We are working hard to keep Brighteon free while covering our substantial costs and growing the number of channels and videos on the network.

The greatest challenge we face right now is from the use of Brighteon as a video archiving platform by some users who upload hundreds of videos to the network but never promote or share those videos with anyone. This places high costs on Brighteon for video storage.

In essence, some users are using Brighteon as a video archiving / storage site, which is not its intended purpose. To keep Brighteon free and sustainable, we must generate sufficient views to help encourage product sales at BrighteonStore.com, which funds the Brighteon operation. (Hint: Video storage is expensive. Video views and bandwidth are dirt cheap. We can serve a billion video views per month right now, and those views will pay for themselves via store sales.)

In order to protect Brighteon's financial sustainability and protect this platform for those users who are using it as intended, we are changing our policy to encourage more viewing activity for videos hosted by Brighteon. Beginning in early 2020, new users will at first be allowed to upload a maximum of 50 videos. After that new user's channel receives 1,000 total views across all videos, the ability to post 100 videos will be unlocked. This only requires 20 views per video on average, which is a very minimal requirement.

At 2,500 total channel views, 250 videos are unlocked, and so on. The more views your channel receives, the more videos are "unlocked" for you to post. (See chart on this page.)

Importantly, existing accounts will be assigned a user level based on your total current channel views. This user level will be prominently displayed in your Dashboard once this feature goes live. Nearly all currently active users will have already achieved more views than necessary to support the higher levels of videos, by the way. It's really only "inactive" users who are posting videos but not generating video views that will be limited by these new rules.

If you wish to post a new video but have run out of upload slots, you may delete poor-performing videos to free up the slot. However, we prefer that you promote your videos, generate more views, and unlock the ability to post more videos.

At the highest levels -- 20,000 channel views -- you unlock unlimited videos. See the full chart on this page for the exact number of channel views required to unlock each level of videos.

How to Generate More Video Views and Unlock Higher Levels

To generate more views for your videos, you may:

1. Promote your Brighteon video links on your social media.
2. Include Brighteon video embeds in web content (embed video plays also count, just like video plays on Brighteon.com)
3. Share your channel link with your fans and followers: Brighteon.com/channel/username
4. Promote Brighteon on your YouTube videos, Vimeo videos or other video platforms.
5. Include your Brighteon.com channel link in your emails, social media posts and website content.

Compliance with the New Rules

If your total channel views are not yet sufficient to justify the number of videos you have uploaded, you will be shown a warning in your Dashboard that alerts you to how many more views you need to generate in order to support the videos that currently exist in your channel. We encourage you to take this opportunity to either remove poorly-performing videos from your channel or generate more video views in order to unlock higher user levels.

Accounts that do not come into compliance with the new rules will, after a grace period, be automatically pruned to bring them into compliance, as nearly all of these accounts are from people who posted hundreds of videos and never promoted them. After a period of time, our system will automatically prune the least-viewed videos from those accounts in order to bring them into compliance. No videos less than 30 days old will be pruned. This will only prune videos older than 30 days, and it will only remove the least-performing videos.

This step is necessary for us to protect Brighteon as a free public platform that can cover costs in a sustainable way. We cannot continue to pay monthly storage costs for videos that nobody is promoting or viewing. Brighteon is intended to serve as a free public forum for ACTIVE video users who are actively sharing those videos with their users.

We appreciate your support and patience as we continue to grow this new platform. Remember: We need more VIEWS of videos to cover costs. Bandwidth costs are near-zero. It's the storage costs that are by far the largest burden on Brighteon.com. You can help us by promoting more video views, embeds and social media shares. The more views we generate, the more quickly we cover our costs and can fund new features that benefit everyone.

Thank you,

- Mike Adams

Founder, Brighteon.com