The music distributor and service Vevo plans to triple its global footprint in 2012, CEO Rio Caraeff tells paidContent while answering questions about a rumoured tie-up with Facebook…
“This year we’re hoping to launch in at least another six countries,” Caraeff said. “Our big priority is to make the service more available in more countries.”
Vevo, which redesigned last week, is currently available in the U.S., Canada and UK. paidContent understands Australia is one of the new territories under consideration.
In January, reports had it that Vevo, which supplies officially-licensed music videos to YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG), was in preliminary talks to switch that supply to Facebook, which lacks such a content play of its own.
Asked to confirm talks, Caraeff told me:
“We’re in a good position. Content is king. We’re seeing a lot of distribution partners take an interest in that content as a way to differentiate their services.
“We’ve had a lot of people reach out and say, ‘What more can we do together beyond just having the player on our platform?’ We’re talking with everyone about a more in-depth relationship; we’ve nothing to announce.”
in other words, Vevo is, of course, speaking with a lot of potential partners. Vevo recently began supplying some content to AOL (NYSE: AOL) and Yahoo.
The service is clocking up 3.5 billion views per month, Caraeff said – 30 percent of its streams come via YouTube (10 percent in the UK).
“Mobile and tablet is the fastest-growing part of our platform,” he said. “Xbox is exceeding our expectations.”
Many online content distributors, and many in the music segment, are currently on a globalisation drive, as they each try to achieve worldwide scale as global brands.
Caraeff said it’s important for Vevo to diversify revenue streams from just ad-supported music videos. Original programming o
Vevo did $150 million in revenue last year and has paid $100 million in royalties in the last two years, Caraeff also said during a session at The Guardian’s Changing Media Summit
“Advertising is a great model when you’re trying to reach billions of people – it’s not the only model.
“We’re very much focused on profitability but it’s not our number-one objective. We’re very much on track – it’s something we hope to achieve in the next year We’re definitely not a perpetual loss-making business.”