Despite YouTube's many problems, there hasn't yet been a site that can challenge its dominance. Vidme (better known as vid.me) launched in January 2014, and over the past year or so, has become one of the prime candidates for a YouTube alternative. Sadly, the site announced yesterday that it is shutting down.

A recent blog post from the company reveals that the site will shut down as early as December 15, and new sign-ups and uploads have already been disabled. If you have videos uploaded to the site, you have until December 15 to export them. After that point, they will be gone forever.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Vidme stated that monetization was a major challenge for the company. Without the vast amount of user data that companies like Google and Facebook have on file, Vidme couldn't target ads the same way that YouTube and other sites could. Vidme also didn't have the resources to manually review videos and ensure ads only played on appropriate videos, something YouTube still has challenges with.

Vidme also mentioned that expensive Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), the struggle to keep creators on the site, and other problems were contributing factors to the shutdown. Some of the team will be moving onto another unnamed product, which will be announced sometime next year.

It's definitely a shame to see Vidme shut down, especially as it started to look like the primary alternative to YouTube. You can see the company's blog post at the source link below.

Source: Vidme