Maker Studios Is Shutting Down Blip Next Month

Disney-owned Maker Studios will shut down its web video portal Blip next month. Blip informed its users Monday that it will shut down on August 20, and encouraged them to export their videos.

Founded in 2005, Blip was a pioneering online video site that was home to many of the first video bloggers. Blip initially pitched itself as a more community-focused alternative to YouTube, and at one point had around 900,000 video publishers on its platform.

However, Blip was quickly eclipsed by YouTube, which had a lot more resources at its disposal after it got acquired by Google in late 2006. Blip tried to reposition itself with a focus on professional content in the following years, and even launched a short-lived production unit dubbed Blip Studios.

It got acquired by Maker Studios in 2013. Maker at the time painted the acquisition as a first step to build out a distribution platform capable of competing with YouTube. However, the shut-down email sent out Monday encouraged video producers to monetize their YouTube channels with Maker’s help instead:

“As you may know, Blip was acquired by Maker Studios in September 2013 and the acquisition has allowed for additional, more expansive direct-to-consumer tools and products for content creators across the network. We encourage you to apply to the Maker Gen network if you have a YouTube channel to take advantage of Maker’s tools and services.”

In the months following the acquisition, Blip booted many video producers off its platform, leading to tensions with the video blogging community. Maker itself got acquired by Disney last year in a deal worth at least $500 million.

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Justin Day, one of the founders of Blip, commented on the news on Twitter Monday:

Sad to see my baby, @blip.tv finally shutting down. We tried hard guys. Ultimately video is just a really tough business. @internetarchive

— Justin Day Ⓥ (@potatono) July 20, 2015

Maker Studios didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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