The Sad Demise of The Vidnami Video App

August 28, 2021

Vidnami has been my go-to video creation service for creating marketing videos and some purely informative videos for many years.

It was formerly, and perhaps better known as Content Samurai.

I used the service, literally, for years.

But now it’s gone.

The owners were bought out by GoDaddy earlier this year (2021).

You can see it from their perspective – it’s a huge payday for all the work they put in, and there were less than 10 people on the development team.

But it’s left their customers and affiliates high and dry.

Affiliates played, by Vidnami’s owners own admission, a huge role in building up their customer base.

And while affiliates did get ongoing commissions from the people they referred, there was no payday for them with the sale of the company.

Should there have been?

I don’t know.

If affiliates were so instrumental in building up Content Samurai / Vidnami to what it had become, maybe they should have received a goodbye handshake deal as they parted ways with the company.

But it’s the customers who were really affected by this company sale.

The owners claimed that they just didn’t have the resources to keep the Vidnami service up and running while also working for/with GoDaddy.

Customers were told that they would have access to the videos they created until August 20th, after which they would lose all access, permanently.

Yes, customers were given time to download their videos so that they could save them locally, but they lost the ability to clone and edit existing videos.

The only way to do that now is to use a PC-based video editing tool that was never designed to work specifically with videos created with Content Samurai / Vidnami.

If you have videos with embedded text, you can’t edit that out or change it.

If you have videos with the human-sounding voices that their text-to-speech engine created, you can’t add or edit those voices either.

The best you can do that case would be to use a tool like Camtasia (now also available for Macs) to separate the audio and video tracks, delete the audio track and record (or hire someone to record) a new voiceover track.

Customers have also lost access to the hundreds of thousands of video clips that they could add into videos, along with access to the hundreds of thousands of royalty-free music tracks.

Frankly, as both a customer and an affiliate, I feel stabbed in the back by the folks behind Vidnami.

Do you think I’m overreacting?

If you were a Vidnami user yourself, how to you feel about what’s happened?

If anything rises from the ashes of Vidnami on the GoDaddy platform, I can’t see myself buying that service.

That’s partly down to GoDaddy being price gougers and providing lousy customer support (at least that was my experience a few years back – maybe it’s better now).

But the Vidnami team have generated a lot of badwill in me so I just don’t feel like I’ll be supporting anything they produce in the future.

It’s a sad way for a customer/company relationship to end.

If you’re looking for an equivalent service, the closest fit I know of is Instant Video Wizard. You can check out my bonus package for it here.

Anyway, let me know your thoughts on all this.