Digital

YouTube still important to VEVO, says SVP

By | Published on Monday 16 April 2012

VEVO

Amidst rising speculation that major label-owned music video service VEVO might end its partnership with YouTube – which provides both technology and a gateway to market to the official-content-only music video site – the service’s International SVP Nic Jones told reporters that the Google-owned video platform remained a “vitally important partner”.

While VEVO licenses its own content and sells its own ads, since its launch key partner YouTube has provided traffic as well as technology, with users looking for official artist content from VEVO-affiliated labels being pushed towards VEVO pages when navigating the Google service.

While VEVO.com has started to become a destination in its own right in the last year or so, the digital firm is known to be keen to further push up its non-YouTube-originated traffic, and is thought to be talking to Facebook about some sort of alliance.

That has led some to wonder if VEVO might dump YouTube once its current deal with the video site ends, instead finding a new technology partner and relying on Facebook for extra traffic. Though YouTube is such a big destination for those seeking music videos, such a move would not be without risks. Ideally VEVO would be better having both YouTube and Facebook as partners, though with relationships between Google and the social networking giant souring, that may or may not work.

Anyway, talking ahead of VEVO’s Australian launch, Jones confirmed that while his company was working hard to generate more traffic to its own home page, that didn’t mean YouTube wasn’t still key to its operations. Jones told ZDNet: “YouTube is a vitally important partner for us to get coverage. We’re in over 240 countries with YouTube, but the plan has always been to light up VEVO.com. It’s a different experience to VEVO on YouTube. We’re not saying to users ‘don’t go to YouTube’, but obviously we want to create a Vevo.com environment that we think is compelling. The issue for us is creating the best environment people want to go to”.



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