Fourteen months after Casey Neistat retired from daily YouTube vlogging and joined CNN to start a media company aimed at a younger crowd, the news network has ended the experiment.
Neistat created Beme, a video-sharing app that allowed users to share short unedited video clips before they disappeared forever, in 2015. CNN brought in Neistat and his startup on a deal valued at $25 million in November 2016 to improve the network’s digital news capabilities.
On Thursday, CNN said it was parting ways with Neistat, and as Neistat told BuzzFeed, he and the network simply couldn’t figure out what it wanted to do with Beme. Eventually, Neistat said he began focusing more on his own YouTube videos than on improving the startup.
“I don’t think I’m giving CNN what I want to give them,” he told BuzzFeed, “and I don’t think they’re getting value from me.”
On Thursday, Neistat posted a video on his YouTube channel (8.8 million subscribers) saying he’s not ready to announce his next move.
Said Neistat: “It’s easy to get sad and nostalgic about this, because Beme has been my life for the last three-plus years. This is the end of the road for me.”
Neistat said he would continue to work with the Beme YouTube channel, which has nearly 270,000 subscribers.
H/T TechCrunch