$70 million Veoh.com filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Letter from Founder. | Hacker News Reader

$70 million Veoh.com filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Letter from Founder.

dmitryshapiro.com

39 pointsstaunch13 comments

Well, that's what it costs to set the stage for an important DMCA ruling: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/08/required-reading-user-g...

"To fund Veoh’s YouTube-sized ambitions, apparently. Sources familiar with the company tell me that during its go-go days, it was spending as much as $4 million a month on a bloated staff and infrastructure.

But Veoh only generated something like $12 million in sales over its 5-year life, and most of that was in the past couple years, sources said."

source:http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100211/universal-music-gro...

This is just another case of a major problem with user generated video sites - nobody has figured out how to make any money off of them. Maybe Google will eventually make Youtube profitable, but how much time and money have they invested already?

Don't be so quick to assume that youtube is losing money. Most of the analysis (and by that I mean guesses) of their financials assume that they're spending gargantuan amounts of money on bandwidth. What the people making these [un]educated guesses seem to ignore is that google is effectively a tier 1 bandwidth provider. It's very likely that they're paying little to nothing for bandwidth.

This is, of course, also just a huge guess.

While it seems likely that's true (to me, anyway), it does still mean that for anyone who isn't a tier 1 ISP, and therefore does have to pay out the gargantuan bandwidth costs, it's quite difficult to profit from video websites.

i love this post, not so much for what they said- none of it too terribly surprising- but for what commenter #3 (Mike Cane) had to say:

  Really, I feel like banging my head against a wall by leaving this Comment,
  but dammit, Veoh going under makes me mad. You were better than YouTube. 
  I recommended the hell out of you … and then you stabbed us all in the back. 
  You revamped at one point and took away crucial ease of discovery options 
  (like WTF did you take away recently uploaded by length as an option?), you 
  kept changing the damned player software, and your support staff in forums 
  ignored all the complaints about the revamp. You guys shot yourselves in 
  the head and only now do you wind up at the inevitable end. Had you frikkin 
  LISTENED over a year ago, you might have escaped this fate. Using the lawsuit 
  as an excuse is utter BS. This is YOUR failure. This pisses me off to no end 
  because Veoh deserved to thrive. Next time, LISTEN to your fanatical users, 
  goddammit. Learn at least THAT much.

Startup rule #4080: Never... everevereverever... require a download of anything unless it works a) in the browser and b) on countless other websites. In other words, you better be Adobe if you're gonna push a standalone player on users.