Viddler, a service that aspired to be a stand-out competitor to other video hosting services like YouTube and Vimeo, announced yesterday that, effective immediately, they are going to stop allowing users to sign up for their free personal accounts. All existing personal users of Viddler will be able to maintain their accounts (for the time being, at least), but all future registrations will have to be premium accounts. Following is the announcement that was sent out to existing personal account holders:
Howdy Viddlers,
Many of you are the reason Viddler has risen to where it is today. You are the ones that dedicated hours everyday creating videos, viewing and commenting on the videos of others, and participating in the many community adventures. There’s been countless smiles, tears, frolics, artworks, deep thoughts, kids, birthdays,unboxings, and marvelous accents.
Gosh, this is looking like one of those farewell letters you receive from a company that got acquired and then gathers dust (*ahem* Jaiku). This is certainly not the case.
It’s no secret that Viddler’s community of free users hasn’t been as active in the past couple of years. You guys and gals have grown up, changed hobbies, switched jobs, fallen in love, or just miss iJustine. That’s understandable, but we still love you, so we’re giving away a return trip to AUSTRALIA if you login and upload a video.
Okay, not really. Maybe one day. ;)
In all seriousness, we do love you, and we just want to let you know that we’ve decided to remove the option to sign up for a Personal/Free account. This will not affect any of you, but it will mean that new users will be required to sign up for a Pro, Business, or Enterprise account.
This decision was made because a good portion of new user sign-ups are spam or businesses wanting to trial our service without using the free business trial (which previously required a credit card, but now don’t).
Since this is a fairly significant change, there will be changes to the website which might confuse some of you who haven’t been back in a while. Rest assured, your videos, comments, tags, and more will stay intact.…
If you have any questions or handy feedback, then you’re welcome to contact me:[email protected].
I look forward to seeing you around Viddler, and next time we meet in person.
To keep up-to-date with everything Viddler, please visit and subscribe to The Viddler Blog.
Huge thanks and many hugs,
Derek Steen
Community Participant since 2007
Community Leader since 2008P.s. This message was shown to several of our Personal users and they approved of its contents. I hope you all feel as accepting as they did.
It’s neat to see that, despite this difficult business decision, the principals of Viddler are keeping their sense of humor. It’s kind of a shame we, as personal users, didn’t see more communication of this caliber in the past. For some users, that kind of personal touch can be exactly what’s needed to convince someone to switch to a premium account.
It will be interesting to see how Viddler fairs going forward.