Stage6 Closed Down
Stage6, one of the most popular, high quality, sharing sites had permanently shut down its services as of 2/28/2008. The reason behind it? Well, there were lots of reasons. But the main reason is being … too much egos flew around to fit them all in a single site. Hey, you can’t keep a project moving forward when your key players stood up and leave, can you? With the close down of Stage6, their userbase of about 17.4 million visitors/month went up in smoke as well.
To prove that stupidity is still alive and well with the board of execs, they are now forwarding visitors to Veoh. They probably made some money for the deal, but still … what the heck? If Google shuts down, I doubt that they will forward their users to Microsoft. People liked Stage6 because they don’t have (much) restrictions, and now you forwarding them to a site that use 5min previews as standard and application that constantly crashes users’ computer? (To be fair, the divx plugin also crashes user computer, too … but you can download the videos without the need of an external app like Veoh’s). With the shutdown of stage6, the 700+ (current known count) video sharing sites can now start fighting over that piece of the pie. On a related note … crunchyroll, another popular everything-asian site, just raised $4million in a round of financing led by Venrock Associates. It’s not quite attractive as the buyout of Youtube (for $1.6billion by Google), but hey … its piece of the pie is getting bigger.
