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Entertainment IT

5-Year-Old Hosting Service AllMyVideos, No Longer Profitable, To Shut Down (torrentfreak.com) 59

Founder five years ago, AllMyVideos.net is one of the most popular video hosting services out there, but it will be shutting store this month. Though millions of users visit the website every month, the company said it operated on "minus 20 percent" profit margin. "We are sorry to inform everyone that effective October 23, 2016 Allmyvideos.net will stop accepting new uploads and the site will close fully at the end of the month," the site announced.
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5-Year-Old Hosting Service AllMyVideos, No Longer Profitable, To Shut Down

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  • by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Sunday October 16, 2016 @06:37AM (#53084651)
    Sorry to see it go.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 16, 2016 @06:38AM (#53084655)

    This must be super popular because I've never heard of it.

  • by ledow ( 319597 ) on Sunday October 16, 2016 @07:30AM (#53084749) Homepage

    "Unprofitable business model leads to business not making enough profit"

    Honestly, where's the news or the shocking surprise.

    A high-end, tech-heavy hosting site that you can upload stuff to for free, and share to people for free, and they can all watch it for free, not making money? Amazing.

    And their premium offering gave you:

    - Ad-free access and no waiting
    (So you pay to make the ads go away)
    - No daily streaming limitations
    (Amazing - how much time do you think one person will spend on such a website streaming videos from it exclusively, such that they will pay to remove the restriction?)
    - Unlimited parallel downloads
    (Ooooh... so I can download more than a handful of videos at the same time. Or just do a few and wait)
    - Upload larger files - up to 5GB
    (5Gb of MP4 is a LONG movie)
    - Files never removed due to inactivity
    (Except if the company goes bankrupt...)
    - Special dedicated servers just for PREMIUM Members
    (Oooh! But if the free service was shit, nobody would bother to pay for the premium one anyway)
    - Mobile access - iPhone and Android
    (You mean I can watch videos on my smartphone too!?)
    - Download original files
    (You mean I can download the thing I'm watching?!)
    - Upload more files simultaneously
    (See "Unlimited parallel downloads")
    - Create custom links to track traffic
    (Because there's no other way to do that)
    - Ultimate file security with AES encryption
    (WTF does that even mean in the context of a video-sharing website?)

    Amazon Prime? People queried why I bought it. Because my usage pattern makes it have value enough for me even if theirs doesn't.

    But what these people have made is a pay-for YouTube. One of thousands of them. A website that's incredibly annoying to download anything significant from, and would confuse people for even casual use (e.g. your family video), and which nobody with a brain would ever pay for against other sites offering the same or more.

    And I imagine the costs of DMCA takedowns alone would wipe out anything that you've got coming people. People will badly abuse a site like this, and maybe even pay to do so, just like any other file download site.

    Where was the profit, ever?

    There should be a register of people who have owned a company with a turnover over a certain amount, which later closes business, so that you can deny these people ever running a business again.

  • by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Sunday October 16, 2016 @07:51AM (#53084787)

    One of the biggest reasons for AllMyVideos (and a number of other similar sites) to exist is for hosting all the copyright-violating stuff that the big boys like YouTube and DailyMotion detect and block.

    And the sort of people who seek out such content are exactly the sort of people who are least likely to pay AllMyVideos any money and the most likely to use whatever combination of blocking software and tools are necessary to avoid the annoying ads (after all, one big reason why they want to find the stuff online rather than watching it on TV is because they want to avoid all the ads TV gives you)

    So its not surprising that AllMyVideos is failing (not getting enough people paying for premium stuff and not getting enough people viewing their ads either)

    • by ledow ( 319597 )

      And lawyers up its backside every minute of the day looking for any profiting from that venture in order to claim triple-damages on later.

      Sometimes, there's a reason to go bankrupt.

    • by AAWood ( 918613 ) <aawood&gmail,com> on Sunday October 16, 2016 @08:46AM (#53084973)

      One of the biggest reasons for AllMyVideos (and a number of other similar sites) to exist is for hosting all the copyright-violating stuff that the big boys like YouTube and DailyMotion detect and block.

      One of the other biggest reasons for for AllMyVideos (and a number of other similar sites) to exist is for hosting all the none copyright-violating stuff that the big boys like YouTube and DailyMotion misdetect and wrongly block.

      • by lgw ( 121541 )

        That would make sense if AllMyVideos was a Youtube clone, where you could browse for videos to watch. But it seems to be a Megaupload clone, for hosting vids traded on forums. That's a dead giveaway.

    • by TheLink ( 130905 )
      That's why I think that a fair amount of money that Kim Dotcom's Megaupload made was legit.

      >99% of those people who wanted free stuff wouldn't have paid him. And they might even be running ad blockers. In contrast I can imagine employees of organizations signing up for paid accounts to transfer large files to customers. I used it to transfer large (legit) files. Didn't go for the paid account- the downloaders could wait - wasn't a business thing. If I needed it for business I might have expensed it.
  • So were these sites ever profitable? I assume that Kim Dot Com was running Mega profitably, was this one ever cash flow positive?

    On a side note how about all the other cash flow negative internet 'businesses' (hobbies AFAIC)? I fully expect the Fed to announce a new round of QE sometime but not too long after the elections, that will help them I suppose. Other than that those types of enterprises should also be readying to shut down.

  • by Chewbacon ( 797801 ) on Sunday October 16, 2016 @09:44AM (#53085179)

    Maybe I'm living under a rock, because I've never heard of this site. I thought YouTube was pretty popular.

  • Most popular video hosting service? Wow... guess I'm out of touch with the whole video hosting service thing.
    I did some research sometime ago and came up with names like YouTube (obviously), Vimeo, Metacafe, Dailymotion, Break.com, Crackle, Viddler and stuff from other countries like NicoNicoDouga and Youku. But AllmyVideos? Never even heard of it.

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