Vevo generates a staggering 17 billion video views a month.
Vevo CEO Erik Huggers on Making Money in Music Videos -- And What Happened to Intel TV (Video)
Vevo’s complicated ownership structure and its intimate ties to Google and YouTube make it a knotty business to get your head around.
Asa Mathat for Vox Media
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
That kind of audience should make the music video site one of the buzziest properties on the Web — and certainly one of the most valuable. But its complicated ownership structure and its intimate ties to Google and YouTube make it a knotty business to get your head around.
It’s also hard to manage, but that’s what Erik Huggers, its newish CEO, is trying to do. At Code/Media last week, Huggers talked about his strategy to turn Vevo from a promising notion into a real, standalone company — including a plan for a subscription service. (Sony Entertainment boss Michael Lynton, who oversees Vevo partner/investor Sony Music, later said that means some videos will no longer be available for free.)
That’s a challenge, but Huggers likes challenges — even when they don’t pan out, like his attempt to launch a Web TV subscription service at Intel.
We spent some time going over that project as well. Huggers thinks his attempt was a couple years early, which is a reasonable argument, given that three years later, only one Web TV service has any kind of traction. Here’s the full video of our chat:
And here’s the audio version:
(For more audio from Code/Media 2016 and all our other events, subscribe to Re/code Replay on iTunes.)
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
