Earlier today we posted a product and biz review of Vevo by Ty Ahmad-Taylor, founder and CEO of FanFeedr and previously SVP of Strategy and Product Development at Viacom (NYSE: VIA). It has generated a bunch of discussion and tweets since this morning. Vevo CEO Rio Caraeff had a lengthy response to the article in comments as well, and we are posting it below in full:
—————————————————-
My name is Rio Caraeff and I am the CEO of VEVO. Thank you for taking the time and interest to write about us. I appreciate your thoughtful perspective and insights. If you don’t mind, I would like to offer a few comments in response to your post.
ECONOMICS: The Business of Advertising & Music Videos
We believe that music programming is one of the most popular forms of entertainment available on-line. In terms of the popularity of music videos, the numbers on YouTube and across the broader internet speak for themselves with many billions upon billions of total views. In order to build a meaningful business around music videos, we believe that VEVO can play a role in aggregating a large audience around this form of content everywhere that engaged viewers happens to be – whether it be within YouTube, while at an artist website, within the AOL (NYSE: AOL) or CBS (NYSE: CBS) networks (recent VEVO partners we announced), at VEVO.com or even on any connected television or handheld platform.
VEVO will provide it’s music video experience within all of these environments, providing many hundreds of millions of views and tens of millions of viewers. VEVO will manage the ad sales, ad inventory and underlying audience metrics to create a large scale network of engaged and passionate music fans which is available for the integration of premium brand & advertising partners in a clean and well-lit environment.
It is early days still, but we are very encouraged by the reaction we have seen in the marketplace so far, and last week we announced over 15 major brand partners (AT&T (NYSE: T), Colgate, McDonalds, Infiniti and many others) who are supporting the launch of the VEVO network.
SEARCH: Giving Fans What They Want
It is our absolute intention to offer the best music video experience for the benefit of all fans who love music. We are very conscious and aware of our search experience and the challenges that are faced without a full aggregation of all the worlds music videos. We are planning on addressing this on two fronts, both with an ongoing and immediate urgency.
1) We are continuing to strike licenses with many different music licensors and recently announced deals that will bring in tens of thousands of new, established, major and independent artists into the VEVO experience. We have over 15K videos right now and within Q1 we will have twice that amount within VEVO. These videos will start to flow into our network starting in January and our experience will keep getting better.
The promise of what VEVO will offer, a high quality experience for fans and for brands across a massively distributed footprint is resonating well within the music community and I feel good about the progress we have made so far.
2) At the same time, we understand that VEVO may never be able to have EVERYTHING that EVERYONE will ever want – which is why we are working on other search solutions to significantly improve our search results which will simply direct fans to the best and highest quality versions of music programming from artists they love, whether or not those videos are licensed into the VEVO network.
CONTROLLING OUR OWN DESTINY: Internal vs External Competencies
You are correct in that YouTube is our partner and we work closely with them in many areas, not the least of which is in the hosting and streaming of music programming on VEVO.com and on VEVO within YouTube. Our partnership is designed to focus on what both of our companies do well and is mutually symbiotic and well balanced.
Regarding Schematic, yes it is true that we worked with Schematic early in the process on the design of VEVO but that was a relatively short engagement that was necessary while we were in the midst of building up our own internal design, product and engineering competencies. We transitioned away from Schematic many months ago and have been managing all aspects of the business internally with VEVO ever since. This was always our intention from the very beginning as we believe that developing internal competencies is critical in order to control your own destiny and to provide the best experience for our customers.
We are a very young company, far less than 1 year old – who believed in getting to market quickly to learn what music fans and brand partners want and then to focus on iterating and improving rapidly going forward. While far from perfect, VEVO represents a clear and simple mission which is to provide a high quality and far reaching music video experience for the benefit of all fans who love music.
Thank you,
Rio Caraeff
A few observations. First, the original post by Ty has no credibility. Who is he and what has he ever accomplished?
Second, Rio should be fixing his product and not wasting time responding to a ridiculous post by a nobody. The time it took for him to write his response was hours out of his day. He’s got bigger problems than responding to a nobody.
Let’s get with it gang.
@ Sbane – I agree. Ty or who ever just because they worked at Comcast (a dinosaur) does mean he understands the web. Both Ty and Rio’s posts are too simplistic. Clearly they do not understand technology nor music on the web. The traditional music business is dead. Vevo is a way for the music industry also dinosaurs to milk every penny – they have not innovated in the past 20 years and it is too late to do so now. Their fate is the same as the newspaper business. Once the copyrights run out on current music they will be extinct. Read why Vevo Will Be A Complete Disaster http://www.webguild.org/2009/12/vevo-will-be-a-complete-disaster.php
Rio: One thing that will make Vevo rock if you take advantage of it — steal a page from Apple Genius or even partner with Pandora to make the auto-assembly of a video playlist work. If I can pick one video I like and have it automatically matched by 20 more with similar music, then I can use Vevo as a personal jukebox. This is how teenagers use YouTube for music today (they get a text from a friend about a wicked awesome new song, look up the video on youtube, and listen to/watch it as they do their homework). Playlist autoassembly will quadruple time on site and give you the kinds of stats advertisers will be excited to see.
I recognize it’s early for Vevo (and was shocked not to see the standard/lame “Beta” stamp somewhere on the site like you see everywhere else these days). Nevertheless, my Vevo experience/perspective:
1. In many cases, I could press play on a Vevo video and read this article in full & take a quick nap before the video would start playing (if it even did play).
2. When the video did stream, I found that the Vevo streaming experience was often like a slide show – kind of brings me back to streaming à la late 90′s!
3. Rio – how much money did Vevo spend on its launch party (http://www.rap-up.com/2009/12/08/vevo-launch-party-inside/)? Weren’t you a bit embarrassed by the hype/$ spent on a party for such an unpolished/unfinished product? Seems like it may have been better spent on the product itself, no?