Creators first. Not advertisers.

Yesterday, YouTube tweeted this:

According to their post, “advertiser confidence on YouTube is critical to the financial success of creators.” While we know that advertiser confidence is critical to YouTube’s financial success, we don’t think it should be critical to the success of creators.

Vidme’s mission is to build the world’s most creator-friendly video community. To that end, we’re moving beyond the traditional ad-supported business model and focusing on new ways for creators to make money. This allows us to put creators’ needs ahead of advertisers’.

Here are some reasons why the current ad-supported internet model fails both fans and creators:

1. Most ads suck, especially pre-roll ads, which are often repurposed television commercials. Psst, car companies, your ads make people NOT want to buy your cars.
2. Most creators don’t make much money from ads. Ad blockers are increasingly popular and effective, and advertisers pay much higher rates for “safe” television ads than for brand-questionable digital “content.”
3. Advertisers dictate which videos are monetized, and thereby influence which videos prevail. Quantity and clickbait are rewarded over quality. Meanwhile, saying “fuck” can get your video buried and demonetized.

We’re less interested in dwelling on how things are broken, and more interested in fixing them. Here’s what we’re doing:

1. Putting creators first. A key part of our mission is to support independent video creators with as little advertiser influence as possible (ideally none).
2. Empowering fans to directly support the creators they love. We’ve already enabled direct tipping and are rolling out channel subscriptions and other monetization features soon.
3. Building a community that highlights and rewards creators’ biggest fans.

Questions or suggestions? Please tweet at us. Otherwise, join 25 million other humans already using Vidme, and make videos for your fans, not for advertisers.

— The Humans at Vidme