it seems like just yesterday every single musician had Vivo in their YouTube channel name Vivo in the bottom left of their videos and there were even YouTubers putting Vivo on their diss tracks because it made them look more official but this has left people with a few questions like what even is Vivo why was their name on every single YouTube video and whatever happened to it well it turns out that Vivo was a big scheme cooked up by the music industry that eventually failed so to understand that we got to go back to vivo's Inception
Vivo was created back in 2008 when the music industry was recovering from quite a few problems see back in the day music videos used to be aired on TV on platforms like MTV NBC and more this way the producers and artists could get money directly from the networks and their advertisers but then the internet came in and disrupted everything CDs and records were being replaced by illegal fil sharing services like Napster and lime wire because why would you buy something when you can just get it for free so as you may know this made the
music industry very or I guess not very profitable things like Spotify and iTunes were just coming out so the industry hadn't really figured out how to make money that's why they came together and created Vivo Universal music group and Sony Music Entertainment both got together in an evil corporate fashion and created video Evolution or Vivo for short if those names sound familiar that's because umg and Sony are two of The Big Three record labels which means that these three labels own pretty much every other smaller label they thought that by creating Vivo they could find
a way to monetize music videos and they did what we're trying to do is quite simple which is to provide a highquality premium music and video experience to as many people as possible in as many places as possible on any television on any computer on any phone on any connected digital platform we want to provide the highest quality premium music and video experience so we do that today with our partner YouTube so about 70% of music videos worldwide are consumed and discovered and and viewed through YouTube so what Vivo does is provide that experience inside
of YouTube with the world's largest music companies the issue though was that YouTube was only monetizing like 3% of their videos at the time while platforms like Hulu had ads on all of their stuff but YouTube had been working with these record labels and wanted to keep music videos on their platform because that was one of their biggest sources of views so YouTube and Vivo came to an agreement Universal and eventually some of the other labels I mentioned would put their music videos on YouTube and Vivo would distribute them Google hosted them on Youtube and
vivo's website as well Vivo was also in charge of selling ads to advertisers most ads on YouTube videos like the one you're watching right now are sold Pro programmatic are sold programmatic are sold programmatically where advertisers bid on a certain type of customer demographic like specifically targeting which country they are from or what age group they belong to this is very common I'm sure most of you understand that but Vivo instead would sell specific slots to advertisers which makes a bit more sense because you can imagine that imping in front of a Drake video is
likely going to get you more attention than throwing your ad on a matty balls video for example it's kind of like how advertisers kill to be in the Super Bowl I'm sure they've had quite a few bidding wars over Taylor Swift's music videos not because they're good but because she gets a lot of views also on long videos like interviews and things like that they can sell slots for ads during the video as well this way Vivo is able to make quite a bit more money from YouTube ads than your everyday YouTuber so with all
of that sorted out Vivo got like $300 million in investment money and they were preparing to launch they acquired some other labels as distribution Partners furthering the music video Monopoly and then they were ready to launch Viva launched on December 8th of 2009 with 30,000 videos on their website from huge artists like Eminem Lil Wayne Michael Jackson Lady Gaga Kesha Miley Cyrus and many more the website actually crashed on launch and in the first month got over 35 million views apparent L they had already surpassed other websites like AOL music Myspace music MTV Warner music
and more I was 7 when all of this was going down so hearing about myspace music is new to me and pretty interesting regardless Vivo was going crazy launching in different markets internationally like European countries Mexico and more they even got the other big three record label Warner to sign with them as a Content distribution partner and they were also Distributing videos on mtv.com which was a whole lot cooler back then at this time Vivo was getting most of its views 80% to be exact from YouTube because Vivo was a conglomerate of pretty much every
big record label and small one and they distributed these videos to YouTube That's why every artist had their own Vivo page like Eminem Vivo or Rihanna Vivo that's also why pretty much every music video in the early 2010s and even up until this day have Vivo in the bottom left corner or right I can't remember but that still leaves us with one question what happened to Vivo and why did I say they failed earlier well they had a problem Vivo wasn't making that much money as an actual company most of the money was going to
YouTube and then to the record labels leaving Vivo to pick up the scraps apparently Vivo was also very expensive to run because of everything I mentioned so pretty early on into the company's life they tried to find a buyer for $1 billion which didn't really work out so Vivo had to come up with some other ways to make money first they started making other types of content on YouTube and their own website like interviews live stream concerts and things along those lines although that content was never super successful then they released an app to watch
music videos on your phone and when it first launched it was actually very successful by early 2011 they were bigger than Facebook and right behind YouTube for video viewed content by the end of 2011 Vivo was getting over 3.7 billion views a month they had over 13 million downloads of their app and they had made over 150 bucks 150 bucks and they had made over $150 million in Revenue but like I said most of this money was going to YouTube and the labels not to Vivo and because they didn't want to rely so much on
YouTube they tried to diversify they created something called viot TV that was supposed to be like Hulu and they were also on apps like Roku Apple TV and more it's likely that they were eventually plotting to become something like Hulu for music videos where they wanted people to pay a monthly subscription to watch these music videos and so we think there's a that that one of the important things and you hear this throughout the industry that the move towards subscription a a more premium product that's something we're very interested in and very much you know
uh working towards what that's a subscription service or or does the whole thing go behind a pay wall do I have to pay to watch k no we believe we believe in a dual Revenue stream this was a rumor for a while but after consumers have had music videos for free for so long it's very unlikely that would have ever happened regardless for a while like I just said their diversification was working but it didn't last long because in 2018 everything came crashing down for Vivo Vivo had a few controversies that really hurt the company
and I'm not talking about the time some Executives were ironically caught watching pirated content or when they were trying to work with Facebook to get people's info for targeted videos the main issue they had was in 2018 when they found themselves in the crosshairs of some hackers from the group Armine first the hackers got into vivo's servers and released three terabytes of their documents and videos then they got hacked again this time two hackers named kooy sh and prox got into vivo's YouTube channel when they got in they deleted despasito which was the most viewed
Vivo Video on YouTube and they also renamed a ton of the videos as well changed some thumbnails and apparently this was some sort of pro Palestine protest I'm not sure how much these hacks really affected Vivo but it seems like everything started crumbling after this happened the CEO stepped down a bunch of important Executives left and they had to lay off dozens of employees at the same time Viva was really struggling to compete with YouTube it seemed like them putting their content on other websites or making their own website was a way to distance themselves
from YouTube so that way they didn't have to pay all of their revenue to YouTube but that clearly didn't work as YouTube is still the number one site when it comes to watching music videos plus the same year YouTube just launched YouTube music so Vivo never became the Hulu or the Netflix of music videos instead Vivo decided to wave the White Flag Vivo decided to shut down all of their other operations and just merge with YouTube to become a regular distributor YouTube merge the Vivo accounts with the artist official accounts to consolidate everything so if
you were subscribed to a Vivo account your subscription would be switched over to the official artist account YouTube said vivo's reach in business can continue to grow on YouTube as a direct result of simplifying the user experience through consolidation of an entire artist catalog into one channel where Vivo videos are featured prominently so basically like agario YouTube just ate up Vivo this is probably why it feels like you don't see the Vivo branding as much I mean we're all probably used to seeing the vi v logo in videos so we don't notice it very often
but it is still there it's just that the channels don't have Vivo in their name anymore and Vivo is still pretty successful after the merge with YouTube as they have over half a million music videos that get over 26 billion views a month you can still go to vivo's website and check out their content and their artist but it always redirects you to YouTube they also still host their videos on Pluto TV and Roku but let's be honest no one's going there to watch music videos like medium.com said without assassinating YouTube they really wasn't enough
room for both of them to coexist the consumer isn't ever going to go to a second location for the same product they can get at the first so just because it looks like they aren't there Vivo is still there operating in the shadows however their plans to take over the internet as the goto music video service failed like Jordan Frasier said Vivo isn't dead it has regressed to the bottom of the video screen it exists today as branding you'll continue to see on most music videos it also exists as a reminder that the entire music
industry is run by only a few people in expensive suits if you like this video you may like my video about some of the worst marketing attempts in the music industry as many of these Vivo era artists came up with some really dumb ways to promote their music so make sure to click the video on screen right now other than that this has been your boy Matty balls thank you guys for watching if you did enjoy maybe leave a like and uh yeah I'll see you guys next time
