How do vlc make money

We do it with no interest in making a profit and with clear goals, so people know what we are aiming to achieve and they can trust us. Also, you could play videos that had been downloaded, and VLC allows you to play your clip before it has read the whole file. Keeping VLC free and without ads is a no-brainer. Money can restrict you. Sure, more money would be fun, but most of the people I know who have more money are annoying.

And if it makes you a slave to your work, what good is that? Because it was done as a student project, it is a very modular program and it is very easy to add a new feature. There are about modules in VLC, which means you can come and work on a very small part and improve it without breaking everything else.

For a patch to get accepted, it needs to be maintainable as well as useful. You might be wondering why that is. People change jobs, change wives, have kids, accidents, and so on. So everything in VLC needs to be done so that we can continue without you. Which means that we put a lot of emphasis on quality. Barrett, who became famous for scathing criticisms of the Trump administration , also shared his views on President Biden's performance.

It's pretty hectic basically talking to every hedge fund and investor in the world in the past week or so. We're kind of out of practice, honestly. We don't really raise money.

It's been fun to get back out there and talk with people and share the vision and hear people like, "Wow, you guys have been busy. I don't know if there's a particularly hard question to answer after you've answered the same questions 50 times in a row. Maybe one of the most persistent questions — though we didn't get this as much as I expected — more often than not, people are like, "OK, so you're this payments super app in SMB. What makes Expensify special, fundamentally, is that we have a completely different business model.

Everyone else in our industry has a top-down acquisition model. They've got a sales team calling into the CFO or whatever. And that model works fine, but it only works in a tiny corner of the marketplace and it's the same market that everyone else was going after. Our competition is email and Excel.

It's like a manila envelope stuffed full of receipts that is the actual competition. And no one is defending it. Our competitors use the same business model. You buy a list of CFOs and then you call that list from top to bottom and then you put them through a qualification [process]. They're all calling the same people off the same list with the same message, selling the same product. And, shocker, it's really hard to compete when you're exactly the same as everyone else.

Our approach is starting with the employee, and then they pull us into the company. The bulk of our revenue is subscription revenue that comes from companies between, let's say, 10 and employees. There's a view that B2C fintech has become increasingly hard, and a B2B approach is more cost-effective.

I love that everyone thinks that because that's why they're all failing while we thrive. If you try to apply an enterprise business model in the SMB, those are really different markets. The economics of top-down acquisition just do not scale well outside of the mid-market. I gotta go acquire it.

We need to go to bigger businesses. We're different. We're like, "Screw the enterprise. We will be your very first accounting tool because way before you have revenue, you definitely have expenses. Then we'll grow with you forever.

Business travel is back, which is great. We see a different slice of business travel than I think most because we're more of a Main Street business than a Wall Street business. When people think of business travel, they typically think George Clooney in "Up in the Air," sort of flying around. And that happens. It's obviously a big deal. But there is a huge fraction of business travel which is just mileage, people driving around.

My dad drove around all of Michigan essentially selling machine tools. You drive to Toledo and you stop by the Home Depot and you pick up a whole bunch of materials for the job or something like that. We get way more reimbursements for Home Depot than for United. Business travel is a very humble affair for a huge fraction of our customers. How do you view the market environment going forward, given that we're still in a pandemic?

The pandemic was basically the ultimate stress test of our business model. I think we've weathered it pretty fine. Going forward, so long as we don't have an even worse pandemic, I think we're gonna be just fine.

I'm actually quite optimistic, and I think that our customers are as well. I think we feel we're through the worst of it. I think there's a ton of reasons to be super optimistic, honestly. And I think that that's why we're excited about it. You were very critical of the previous administration. What do you think of the job President Biden is doing?

Is there anything that the new administration has done that you are critical of? I think the vaccine mandates are some really hard calls.

I can see value in both perspectives. Obviously the vaccines work and they're wonderful, but at the same time, I think your body is your ultimate line of sanctity. These are really hard issues. I don't know that I have a real clear opinion to be honest. I think that it's a muddy process. A vaccine or pulling out of Afghanistan — these are huge, multitrillion-dollar issues. These are not clean issues. No one's gonna just knock it out of the park. I think that Biden's doing a great job in the most important thing, and that is he's defending democracy.

I feel very good about the prospects for democracy going forward under the Biden administration. And that's all we're ultimately looking for. To give you the best possible experience, this site uses cookies. If you continue browsing. You can review our privacy policy to find out more about the cookies we use. Subscribe for free. Source Code. Next Up. The Inclusive Workplace. Tech Employee Survey. Return to Work Calendar. Power Index. The New Database. Buy Now Pay Later.

Rise of Retail Investing. Or he might be just well-off not rich and he figured out that millions of euros are not going to increase his satisfaction. And no, realizing this doesn't make you less greedy. I'll take the money even though I know it'll be a net negative in my life.

And I know this very well because I have been through it. If you're gonna sell out, at the very least get enough money to hop into the poorest rich category. And you think he doesn't? Besides working on VLC, he does consulting on the side to pay for his.

Well, you have some choice regarding the amount of bills you have to pay. I'm not saying I'd have such integrity myself, though. SirZimzim on Sept 30, parent prev next [—].

It would be likely that anyone prone to selling out would have done so a long time ago when stakes were in the tens of thousands. The smart move would have been to take the tens of millions of dollars, retire, and spend it developing VLC Too if you'd like. No, because the user bases are completely different. If you're pulling down an open source database and setting it up there's a certain minimum technical skill level that can be assumed.

The same can't be said for a consumer video player. Where does the user base come into the discussion? You're on a forum, whose users primary motivation is starting companies. We're here to make money. If someone offers you tens of millions of dollars for a video player, you take it, and go enjoy life.

There are plenty of folks here for whom 'comfortable' money would be just fine when accompanied by 'make the world a better place, and avoid doing things that make it a worse place.

You can do a lot more good in this world with tens of millions of dollars. You can also enable people to make the world a significantly crappier place for millions of people by accepting that money. If you're going to think of good or happiness as a transactional thing, you can "steal" some happiness from millions of people to increase your own e.

MAYBE you can make up the total amount of reduced happiness by spending that money to do good somewhere else, but you can never really know whether you've been successful and you can also never really know just how much you've worsened people's lives long-term.

I find it unlikely that people interested in purchasing VLC so they could monetize it would stop at a level that users would consider acceptable.

Selling out your users for money is almost always going to be a net loser in the currency of happiness in the world. Open source is not primarily for making money, no. Could be me, but the headline is confusing.

I thought at first that several tens of millions intended to keep VLC ad free had been refused. Thankfully we dodged that bullet. Sephr on Sept 30, prev next [—]. I would rather they took the money and forked VLC. It would be big enough news that most users would switch and the development would only benefit from the extra cash. If the initial media attention isn't enough, they could spend some of the excess on an ad campaign to inform users that "the most popular VLC fork is now [new name]".

EpicEng on Oct 1, parent next [—]. You think most of VLC's users are the type who would read about a fork on a site like this?

I imagine their user base is much larger than that. Sephr on Oct 1, root parent next [—]. Adding ads is a significant enough negative change alone to get adequate media attention outside of sites like Hacker News. EpicEng on Oct 1, root parent next [—]. For a product like VLC? I don't know about that. The average user will put up with quite a bit of crap from their software, and I don't imagine e. But that's deceitful and wrong. There is nothing wrong with paying someone for advertising space.

Sephr on Sept 30, root parent next [—]. What's deceitful about it? It seems like the person making this offer didn't really think this through, considering that VLC is open source.

The name is meaningless if they implement ads. People like this keep OSS community going. VLC hasn't done much to improve picture quality. An mpc and madvr combination easily trumps it and yet you want to donate to this cookie cutter program to only maintain but not make it better?

MPC was on the verge of being stopped of development until few people made the effort to volunteer and contribute to code. I assume you're not talking about the mpd command line client of that name? At least I wouldn't know how it relates to video quality, though it plays music quite nicely. The other mpc I can easily get to does multi-precision arithmetic on the complex numbers.

Also unlikely to be a match. So there's your problem. Your software is hard to use and hard to find out about. Get it into distros so that installing it and trying it out is as painless as possible. If I don't know it exists or have to hunt around the web for a copy, I'm unlikely to donate to it. Thanks a lot! SSL is already there. Why doesn't it auto-redirect? Not a criticism, just curiosity. But that is soon over.

You should see SSL from Google though. Because of lacking SNI support? An unconditional redirect would be better, but that requires a dedicated IP. You can also set the favicon path to https, and put hsts headers on it. No JavaScript required. Neat idea, but wouldn't this still be exposed to ISP-level attacks? Yes, no redirect can protect the user from that. But it can protect them if they open it on a safe connection and then bookmark the page, or keep the tab open, or send the link to someone else, and then use that link on an unsafe connection.

Good idea. Hello71 on Sept 30, root parent prev next [—]. Is there an existing ticket for redirects? Key question indeed. And HSTS would be the cream on top. But let's start with redirects. What is the point of the redirects? If the user wants to use the https version he would directly go to that either manually or by using something like httpseverywhere. Why force to user to use a specific one?

Because most people have no idea what HTTPS is, let alone that you can manually switch between the two. Nor do they know what a browser addon is, let alone knowing that specific one exists. In that case they should deal with the consequences of their ignorance. NicoJuicy on Sept 30, prev next [—]. I once sollicitaties for a company that did tv streaming for hotels, everything was based on VLC That was amazing to hear!

I think there's nothing at all wrong with differentiating into paid and free. No ads needed. I think you're right, in that there is nothing wrong with it. But, I believe their goal is to keep it free as in beer and free as in speech. Noble goals, indeed. Out of curiosity, what do you think about silicon valley startups :. If the software had ads, it'd lose its popularity anyway JohnTHaller on Sept 30, parent next [—].

I used to get offers almost daily. Still do every couple weeks. By the time you start to lose popularity, you've more than made your money, you just have to screw over a few million people in the process.

Off topic here - but thank you so much for PortableApps. Still, for maintaining servers, website and marketing they need money, for which they ask for donations.

For more information checkout their donate page. For server and other stuff they have some generous partnership with certain big names like Free SAS, Gandi. Yubico: Yubico is a popular brand known for manufacturing security keys which helps the VideoLAN Organization to strong their security.

If you have any question related to How VLC Media Player Makes Money or post idea write down in comments section or join our forum to ask your questions. Abhishek Verma is a tech enthusiast and freelance tech journalist. He has been writing about technology for 4 years.