A few years ago music videos were everywhere; literally. Not only were they being rapidly pirated, but they were also being distributed by countless people and there was very little monetization of them. That’s when two big names in the recording industry (Sony and Universal) teamed up to create VEVO.
VEVO was created about two years ago with one purpose in mind – music videos. It began launching videos on the ever popular YouTube and monetized their videos with ads that were on the first run of videos (YouTube got ads on afterwards). VEVO has also expanded past YouTube and distributed music videos on other places such as Xbox Live.
This music distributer was bound for greatness and has lived up to those who created it. Since its beginnings VEVO has become the most popular music related site on the internet and has a mind blowing amount of visitors – 57million unique visitors each month! What’s even more amazing is that the average amount of time spent on the VEVO website is more than an hour!
VEVO has made a huge profit through all of those visitors however they have also paid out a hefty sum of money to the artists and content owners. So far VEVO has dished out over a hundred million dollars ($100,000,000!!) and yet they continue to set their sights higher with talk of expansion!
Rio Caraeff, VEVO’s CEO, spoke a bit about VEVO’s prosperous future in an interview with Business Insider. Here are the main highlights of the interview with Rio Caraeff:
– VEVO will stand to have another profitable year this 2012 which bodes well for their future expansion plans. “So we’re staying true to music but we’re expanding our programming beyond performance based music videos and into other types of programming.”
– YouTube accounts for the vast majority of VEVO’s traffic (in between 70% and 75% ).
– VEVO plans on expanding their own original programming and long-form content while still providing all of the music videos for their viewers.
– VEVO does not plan on having their own cable TV channel like MTV does, however they do plan to appear on the television sometime in the future via their partnerships with other companies and networks.
– Lastly, Rio Caraeff mentioned that viewers could also expect to see premium VEVO content coming sometime in the future. As VEVO CEO stated aptly: “I think it’s healthy for all businesses to have multiple business models and if all your eggs are in one basket, that’s ultimately not a smart move.”
With premium content coming out soon and more of their own original content being aired as well, VEVO viewers will have a more diverse selection of videos available to them. Overall VEVO seems to be on the right track and is headed for even more success in the coming years. Their sights are set extremely high, with Rio Caraeff stating “We believe music can build audiences at the scale of billions of people.”
