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.
All My Videos nolonger belong to us (Score:4, Funny)
Must be very popular (Score:5, Funny)
This must be super popular because I've never heard of it.
Re:Must be very popular (Score:4, Informative)
This was pretty much my thought.
Quick google and just looks like one of the many youtube wannabies out there that started to spring up when hosting video (at least on a small to mid scale) started to become more feasible.
Re: (Score:2)
I was more thinking another cloud service bites the dust, but at least they're trying to warn the users their content will be unavailable.
Re: Must be very popular (Score:1)
Re: Founder five years ago? (Score:2)
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To be fair: Only one of the two earns their money by writing.
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Pretty sure it's meant to say "Founded five years ago", so to be fair it's only 1 letter out. That's better than most /. summaries manage :)
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What do you expect from manishs?
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There is no K in Yamaha, maker of motorcycles and FM synthesizers. It might be what your computer's spell checker recommended, but many spell checkers fail to take into account phonics or context, instead focusing on presses of a key near the presumably intended one. A "yarmulke", a beanie worn by Jewish men, was probably meant.
Really? (Score:3)
"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.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
5-year-old website nobody's ever heard of, with no business plan, little to no profit ever and obvious misuse for piracy that offers yet-another-file-download service bouyed up for even that long by a handful of ads.
vs
100-year-old bricks-and-mortar, household-name geek store, which we all have nostalgia for the local equivalent of, slowly pushed out of the high street, as a sign of declining necessity and changing use of technology, after a long-established and massively profitable business in many countries for nearly a century, until last year.
Yeah. Same thing.
Re:Yet again... (Score:4, Insightful)
The federal interest rate has absolutely nothing to do with a business failing after five years of losing money. Some of the actual reasons are mentioned in the article that you obviously didn't bother to read.
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the actual reasons are mentioned in the article that you obviously didn't bother to read.
Are you new here?
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It has everything to do with it. There wouldn't be any of this money flowing through the system without 0% interest rates and various QE programs. People wouldn't waste their own *savings* on these so called 'business models' of giving away free stuff for years without the Fed providing the money and the government providing a guarantee.
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"Federal Reserve starts cranking up interest rates,"
When did that happen?
or are you in some alternate universe
Doesn't surprise me (Score:3)
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)
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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.
Re:Doesn't surprise me (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
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>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.
No longer profitable? (Score:1)
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.
Re:And you can thank all the ad blocking for that (Score:5, Insightful)
Blocking ads came as an effect. The cause being obnoxious ads.
It was a run to the bottom (top?) since then.
Ads became more obnoxious, ad blockers became more complex, and so on, and so on.
Of course, some websites would fall. Is this users' fault? Only if you look no further.
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If people aren't willing to be bombarded with ads to pay for a service, then the service is poorly designed business.
An ad-supported business is not "the free web," it's just another business.
You can choose to be deliberately obtuse and skip over how bad the ad serving racket has become, but you should save that for an audience of non-technical people.
Re: And you can thank all the ad blocking for that (Score:2)
Good. I block ads because I don't want to see them, not because ads are inherently bad but because ads have become so intrusive due to targeting algorithms. If the online ad industry continues to evolve as it has been that industry can expect more people to "fight back". Anyone running an ad supported site these days should take note.
Like YouTube? (Score:3)
Maybe I'm living under a rock, because I've never heard of this site. I thought YouTube was pretty popular.
I must be out of touch... (Score:1)
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.