Music Video Supersite Vevo launches into a sea of fans, crashes

Amidst jubilant cries of ‘Viva Vevo!’ and ‘la vevo loca!’ and other such nonsense, Vevo.com launched today. The site is a venture between Google-owned Youtube and the music industry to place youtube-powered music videos in one spot — with higher end advertising to monetize it. The site is built with “official” music videos, those produced by the record industry.
This move, if successful, will help keep music content profitable. Unfortunately, I’ve only gotten one search to load results today. Vevo issued a tweet to the effect of “oh god! the traffic! we can not keep up!” which isn’t all bad for the company but hasn’t made a good first impression on me.
Minutes later, I’ve gotten artist and title searches to work. I’ve loaded a video, “Walk of Life” by Shooter Jennings, viewed my advertisement and the video is streaming flawlessly. I’ll forgive the under-prepared launch and the advertisement. After all, the high end advertising is how Vevo is funding my favorite country (yes, country) videos being piped to my laptop.
Vevo could be imagined as 1980s-era MTV (when MTV played music videos instead of reality shows) for the digital age. When Vevo works, it showcases high production value content from Universal, Sony and EMI records as well as CBS radio stations. The site has partnerships with over 20 high end advertisers like McDonalds and MasterCard. Advertising comes on, says its piece and then you are back to more music videos.
Vevo CEO Caraeff told Reuters that advertisers are paying $20 – $45 per 1,000 page views. Based on today’s site-crashing volume of traffic, Vevo should prove to be a high earner. If Vevo can keep up with the traffic, it will be my new favorite music video service — though for user-generated content, Youtube is still the best game in town.