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>From now on I will stay 100% with Vimeo but, as we know, they have a fraction of the viewership of You Tube – primarily because so few people know they even ex
by jasode 5y ago
>From now on I will stay 100% with Vimeo but, as we know, they have a fraction of the viewership of You Tube – primarily because so few people know they even exist.
Websurfer awareness is not the primary reason Vimeo has less viewership.
The cause & effect before the buildup of awareness is the incentives that prevent content creators to upload videos to Vimeo in the first place:
- platform membership fees: Youtube is $0 to upload and host, Vimeo used to be $240 and now has some new pricing plans[1] with a low-use free tier (too limited for high-res 4k uploads)
- no advertising partners : Youtube enables monetization without content creators asking audiences to pay for subscriptions. This financial model covers a wide variety of videos especially for unknown creators.
The financial model of Vimeo is fine but its inherent costs will keep it smaller than Youtube because both the uploaders and the viewers don't want to pay.
[1] https://vimeo.com/upgrade https://vimeo.com/upgrade
- stefan_ 5y agoThe biggest of all being that Vimeo has essentially no discovery system? To a viewer, Vimeo is just a crude way to host a video.
- amelius 5y agoAs a viewer I want my discovery algorithm decoupled from who hosts my videos.
- rtkwe 5y agoThe problem with that for creators is the information on who is watching what gets much poorer when that happens so the algorithm has much less to go off of so no one has really done it. Also how do you monetize that? The host will be the one inserting ads.
- MikeTheGreat 5y agoCan I ask how that would work? Like, are you saying that you'd rather use Google to search for content (including videos) and then find the videos on whichever web site hosts that individual video? I do enjoy listening to music on YouTube and I actually like that it'll auto-enqueue music to play next that's similar to what I'm listening to now. You idea (I think) is really interesting - it's been a while since the web has worked that way and it's interesting to think about how combined hosting+discovery has changed it from the 'early days'
- kmeisthax 5y agoI could imagine an extension that scrapes video metadata (if not actual video frames) and runs some FLoC-like P2P discovery mechanism for similar video content. The main problem with this would be spam; Google has a lock on web search entirely because building a search index that is not immediately besieged by adversarial content is very difficult. Alternatively we could bring back RSS readers and aggregation. We'd need some way to scrape/feed YouTube metadata into it. Feeds could advertise related creators that way (with the caveat that this would almost certainly become a sponsorship/advertising mechanism, something something RAID Shadow Legends).
- dredmorbius 5y agoSee for example DDG video search (which I believe proxies for Bing video search). If I bang-search "!video <search expression>" on DDG, I'll be returned hits for the search across a range of video hosting sites. Principally YouTube and Vimeo, though also others. I don't believe Peertube sites presently appear, which is a shame.
- jcelerier 5y ago> I do enjoy listening to music on YouTube and I actually like that it'll auto-enqueue music to play next that's similar to what I'm listening to now. I'm like the post your responsed to, I really hate that (and all sorts of automated recommandation systems, I just can't stand Spotify for instance). Computers are here for me to tell them what to do, not to take non-repeatable decisions (and this makes it more and more painful to use the web over the years frankly, everything is becoming an inconsistent mess)
- sushid 5y agoAs someone who enjoys watching recommended videos I'm glad your views are not shared by the majority.
- rtkwe 5y agoYeah people shit on recommended videos a lot but I’ve found a couple real interesting gems in there. The most recent one is finding the video channel for the Battleship New Jersey museum ship. Their curator climbs all over the ship making videos about the engineering, construction and history of the ship. Admittedly I t’s often a lot of videos I’ve rewatched multiple times but I do enjoy them so it’s not wrong that I might like to watch them again. A trick I’ve found is being careful about not ‘poisoning’ your recommended videos. There are some topics that are really bad about taking over your recommendations (though liberal use of the “show me less like this” and “don’t recommend channel” options have pruned some of that out) so sometimes watching a video in incognito helps.
- amelius 5y agoHuh? I didn't say you can't have recommendations. I said you can choose your recommendation engine.
- sushid 5y agoApologies, I misread.
- stefan_ 5y agoI don't need an algorithm, just have channels and a client-side subscription list. But on Vimeo everything is basically link-only and their front page wants you to sign up as a creator. It's just not a competition to YouTube, it's a video hoster.
- bosie 5y agoif all you have are channels and client-side subscription list (sync across devices?), how do you find anything new?
- krageon 5y agoThere was a time when youtube wasn't around to shove "related" content in your face and videos still got shared, talked about and discovered. This would be by word-of-mouth (either real life or fora) and (as an another poster commented) searching.
- greazy 5y ago....by searching for it??
- bosie 5y agoSearching and recommendation have two different use cases that might overlap but most often don’t
- wruza 5y agoThis. Vimeo feels like these noname pic sharing services. You may land on it from somewhere, but if you try to explore, it’s just a “see plans” homepage and the search knows almost none of my interests.
- kranke155 5y agoYou can have a feed but they’ve actually made it worse recently.
- bedobi 5y agoThey also don't have a dark mode in their app, which is a showstopper for me Can't binge videos at night with what feels like a friggin flashlight shining in my face
- bombcar 5y agoWe say as we are binging hackernews at night …
- throwaway14356 5y agohttps://github.com/UserStyles/hacker-news-solarized-dark https://github.com/UserStyles/hacker-news-solarized-dark
- exodust 5y agoThat github page links to the dodgy extension "Stylish". The better one is called Stylus. The main difference being "Any and all analytics, telemetry, and data-collection have been removed completely. We'd rather not know what you're up to." https://github.com/openstyles/stylus https://github.com/openstyles/stylus
- throwaway14356 5y agothanks for the reminder. I just use the css.
- bombcar 5y agoNo Safari, though.
- thrashh 5y agoIt’s not only that. Vimeo explicitly markets itself for a more niche market and has since the early days of video streaming. I don’t think they ever wanted to be YouTube. Sometimes carving out a niche IS the business goal.
- Andrex 5y agoExactly. If you're an actual filmmaker making films (and not just a content creator) you're more likely to favor Vimeo over YouTube, but you probably care more about iTunes/Google Play/Amazon/Netflix/etc.
- tombert 5y agoDoesn't Vimeo also license their platform out for other private streaming services? I thought I read that the Criterion Channel, for example, was hosted on Vimeo. I don't really think that YouTube is designed for that.
- agency 5y agoYeah they do. I’m a fan of the comedian Tim Heidecker and and he recently launched a small subscription-based streaming site (https://www.heinetwork.tv/ https://www.heinetwork.tv/) for some of his projects that’s built on Vimeo
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hanklazard 5y agoOff topic but I love his work so much. The universe that On Cinema has spawned is so much fun, not to mention all the previous stuff with Eric. I could watch this clip a thousand times, not yet taken down from YouTube: https://youtu.be/wjG-LJ5PP0o https://youtu.be/wjG-LJ5PP0o
- snek_case 5y agoIs there any competing service that has a model similar to YouTube? I know there's Facebook video, but AFAIK you need a Facebook account to view the videos, which stops a lot of traffic and makes the platform not searchable from Google.
- munk-a 5y agoFacebook also publishes famously misleading engagement metrics to producers. It's lead to a lot of business issues where content creators have gone too heavy into the platform and ended up running out of revenue.
- Ir0nMan 5y ago>Is there any competing service that has a model similar to YouTube? No.
- smaryjerry 5y agoRumble is making some big waves right now, actually paying uploaders for ads run on their videos and such. It’s still a small fraction of YouTube in terms of viewership though.
- bitwize 5y agoIt's also a den of right-wing disinformation and propaganda. Not something the average content creator wants to be associated with
- dleslie 5y agoNone of that pricing would seem all that unreasonable of Youtube weren't operated as a loss leader.
- TulliusCicero 5y agoI thought YouTube made money now?
- vanviegen 5y agoAny source to back that up? A quick Google only got me their revenue, which is a cool 20 billion. Though their costs are undoubtedly high, I'd guess they're making a nice profit.
- dleslie 5y agoIt was run as a loss leader for years, when there were still numerous viable competitors.
- kazinator 5y agoYouTube is not a loss leader. It uses your content to insert its ads; you don't pay because you're helping their advertisers sell stuff.
- wccrawford 5y agoI don't know if they still do, but Vimeo actively rejected lots of content that they felt didn't fit the goal of their platform. IMO If it wasn't basically art, they didn't want it. Most of the stuff I watch on Youtube wouldn't be allowed there. Under that direction, of course they'd have fewer content creators and viewers, and they obviously wanted it that way.
- zoul 5y agoWe used to pay for Vimeo and were happy about it, but then the service got slower and the UI more cluttered and we were constantly nagged to move to a higher plan. Also, even with the paid plan there was a quite low weekly upload quota (5 GB IIRC). It made no sense.
- agent327 5y agoAlso, there's already more on youtube than anyone could ever watch, and many people struggle with youtube addiction. Adding further platforms doesn't make things better, it makes things worse.