YouTube is massive. More than one billion people visit its site and apps every month, watching more than 6bn hours of video. Its top channels count their annual views in billions.
That’s why even though some grumble about the amount of money they make from ads on YouTube, for now the idea of those stars ditching Google’s online video service for a rival isn’t a serious prospect.
That’s why Vessel, which launched last week in beta, is very carefully not positioning itself as a direct rival to YouTube.
Instead, the US startup is pitching itself as complementary: a “first window” for online video that wants creators to launch their new clips exclusively on Vessel for three days before making them available on YouTube and other sites.
The pitch to those creators is that they’ll earn much more money during that 72-hour exclusivity period than they would on YouTube, because Vessel will charge people $2.99 a month to subscribe to its service, with those revenues being shared with creators as well as income from advertising.
The pitch to those viewers is that they’ll be able to see new videos from their favourite online stars first, whether they’re using Vessel’s website or its smartphone and tablet apps – iOS for now, but with Android to follow soon.
Signing up well-known YouTube stars and brands will be crucial to Vessel’s chances of persuading people to part with their money, but so will the quality of its service. I’ve been testing it out since Vessel launched its beta to see how that’s shaping up.
When compared to other ways to watch online video on a tablet, from YouTube to BBC iPlayer, Vessel’s iPad is very slick. The first time you load it up, the app asks you about your preferences, from categories (comedy, geek, music, news etc) to individual creators. That quick questionnaire creates your initial list of channels and genres that you’re “following”.
There are two ways to browse Vessel. One involves simply swiping down through a feed of your follows, with each getting a screen showcasing either a single recent video, or a selection of three. It’s made for relaxed browsing on the sofa, with a single tap playing the video full-screen.
Icons at the bottom enable you to mark a video as liked, or join the conversation around it by posting a comment. One of the potential strengths of Vessel – albeit unproven for now – is that its community of paying subscribers may foster a commenting culture that’s less... toxic than the worst elements on YouTube.
It’s very early days though: most videos I’ve watched have a handful of comments at best. For example, British creator Marcus Butler’s video “Relationship Goals” launched on Vessel on 22 January, and has four comments at the time of writing. The YouTube version released on 25 January has more than 1,400.
The disparity is unsurprising so soon after Vessel’s beta launch, but it does mean it’s way too early to tell how its commenting culture will evolve.
The second way to browse Vessel is via a pop-out menu on the right-hand side of the screen. There, you can find a list of the channels and subjects that you’re following, as well as options to browse by New Releases, Popular and directories of categories, channels and shows, and music artists.
It’s a handy way to get quickly to a particular channel, rather than swiping down the main feed of videos to find it. You can edit the list to put your favourites at the top, too. Once you navigate to a channel, you can browse its grid of videos, sortable by date of release or popularity.
You’ll see two kinds of advertisements while using Vessel. The first are animated, full-screen ads as you scroll down your main feed.
They usually contain a call to action of some kind: the ad for Charity: Water gets you to tap through to an in-app browser with a website explaining how to start a campaign to raise money for it, for example, while ads for Vessel creators prompt you to tap through to their channels.
The second kind of Vessel ad are pre-rolls shown before videos. These only last for five seconds, usually with an unobtrusive “Learn more” button taking you through to the in-app browser. Note, you’ll still see some ads even if you subscribe.
Vessel’s iPhone app looks and feels very similar, with the main difference being that you scroll through your feed of videos and channels in portrait orientation, before turning the device to watch them in landscape mode. Meanwhile, the website follows suit, with minimal clutter.
It works nicely, then. What is there to watch? You can divide Vessel’s content into two categories: music and everything else.
Through a deal with music videos service Vevo, pretty much every major music artist has a channel on Vessel, although that means official videos and interviews rather than fan-uploaded clips – a good or bad thing depending on your preferences.
For now, the music section can feel limiting if your tastes aren’t weighted towards the mainstream. For example, the World Music category has just eight artists, Metal has nine, and even Electronic/Dance has just 28. This will surely grow in time, but for now it pales next to YouTube’s wide and deep music archives.
Non-music videos? Vessel has already signed up some popular YouTube channels and networks – in the latter case, Machinima for games and comedy, Tastemade for cookery and DanceOn for dance.
There are well-known shows like Epic Meal Time, Nerdist and Unbox Therapy, and YouTubers including Connor Franta, Brittani Louise Taylor, Jack Vale, Smosh, Rhett & Link, Shane Dawson, Marcus Butler, Ingrid Nilsen and Caspar Lee.
More? Alec Baldwin’s Love Ride show sees the actor dispensing relationship advice in a taxi; Scott Ian of metal band Anthrax has a Blood & Guts channel exploring horror makeup and special effects; Jay-Z’s Decoded channel digs into the lyrics of music tracks with their writers; and there are channels for media brands from BuzzFeed and PopSugar to National Geographic, the Financial Times, Fortune and the Wall Street Journal.
It’s a real grab-bag of stuff, with plenty of gems to discover even if you don’t fall into Vessel’s main target audience of 14-24 year-olds. It’s not just a sea of vloggers, make-up experts and let’s-play games videos for teenagers, in other words.
Here, too, it’s very early days for Vessel, which has signed up a small subset of even the very top YouTube creators. I’d expect many more to join in the coming months if Vessel picks up steam, especially if it signs up a really big YouTube star – PewDiePie, for example.
As its catalogue grows and its algorithms get to know more about individual users’ preferences, Vessel will also face an interesting challenge of discovery: whether it can successfully recommend new and newly-added channels to users based on their viewing habits, rather than just expecting them to find these manually.
If it can become not just a way to watch the YouTube channels you already know, but also a quality filter cutting through the clutter to find you new things to watch, Vessel will start to become really interesting.
Especially if, as the company’s founders hope, its payouts to creators are high enough that they can start spending more money on the quality of their videos – from better cameras, sound and editing kit to investing in new, more ambitious kinds of shows that stretch the creative boundaries of online video.
But that’s all for the future. For now, Vessel is an impressive app and website offering a slick complement to YouTube – not a replacement for it. Once its initial month-long free trials are up, we’ll find out whether that’s enough to persuade people to pay for it.
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