The features haven't been very popular on the site

Jun 27, 2009 09:59 GMT  ·  By

Social music service imeem has announced that it will remove all user-generated videos and photos from the site on June 30, in an effort to simplify it. The website says that the features weren't very popular and it didn't make financial sense to keep them.

“We’re making these changes as part of an overall effort to simplify imeem so it’s cleaner and easier to navigate. This means enhancing imeem’s most popular social music features, and de-emphasizing some (like user-generated photos and videos) that are less popular, cost more to host & stream, or are of less interest to our advertisers. Simply put, there’s no ROI for us in UGV,” the imeem blog post announcing the changes reads.

The company wants to focus more on the core functionality and its main features. Matt Graves, imeem's VP of marketing and communications, has noted in a comment that less than 0.1 percent of the site’s pageviews are related to the photos and the user-generated videos have an equally low appeal for most users.

“People come to imeem to enjoy music; we want to make it even easier for you to discover, buy & socialize around the music you love. Our recently revamped artist pages, which aggregate artists’ music and videos on a single page, and our new search page are just two examples of how we’re already refining the experience in direct response to feedback we’ve gotten from our community,” the post also adds.

The community was less than pleased with the changes and has been vocal about it, but imeem says it has taken steps to ensure that VIP users who have paid subscriptions are properly refunded if they are unhappy with the changes. The changes will not affect the users' profile pictures, and neither the MP3 uploads.