Kodi Freeloaders Force RapidVideo to Change Business Model

• RapidVideo will no longer try to serve an ad per view and will become a subscription service instead.
• The primary reason behind this is the fact that Kodi freeloaders have made their file-hosting service operation non-feasible.
• The operators have clarified that they will not be the only ones to make this transition.

RapidVideo’s operators have announced their intention to change their business model, as they can no longer sustain the project through advertising. According to the statistics, about half of the website’s total bandwidth is tied down by “freeloading” Kodi add-on users who don’t generate any revenue for them. That is because users of Kodi make use of the platform’s file-hosting offering, but the ads that they were supposed to watch (and click) in exchange never actually reach them.

RapidVideo is a “content distribution network” video hosting service that allows people to upload and share videos. Being free, reliable, and featuring fast post-processing, the platform is very much appreciated by content pirates, a category that accounts for about 70% of the total Kodi userbase. Of course, RapidVideo and other similar service platforms have been facing the “Kodi-freeloaders” problem for quite some time now, and they have tried to implement smart Anti-Adblock scripts to force users to get the ads they have agreed to receive when signing the user terms. No matter their efforts, it seems that the finances are no longer adding up, and as the operators have stated: “We can’t finance ourselves from internet ads any longer.”

https://twitter.com/RapidVideoCom/status/1110658160304492544

The new business model for RapidVideo will strip away the “pay-per-view” / “pop-up-per-view” approach and put a “prospective payment system” for premium accounts in its place. Free users will be able to get some (possibly 10) views per IP per day, and then get an automatic short-term (possibly an hour) pause for the clock to reset. The RapidVideo admin who has made the relevant announcement on the Wjunction forums has not missed out to mention that besides the Kodi freeloaders, the platform also had to deal with unauthorized hotlinking, sandboxing, adnetwork scams, and downloader tools. With the “Premium Accounts” model, the basis for better control over all of this will hopefully be laid down.

According to a statement by one of RapidVideo representatives on TorrentFreak, the decision to change business model was made in conjunction with another popular file-hosting and file-sharing website which has not been named, and which is expected to make their move in the following weeks. This shows how large services that belong to the same field work together for their mutual benefit, creating a fair competition environment instead of acting as lifeboats for ship-changing freeloaders.

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