existing videos remained playable and exportable from users' video managers until December 15 at noon PT, at which point they were permanently deleted from Vidme's servers.
- 04
Outstanding earnings were paid out upon verification within 60 days.
- 05
The team moved on to building something new; the Medium post was later updated noting that Vidme was acquired by Giphy.