This is a joint post from both of us. We don't usually write together, but the retrospective felt right as a conversation.

What we got right

The invitation model. We've never seriously considered opening registration. The model works because it selects for people who care about the form, and caring about the form makes you a better member — you contribute more, you're more thoughtful in the forum, you make requests that improve the archive for everyone. The invite process is some overhead, but it pays for itself.

Director-first organization. In retrospect this seems obvious. At the time, every other platform that had ever tried to organize music video had done it by artist or by label. We were told several times in the first year that "people search for artists, not directors." This is true, and we have artist search. But the director page turned out to be the most useful thing in the archive — more useful than we expected, used in ways we didn't anticipate. More on this below.

Keeping it small.} We've been offered money twice. Not large amounts, but enough to change what we could build. Both times we said no, because both times it came with conditions that would have pushed us toward growth metrics rather than archival quality. Staying small means staying slower, but it also means we control what we do. We're happy with this trade.

What we got wrong

The forum. We built the members forum as a text-only space with threaded discussions and minimal features. For the first two years, it worked well. Then it stopped working well, for reasons we still don't fully understand. Traffic dropped, discussion became shallower. We spent about six months trying different moderation approaches, thread formats, weekly prompts. Nothing really moved the needle. The forum is still there and still used, but it's not the community hub we imagined it would be. If we were starting over, we'd build something different — probably more email-based.

The mobile experience. We knew from the start that we were building a web application and that mobile would be secondary. What we didn't anticipate is how often people watch music video on their phones — specifically, how often they discover a video they want to watch properly on their phone and then watch it on a phone anyway, because that's where they are. The mobile experience is functional but not good. This is something we're actively working on improving.

The director interview programme. We launched this in 2022 with high ambitions. We'd do eight to ten long-form written interviews per year, published exclusively on SpectraVid, with directors whose work was underrepresented in mainstream criticism. The reality: we've done twelve interviews in three years. The bottleneck is time — coordinating interviews, transcribing and editing them, getting approval from the directors. It takes longer than we expected, and we've been unwilling to do it badly. We still believe in the programme; we're more realistic now about the pace.

The things that surprised us

The academic use of the archive has been the most unexpected development. We knew we were building something that would be useful to researchers — that was part of the point — but we thought it would be useful mainly as a viewing platform. What we found is that the metadata is what researchers actually use: the director credits, the dating, the source notes, the classification methodology for visual albums. Three PhD theses have cited the archive in the last two years. A film school in the Netherlands has used our director pages as a teaching resource.

The geographic spread of the membership also surprised us. We assumed the members would be primarily European, with some North American representation. In practice, we have significant membership communities in Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Australia, and Nigeria. The Nigerian community in particular has been a remarkable source of archive contributions — material we had no other way of finding.

Directors submitting their own work surprised us too. When we opened a channel for director submissions in 2021, we expected a trickle. We got a flood. Apparently many directors have old work that's effectively lost — hosted on dead Vimeo accounts, on hard drives they no longer have, on YouTube channels they can't access — and the existence of a place that would host it properly and credit them as its author was something they'd been looking for.

Where we're going

The honest answer is: roughly where we are, but better. We're not trying to be larger. We are trying to be more complete — more of the history of the form, better documented, more international in its coverage. We're going to try to fix the mobile experience this year. We're going to keep the interview programme at a realistic pace rather than the ambitious one we originally imagined.

The thing we're most interested in, looking ahead, is the question of what happens to music video as the form continues to evolve. The line between a music video and a short film continues to blur. The line between a visual album and a film continues to blur. We don't know exactly where those lines will end up, but we're paying attention.

Thank you to everyone who's been part of this, especially the members who've contributed archive material, curatorial notes, and general patience over five years. You built this with us.

— M.H. & K.N., Berlin / Hamburg, February 2025