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Popular Patreon creators are being hit with Vimeo price hikes

217 points by usermi 5y ago

nathanyz 5y ago
My take is that Vimeo is trying to increase their overall margins. So in these cases the options for the users are to convert to a higher margin custom plan -or- they remove them from service which also boosts overall margins by removing low margin customers.
- HelloNurse 5y ago
  Given the insignificant effort and marginal cost required by a profitable but low margin customer, the only customers they should refuse are unprofitable ones, which should never exist in the first place if they have reasonable pricing plans and accounting. Some theories: - Formerly marginal customers have become unprofitable due to a cost increase, which might be caused by severe technical blunders. - Someone is deliberately paid (or bullied) to increase margin, even if it means decreasing profit and goodwill, or to purge customers that don't fit a certain profile, or to hurt the "YouTube competitor" department within the company. This sort of "strategy" appears to imply a whole chain of command of idiots and/or sociopaths. - Personnel is stretched so thin that instead of hiring they need to move staff from low-value video hosting (hurting what should be their main technical capability, hosting videos tout court) to profitable video hosting (or some bet on a new project).
h2odragon 5y ago
117 subscriber-only videos ... around 150 views on average ... 815 for the most viewed. so "bandwidth usage was within the top 1 percent of Vimeo users" says they have no audience and no traffic, doesn't it? The whole platform.
- barrkel 5y ago
  Likely an extremely long tail of almost-never-viewed videos.
- closetohome 5y ago
  If that qualifies as top 1% and Vimeo is hitting people up for $3000+/year, they must be in utterly dire financial straits. Which is really sad, as they've generally been the only nominally-competitive youtube alternative.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    And yet people complain about YouTube ads, even though YouTube gives an option to pay to not see ads.
    - neonnoodle 5y ago
      But what you can't do on YouTube is pay to not show ads to those viewing your videos. If it were an option, I would pay to have my videos be hosted ad-free on YT for the other features the platform offers. Unfortunately YT doesn't have this option.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Yes, that would be nice. I meant to illustrate how good the viewers of YouTube have it (it could not be better, of course), given that the main alternative is tapping out.
        rurp 5y ago
        Sure, but there's a specific reason there are no Youtube alternatives. Google leveraged their funds from a separate monopoly to drive out competitors on this space, and now that they have no viable competition they are free to massivly crank up the ads. If the US weren't so allowing of anti-trust behavior from big tech companies we might live in a world with several major video streaming sites that actually had to compete for creators and viewers.
        kmeisthax 5y ago
        Maybe. Or maybe we'd live in a world with no major free video sites, because the bandwidth costs of hosting such a thing would be too great for any competitive business to bear. Google gets to run YouTube because they can afford to store a lot of video, and every ISP needs to peer with them just to reduce their own bandwidth costs. Few, if any other companies have that advantage. The monopoly in online video is almost certainly being caused by upstream monopolies in last-mile Internet service, which makes them able to decide what companies can and cannot economically run an online video service.
- nathanyz 5y ago
  Can say that we are seeing a lot of these customers reach out to us at Swarmify and many of them are similar size. It doesn't seem like they should be anywhere close to "top 1% of users" at Vimeo.
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    I have to wonder how your pricing model of "views" is going to fare when Vimeo is dumping what they consider to be their worst customers onto you. Everything I know about how networks pay each other for this would suggest that you're charging a blended rate for a good whose cost is highly variable[0]. So either... - Vimeo is very wrong about how they calculate their bandwidth costs per user - Vimeo doesn't have the scale necessary for peering and is thus getting a raw deal on bandwidth that you've managed to avoid somehow - Vimeo is actually correct and you're about to become the next niche online creator subsidy vehicle I'm not sure Vimeo is miscalculating, at least in the specific case listed in the article. If the creator in question were to self-host their own video on AWS or Fastly, they'd be paying about what Vimeo wants to charge them. If you're uploading very long videos (multiple hours) and have a use case (art tutorials) that demands watching at 1080p or 4K, then even a few hundred views will breach 10TB+ of bandwidth per video. I have no idea how you guys would be even breaking even, at $59/mo plus $1 for every 1k views over 50k. I don't know what your bandwidth arrangements are, and I suspect you are not at liberty to explain them. But Vimeo is almost certainly larger than you, so they almost certainly have better bandwidth deals than you. Of course, this one case could also just be an outlier, and perhaps Vimeo is hosing everyone else with high-margin custom plans. But I doubt this is the case. [0] IP transit is typically charged by bytes sent, and peering costs are typically some large fixed cost to get a pipe of a specific capacity to a given network. A "view" can be anywhere from 1 to 50 Mbps depending on quality, and if you're paying for transit then your costs are also proportional to the length of that view.
    - nathanyz 5y ago
      These are fair points. You can check our history as we have been around since 2013 and sustain without big VC subsidies. The answer as to how is "deep tech" which we have been very protective of given how game changing it is. Not a satisfying answer I am guessing since it leaves out any hint of the how. Unfortunately necessary while we took care of protecting the intellectual property we created. Good news is that it looks like we will be able to share more in the near future.
- contravariant 5y ago
  So that's about 150 full downloads a month (give or take)? Even for particularly huge video files that's not a whole lot of bandwidth.
- protomyth 5y ago
  Honestly, this has to be some programming error in the report they used, or they are straight up lying. I cannot imagine ~18,000 views is the top 1% unless something went really wrong at Vimeo.
  - contravariant 5y ago
    Actually it might make sense if they're just looking at the total bandwidth usage. I can imagine 18000 views total being somewhere in the top 1% of all past and present users, I cannot imagine a few hundred views a month being somewhere in the top 1% for that month. If that's what's happening then this will wind up hurting vimeo's most loyal users.
  - cronix 5y ago
    > I cannot imagine ~18,000 views is the top 1% We're comparing the wrong numbers. If it was a 1 minute video, probably not. If it was an hour long video, well, there's quite a difference in bandwidth consumed per view. The isolated view count is not a good metric for comparing bandwidth, unless you multiply it by the length of the video. 1000 people who watch a 1 minute video is 1000 minutes. 1000 people who watch an hour long video is 60,000 minutes, consuming much more bandwidth with the same view count.
    - 22c 5y ago
      > If it was an hour long video, well, there's quite a difference in bandwidth consumed per view. What counts as a view? If someone watches 10 minutes of a 2 hour long video, does that count as "1 view of the entire video" for billing purposes?
- HillRat 5y ago
  Her videos seem to be fairly long (multiple-hour) art tutorials, so back of the envelope suggests that for most users, monthly delivery costs from a straight CDN (based on 24 months, four hours per video, 1080p quality, per-GB CDN price at $0.05) is going to be somewhere around $300/month, or basically dead-on to the $3,500/year they're asking for. Now, Vimeo's own delivery pricing is far below that -- perhaps an order of magnitude less -- but for most people there aren't going to be better pricing options for long-form video content of this sort.
  - thebean11 5y ago
    Is that assuming every view watched the entire four hour video? Highly doubt that, even if all views were from subscribers.
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
      How much of the video gets loaded/buffered when someone only watches 15m or so?
      - Saris 5y ago
        Usually seems about 30 seconds ahead in my experience.
    - gnicholas 5y ago
      The question is when a "view" is determined to have accrued. It's possible there are many more partial views that aren't counted, or that they're somehow aggregating partial views into full 'views' for the purposes of their calculations.
    - phphphphp 5y ago
      I definitely believe that paying subscribers would, on average, watch most of the video. There are popular creators publishing 3+ hour videos on YouTube, for free, generating millions of views from viewers watching most of the content... so paying subscribers doing the same is very much within the realms of possibility.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
xmodem 5y ago
This looks like a particularly egregious case of the toxic influence of VC money. Whey build a sustainable platform from day one when you can use the free money tap to attempt hypergrowth. Unfortunately, eventually it runs dry, and you have to justify your valuation based on whatever you did manage to build.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > Whey build a sustainable platform from day one when you can use the free money tap to attempt hypergrowth. When the competition (mainly YouTube) has billions of dollars worth of R&D and deficit-coverage budget, you don't stand a chance building a "sustainable" platform because all potential customers of yours will rather go for the free option. The fact that egress data is ridiculously expensive, especially at the quantity you need to build a global high-performance network, only reduces the options you have.
  - RubberbandSoul 5y ago
    Billions of dollars worth of R&D and I still can't organize my subscriptions. Sorry, I had to.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      Those billions of dollars of R&D explicitly went into preventing you from organizing your subscription - since at scale that probably leads to more "engagement".
- aserdf 5y ago
  vimeo had their IPO last year (VMEO)
  - sct202 5y ago
    -81% in about a year ($55->$10.4). Big yikes there.
AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
> In a letter to shareholders in February, Sud spells the shift out in black and white: “Today we are a technology platform, not a viewing destination. We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.” Vimeo did not respond to The Verge’s request for comment. Yup, that's pretty black and white. I plan to send that to everyone I know currently using Vimeo and advise them to jump off the sinking ship.
- tootie 5y ago
  This has pretty clearly been their business for years though. I'm glad she's spelling it out black and white but it's a great B2B platform and they absolutely can't ever catch YouTube so there's no point trying.
  - llampx 5y ago
    Is there no point in trying unless you can dominate the segment?
    - 1123581321 5y ago
      For video, there isn’t if you don’t have a realistic plan to drive video serving costs and ad sales/platform costs low enough. For consumers that requires enormous scale. Perhaps a new entrant would burn investment to try but Vimeo is hopefully not going to want to roll dice on an established company with real customers, after having already been beaten by YouTube once.
      - llampx 5y ago
        I understand your point of view. I am not sure whether the notion that there's no space for #2 or #3 etc, is true myself.
        tootie 5y ago
        I think the proof is in the pudding. Vimeo has been the #2 video sharing platform for a long time and are basically exiting the creator market because it's costing them money.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Bad idea to ask creators, better idea to ask advertisers, as it still costs the creators because someone has to make the bandwidth payments (they make slightly less), but then advertisers know better what their costs should be.
ypeterholmes 5y ago
Apparently it's not just OnlyFans and GoFundMe that like punching themselves in the nads. Mind boggling how these businesses make these decisions. Even if the strategy is to pivot, bungling the PR on this scale is just awful.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  Onlyfans saw what happened to Pornhub after Christian fundamentalist groups targetted them and were (IMO rightfully) scared that they would be the next in the crosshairs.
  - contravariant 5y ago
    I must have missed that, what exactly ended happened?
    - ChoGGi 5y ago
      They lost Visa and MasterCard https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30441276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30441276
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      The banks reversed course after a huge shitstorm [1] that included a number of high-profile influencers... and the attempt of the fundamentalist groups to find actually objectionable material like "revenge porn", stolen content and pornography produced under extortionary conditions like Pornhub hosted failed, which killed their leverage. Additionally, the censorship debate started discussions in Europe to create an European-based, discrimination-free payment network [2] - and that would have been a bigger threat to the Visa/Mastercard duopoly's profits than the risk of angering a bunch of Evangelical nutcases in the US. Meanwhile as for Pornhub, they still only have Bitcoin, Ethereum and shitcoins, and IIRC direct bank wire transfers as payment method. [1]: https://time.com/6092947/onlyfans-sexual-content-ban/ https://time.com/6092947/onlyfans-sexual-content-ban/ [2]: https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/european-payments-initiative-die-letzte-chance-fuer-ein-100.html https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/european-payments-initi...
T3RMINATED 5y ago
klelatti 5y ago
They’re probably testing the price sensitivity of a group of customers who represent a tiny part of their revenue. Some will stay and pay the much higher price presumably - in the absence of alternatives and they’re not bothered about those who leave. Not good but not surprising.
- rasz 5y ago
  They have been doing it for couple of years. I think EEVBlog or Louis Rossmann got hit by >$1K/year bill 1-2 year ago and decided to bail.
jb1991 5y ago
So I guess there are no good options anymore. I always liked Vimeo, but what’s the alternative now? If you use YouTube, you’re at risk of some weird bot deciding to deactivate your account without notice. Seems like there’s just no good options anymore for indie video creators. Are there?
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  PeerTube: https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30445497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30445497
  - jb1991 5y ago
    The comments in that thread are somewhat persuasive that it would not be the most appropriate choice for most video creatives.
  - awiesenhofer 5y ago
    > https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/ That frontpage alone though... and no inplace search, it tries to open a popup to a completely different url doing the actual search, why!? If they want to be an alternative to anything make it ie. peertube.org, with integrated searching and show me the top X trending videos on the frontpage to showcase the content on the platform and suck me in!
- anotherman554 5y ago
  If you already have an audience you can upload a file directly to the Internet and link to it from your Patreon.
  - jb1991 5y ago
    And where would you propose to upload it to? Video hosting is not cheap for heavy video streaming.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
xemdetia 5y ago
I'm wondering since some of the cases were Patreon people with a large back catalogs that Vimeo is actually counting the bandwidth attributed to embedding their player or provide link previews as part of the total. A large list of embedded videos that never actually play might be costing Vimeo in bandwidth to just get them to where they could play. So a 'gallery' of posts might be burning them because Patreon isn't making effort to cache a preview image or something like that.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  >Vimeo bandwidth usage is calculated using factors like video plays, resolution, loading the player and thumbnail image, downloading, and livestreaming, according to the company’s website. Yeah, it sounds like the preview thumb is counted in the bandwidth, and that could very well impact them.
sevenf0ur 5y ago
If you are using Vimeo to host videos you charge for and put behind a paywall, I don't think it's unreasonable for Vimeo to charge you for it. People here are acting like Vimeo is betraying their users or something, heh.
- MauranKilom 5y ago
  > I don't think it's unreasonable for Vimeo to charge you for it. Those users are already paying on the order of one grand per year.
ssijak 5y ago
Ooops, I'm kind of in the same boat as the first described user. Having videos behind a custom paywalled website hosted by vimeo. Looked at analytics right now, 12k minutes played and 200gb transferred in the last month, let's hope that does not put me in the top 1%, I don't want to be forced into a painful migration to something like cloudflare stream. Edit: I'm paying for the "pro" vimeo option currently.
- ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
  200gb bandwidth should cost you a buck or 2 / month in streaming. What's your total storage size? Should we around .01 / GB.
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    Thats maybe pure bandwidth costs with whoever you get bandwidth from. Most people can’t set up their own password protected video streaming service.
  - buggeryorkshire 5y ago
    Plus reencoding costs? Hosting the video in multiple formats for different devices?
    - ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
      Encoding is often free such as at BunnyCDN
- Nexxxeh 5y ago
  >let's hope that does not put me in the top 1% It might be worth starting to look at before it suddenly becomes urgent... As the ship sinks, they've possibly already lost nearly a third of their previous "top 1%". ["The company noted that over 70 percent of users flagged for excessive bandwidth choose to either upgrade to a custom plan or lower their bandwidth usage." - Without further breakdown, that's 30% that didn't choose either option, who presumably jumped or were pushed.]
GiorgioG 5y ago
Sounds like Vimeo will be sold for scraps in a year or two.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  It is already public. Question is if anyone will be willing to buy it for scraps.
- paxys 5y ago
  Why would anyone buy them? Video hosting is already commoditized, and Vimeo barely has a public brand. The buyer would simply be taking on operating expenses for hosting 15+ years of videos for no reason.
root_axis 5y ago
That's a big price increase which is not very customer friendly, but 16 bucks a month to host 100+ multi-hour HD tutorials sounds way too good of a deal to be sustainable.
- rasz 5y ago
  ~30 euro/m gets you Terabytes of storage and unmetered gigabit at hetzner.
pavlov 5y ago
A look at Vimeo's stock chart is enough to understand why they're doing this. Not much left to lose.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Oh, wow: 52-wk high 58.00 52-wk low 9.20 Today 10.47
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    Have they been public for 12 months/52 weeks? If you look at most non legacy/huge tech companies. They are within 1/3 of their 52 week low. A good many are right there within 10-15% like Vimeo. Vimeo’s drop off is steeper, for sure. Almost every IPO in 2021 is doing awful. Bumble’s stock is in the gutter too while still being popular enough (I believe, I haven’t looked at the numbers)
    - tyingq 5y ago
      They went public in May 2021, so 10 months.
lbriner 5y ago
I understand the shock people have with an unexpected bill but also, this is the result of people expecting and getting used to "free" stuff for too long and suppliers eventually realising that returns are diminishing with ads and they need to charge for stuff. What would happen if Google suddenly decided that GMail was not making money and were going to charge $50 per year per user? Outrage or just acceptance that people need to pay the bills (and in some cases, give their shareholders a nice Christmas bonus ;-) So the simple fact seems to be that people need to work out how much their videos are worth. 4000 videos is a lot, so is paying $3K per year really a lot to ask?
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Outrage. Offering people a free service to suddenly demand payment may get some to pay but the negative press might put them in front of regulators. Google will simply degrade the product and offer a better one for a fee. The bigger question is.. is watching that video worth 5 cents to someone. If not that video will disappear or be scaled down in quality so it costs 1 cent.
  - hannasanarion 5y ago
    Vimeo was never a free service though. No matter how big your channel is, to upload to Vimeo, you have to pay, that's how it's always been. The fees have, to date, been on a flat schedule, ranging from $100-$600/yr for various weekly upload limits. This has apparently become unsustainable for Vimeo, as there are no longer enough "minnows" who upload fewer videos on the platform than their subscription pays to subsidize the "whales" who upload more than what their subscription pays for.
    - bdougherty 5y ago
      That's not entirely true. There has always been, and still is, a free account, but of course it doesn't have all the features and has a very low upload limit.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      Vimeo was always a free service. Signup now and upload a video.
ravenstine 5y ago
I interviewed at Vimeo nearly 5 years ago. No hard feelings to anyone there, but let's just say I didn't get the impression that things at Vimeo were "booming" by any means. Somewhat small office for a company that old. When I asked what the interviewers liked about working there, I didn't get any specific answers. Nobody seemed excited at all. It was pretty clear that ship was sinking, and I'm surprised they've lasted this long before desperately clawing at the walls. Vimeo as a platform once had a sort of vibe not too far off from that of Instagram, but they chose to cater to artsy content even though that stuff really doesn't make much money. They should have pivoted to just being a sort of more hip YouTube for the descendants of the YouTube generation. Now TikTok, Instagram, and Rumble (to a small extent) have that.
- smileybarry 5y ago
  Recently during COVID lockdowns, one of the local cinemas with a niche movie club pivoted to offering at-home viewings powered by Vimeo. It was a bit crude, given as a password-protected video that they'd "enable" for specific hourly blocks, but it worked very well. Because they relied on Vimeo, that meant you could use any Vimeo apps or casting plugins, e.g.: Google Cast. Stuff like that might've kept them from sinking, basically companies who want to upload a private, copyrighted video file that they have rights to but would get taken down (or muted, or DMCA-censored) by YouTube in under an hour. I was pleasantly surprised the movie studios actually signed off on them uploading an unprotected video file, but obviously they did. I wonder if they charged them the same or more than the person in this article. They obviously generated more traffic than her, but I'm cynically assuming they "got away" with paying less.
WheelsAtLarge 5y ago
These creators have a following. It seems to me that they should be able to figure out how to finance their usage. Vimeo should give them a chance now that they feel they are too expensive to keep on their platform. The problem is not that Vimeo decided to charge. It sounds like they should have done it a long time ago. The problem is that Vimeo is not giving them enough time to adapt.
- tarentel 5y ago
  The person was already being charged $200 a year. The problem is that they are now being charged $3500 a year. You don't really adapt to that kind of price increase, you go somewhere else if you can find it.
  - hannasanarion 5y ago
    The person also uploaded over 450 hours of video. That works out to $7 per hour of video per year, which does not strike me as unreasonable. Their patreon has only one subscription option: $5/mo, at which 4400 people are subscribed, so they're bringing in $20,000/mo after Patreon's cut. Vimeo is asking for $300/mo pay for services accessible to the people who are paying in total $20,000/mo so, I really don't see what standing they have to complain here.
    - tarentel 5y ago
      I don't think it really matters how much money the person is making. Being blind sided by 1750% increase in price would make anyone complain. Sure, they should have read the fine print and all that but to raise prices that much and say you have 9 days to comply or you don't exist to us seems like a scummy business practice. You may disagree.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
tyingq 5y ago
It would be interesting if there were an incentive for the various last mile ISPs to run a sort of "conglomerate" CDN where you could put bandwidth hungry things close to their users. Google and Netflix have these sorts of ISP hosted cache boxes, but as far as I can tell, they are the only ones with enough leverage so far.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Xfinity does as well for their own infrastructure edges, but I realize that's a little different. IMO Netflix and Google are only ones where doing this makes sense. Deploying and maintaining these edge CDN caches isn't cheap (For Netflix, probably a petabyte per machine to cache their largest shows in 4k with enough mirroring for the read bandwidth they need to they enable streaming terabits of data[0]. For Google it must be larger, or they just run it in raid 0 and have faults fallback to regular POPs). 0: https://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/how-netflix-built-its-openconnect-cache-to-speed-up-your-video-streams/2/#:~:text=We%20don%E2%80%99t%20have%20as%20many%20petabytes%2C%20but%20we%20have%20more%20terabits%20than%20anybody%20else https://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/how-netflix-built-its-openconn...
  - tyingq 5y ago
    Feels like there would be some middle ground, if the various ISPs were working together as a conglomerate and caching at various regional peering points. I suppose that's dangerous ground legally though.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      The bigger issue with that is someone still needs to buy those hard drives and pay personnel to manager the hardware. The solution everyone came up with was to widely expand peering and put in 10 or 40 gig links at IXs, which keeps everyone happy with their opsec and still reduces the amount of backbone transit costs the parties incur.
endisneigh 5y ago
this right here is why YouTube is the most popular. most people don't want to pay what it truly costs. video hosting is very expensive.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
paxys 5y ago
Free service tracks users and shows ads – "This is a terrible business model, they should just ask users to pay." Service offers a flat monthly fee – "Why does everything have to be subscription based? They should bill based on usage." Service bills for hosting and bandwidth use – "How can creators afford to pay so much? This is exploitative." I'm starting to think people here don't like the idea of paying for things, period.
- Macha 5y ago
  I don't think the suggestion from _users_ suffering from subscription fatigue is usage based billing, as it still has the psychological worry of having to keep paying money or have something taken away. Usually they're complaining that e.g. the chess app on their phone wants a subscription. I actually agree that commercial video hosting should have some form of ongoing payment, they have real costs associated with extra usage, in a way that the aforementioned chess app doesn't. But simplifying different users with different concerns complaining into different users as "all users complain about everything" is an over simplificiation in my mind
- tedivm 5y ago
  That's not what people are saying at all actually. What they're annoyed about is finding out their bill is jumping from $120 a year to $7,000 a year with only a weeks notice to do anything about it. Vimeo changed what they want to focus on (they want to be a big enterprise focused organization) and are jacking up the prices for the customers they don't want to support anymore. Due to lock in many of them will be stuck around paying the higher bills for a bit, but in the end most people will end up moving.
  - chiefalchemist 5y ago
    Yes. But haven't we've seen this before? When the foundation of your biz model is built on what amounts to a single outlier, there is always risk. Or actually more risk. The expectation that this would go one forever simply - in the context of history - isn't reasonable. Agreed. More notice would have been helpful, but again this isn't some radical new slip. None of these platforms are too big to fail. We've all been warned. We need to stop forgetting about these warnings.
mdoms 5y ago
I don't know if it's a regional thing but I have never once had a Vimeo video play without stopping to buffer. Not once, in what, 15 years of serving videos? I'm on a gigabit fiber connection. My heart sinks when I see someone sharing a Vimeo link for something I really want to watch.
evan_ 5y ago
Vimeo isn't a destination in the same way that Youtube is, where people go to just browse videos, but creative professionals use it pretty widely. If you're an actor, editor, VFX artist, agency, etc. you put your demo reel and clips of your work up on Vimeo. It's kind of like Soundcloud in that regard, where they're the most popular, go-to destination for something that doesn't actually make any money. They also have a VOD offering and some interesting stuff for turning that into a set-top box channel which I have not dug into. Dropbox seems like a natural fit if they're to be acquired but who knows.
- qiskit 5y ago
  That's interesting. I never could figure out why vimeo even existed as everyone uses youtube. But I guess it has a niche. Any idea why creative professionals gravitated towards vimeo?
  - evan_ 5y ago
    Couldn't say for sure but I would speculate it has to do with, you can link directly to a video and it won't show a bunch of links to other videos to watch, comments, ads, etc. Whereas if you post your serious acting monologue on Youtube, even unlisted, it's going to have a bunch of distractions and videos from other people that you probably don't want the casting director being pulled into. The fact that Vimeo doesn't have the same level of content match might play into it too, if you want to show off a clip from the episode of Modern Family where you had two lines you don't want ABC to pull it. I'm sure network effect drive it as well, if you're trying to break into an industry and you see that lots of already successful people are using Vimeo, you're going to use it too.
  - voltaireodactyl 5y ago
    Video quality is significantly higher on Vimeo, and their support is much, MUCH more reachable than Google’s. Being able to contact someone to resolve issues is so critical to the film industry that even IMDb has added an option.
    - 5y ago
imchillyb 5y ago
> In a letter to shareholders in February, Sud spells the shift out in black and white: “Today we are a technology platform, not a viewing destination. We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.” > “I paid for this year, but I don’t intend on paying again next year,” he says. Goodbye Vimeo, you've just ensured your own demise; congratulations!
sequoia 5y ago
The solution I think most people want here is "give more notice for a change like this." Probably at least six months notice, i.e. enough time for someone to reasonably be able to put together and execute a migration plan. Vimeo is not obligated to subsidize clients they lose money on, but they don't need to screw them over by drastically changing their fees without enough notice for the user to reasonably be able to move.
Animats 5y ago
Since the demand from the video comes from Patreon, you can host anywhere. Why not try PeerTube? Free, no commercials. I put technical videos on Hardlimit, to illustrate bug reports and progress reports. So far, still up, despite numbers like 37 views. If usage from Patreon takes off, PeerTube will either collapse under the load or go mainstream.
dewey 5y ago
Just by looking at the Vimeo landing page over the years it was clear that they are aiming for the B2B market. Small time creators are clearly not the target group. One example is their "white label" streaming provider backend (Netflix as a service): https://vimeo.com/ott https://vimeo.com/ott
k__ 5y ago
Just a few minutes ago, I read about Glass, a Web3 video hosting platform. Guess they came at the right time! https://glass.xyz https://glass.xyz
- Inityx 5y ago
  Web3 is a Ponzi scheme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
  - k__ 5y ago
    Thanks for the heads-up.
kregasaurusrex 5y ago
I've had one creator move all their hosting over to Mega- sure they might miss out on the analytics tools/dashboards, but if your audience is mostly desktop users then they generally won't see much difference in having to unzip a video file instead of playing it from Vimeo. It's generally niche enough that a portion of monthly Patreon subs can make up for a YouTube video being demonetized because of various arbitrary reasons while not disrupting their main income source. Heck, it's probably saving money being on the 10€/mo tier providing 2 TB of bandwidth while Vimeo wants to charge an order of magnitude more for essentially the same functionality, maybe only an inconvenience for those that want to watch on their phone during a commute or something similar.
Traster 5y ago
This is far less outrageous than I first thought. Firstly, the person in question has 4400 patrons at $5 a month. So she's bringing in $20k a month. That's not exactly some small time creator. But obviously the patreon isn't all about her videos. Let's just take her average views - 150 views, let's assume they're her patrons, so there's about $750/mo of revenue associated with those videos. So it's not like she can't actually afford to pay for this. And if you look at the other comments about the cost of hosting videos, the price Vimeo is charging isn't that far from the cost to serve the videos. So all in all this seems like an extremely well earning person who, from now on, isn't going to get below cost hosting from Vimeo. $3500 sounds a lot, but her income from Patreon alone is $240k, and if she's running her business reasonably, that $3.5k comes out pre-tax.
- chii 5y ago
  i dunno how patreon subscription works with vimeo now, but usually, the vimeo vid is just password protected and only patreon subscribers get a password. Therefore, the number of subscribers isn't gonna indicate video bandwidth, because it's easy to unsubscribe patreon, but still retain access to the vimeo access. May be it is different now - i haven't kept up for a long time in this segment of the world.
  - quxbar 5y ago
    Patreon is introducing better integration with things like Discord, I wouldn't be surprised if the vimeo solution is also more sophisticated now (though with youtube it seems to still be just an unlisted video you can share around as you like)
8bitsrule 5y ago
Maybe its time for those Tier 1&2 companies (nobody seems to know their names) - to chip-in with some public-service servers for artists and creatives to use. Obviously they're making money. After users reach a certain level they could be switched to non-profit costing.
srg0 5y ago
A lesson to learn from this story: don’t use Vimeo if video is your business.
nunez 5y ago
I didn't know that Vimeo was spun out of IAC. (IAC owns Match and Tinder.)

217 points by usermi 5y ago

My take is that Vimeo is trying to increase their overall margins. So in these cases the options for the users are to convert to a higher margin custom plan -or- they remove them from service which also boosts overall margins by removing low margin customers.

HelloNurse 5y ago
Given the insignificant effort and marginal cost required by a profitable but low margin customer, the only customers they should refuse are unprofitable ones, which should never exist in the first place if they have reasonable pricing plans and accounting. Some theories: - Formerly marginal customers have become unprofitable due to a cost increase, which might be caused by severe technical blunders. - Someone is deliberately paid (or bullied) to increase margin, even if it means decreasing profit and goodwill, or to purge customers that don't fit a certain profile, or to hurt the "YouTube competitor" department within the company. This sort of "strategy" appears to imply a whole chain of command of idiots and/or sociopaths. - Personnel is stretched so thin that instead of hiring they need to move staff from low-value video hosting (hurting what should be their main technical capability, hosting videos tout court) to profitable video hosting (or some bet on a new project).

h2odragon 5y ago

117 subscriber-only videos ... around 150 views on average ... 815 for the most viewed. so "bandwidth usage was within the top 1 percent of Vimeo users" says they have no audience and no traffic, doesn't it? The whole platform.

barrkel 5y ago
Likely an extremely long tail of almost-never-viewed videos.
closetohome 5y ago
If that qualifies as top 1% and Vimeo is hitting people up for $3000+/year, they must be in utterly dire financial straits. Which is really sad, as they've generally been the only nominally-competitive youtube alternative.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  And yet people complain about YouTube ads, even though YouTube gives an option to pay to not see ads.
  - neonnoodle 5y ago
    But what you can't do on YouTube is pay to not show ads to those viewing your videos. If it were an option, I would pay to have my videos be hosted ad-free on YT for the other features the platform offers. Unfortunately YT doesn't have this option.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Yes, that would be nice. I meant to illustrate how good the viewers of YouTube have it (it could not be better, of course), given that the main alternative is tapping out.
      - rurp 5y ago
        Sure, but there's a specific reason there are no Youtube alternatives. Google leveraged their funds from a separate monopoly to drive out competitors on this space, and now that they have no viable competition they are free to massivly crank up the ads. If the US weren't so allowing of anti-trust behavior from big tech companies we might live in a world with several major video streaming sites that actually had to compete for creators and viewers.
        kmeisthax 5y ago
        Maybe. Or maybe we'd live in a world with no major free video sites, because the bandwidth costs of hosting such a thing would be too great for any competitive business to bear. Google gets to run YouTube because they can afford to store a lot of video, and every ISP needs to peer with them just to reduce their own bandwidth costs. Few, if any other companies have that advantage. The monopoly in online video is almost certainly being caused by upstream monopolies in last-mile Internet service, which makes them able to decide what companies can and cannot economically run an online video service.
nathanyz 5y ago
Can say that we are seeing a lot of these customers reach out to us at Swarmify and many of them are similar size. It doesn't seem like they should be anywhere close to "top 1% of users" at Vimeo.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  I have to wonder how your pricing model of "views" is going to fare when Vimeo is dumping what they consider to be their worst customers onto you. Everything I know about how networks pay each other for this would suggest that you're charging a blended rate for a good whose cost is highly variable[0]. So either... - Vimeo is very wrong about how they calculate their bandwidth costs per user - Vimeo doesn't have the scale necessary for peering and is thus getting a raw deal on bandwidth that you've managed to avoid somehow - Vimeo is actually correct and you're about to become the next niche online creator subsidy vehicle I'm not sure Vimeo is miscalculating, at least in the specific case listed in the article. If the creator in question were to self-host their own video on AWS or Fastly, they'd be paying about what Vimeo wants to charge them. If you're uploading very long videos (multiple hours) and have a use case (art tutorials) that demands watching at 1080p or 4K, then even a few hundred views will breach 10TB+ of bandwidth per video. I have no idea how you guys would be even breaking even, at $59/mo plus $1 for every 1k views over 50k. I don't know what your bandwidth arrangements are, and I suspect you are not at liberty to explain them. But Vimeo is almost certainly larger than you, so they almost certainly have better bandwidth deals than you. Of course, this one case could also just be an outlier, and perhaps Vimeo is hosing everyone else with high-margin custom plans. But I doubt this is the case. [0] IP transit is typically charged by bytes sent, and peering costs are typically some large fixed cost to get a pipe of a specific capacity to a given network. A "view" can be anywhere from 1 to 50 Mbps depending on quality, and if you're paying for transit then your costs are also proportional to the length of that view.
  - nathanyz 5y ago
    These are fair points. You can check our history as we have been around since 2013 and sustain without big VC subsidies. The answer as to how is "deep tech" which we have been very protective of given how game changing it is. Not a satisfying answer I am guessing since it leaves out any hint of the how. Unfortunately necessary while we took care of protecting the intellectual property we created. Good news is that it looks like we will be able to share more in the near future.
contravariant 5y ago
So that's about 150 full downloads a month (give or take)? Even for particularly huge video files that's not a whole lot of bandwidth.
protomyth 5y ago
Honestly, this has to be some programming error in the report they used, or they are straight up lying. I cannot imagine ~18,000 views is the top 1% unless something went really wrong at Vimeo.
- contravariant 5y ago
  Actually it might make sense if they're just looking at the total bandwidth usage. I can imagine 18000 views total being somewhere in the top 1% of all past and present users, I cannot imagine a few hundred views a month being somewhere in the top 1% for that month. If that's what's happening then this will wind up hurting vimeo's most loyal users.
- cronix 5y ago
  > I cannot imagine ~18,000 views is the top 1% We're comparing the wrong numbers. If it was a 1 minute video, probably not. If it was an hour long video, well, there's quite a difference in bandwidth consumed per view. The isolated view count is not a good metric for comparing bandwidth, unless you multiply it by the length of the video. 1000 people who watch a 1 minute video is 1000 minutes. 1000 people who watch an hour long video is 60,000 minutes, consuming much more bandwidth with the same view count.
  - 22c 5y ago
    > If it was an hour long video, well, there's quite a difference in bandwidth consumed per view. What counts as a view? If someone watches 10 minutes of a 2 hour long video, does that count as "1 view of the entire video" for billing purposes?
HillRat 5y ago
Her videos seem to be fairly long (multiple-hour) art tutorials, so back of the envelope suggests that for most users, monthly delivery costs from a straight CDN (based on 24 months, four hours per video, 1080p quality, per-GB CDN price at $0.05) is going to be somewhere around $300/month, or basically dead-on to the $3,500/year they're asking for. Now, Vimeo's own delivery pricing is far below that -- perhaps an order of magnitude less -- but for most people there aren't going to be better pricing options for long-form video content of this sort.
- thebean11 5y ago
  Is that assuming every view watched the entire four hour video? Highly doubt that, even if all views were from subscribers.
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    How much of the video gets loaded/buffered when someone only watches 15m or so?
    - Saris 5y ago
      Usually seems about 30 seconds ahead in my experience.
  - gnicholas 5y ago
    The question is when a "view" is determined to have accrued. It's possible there are many more partial views that aren't counted, or that they're somehow aggregating partial views into full 'views' for the purposes of their calculations.
  - phphphphp 5y ago
    I definitely believe that paying subscribers would, on average, watch most of the video. There are popular creators publishing 3+ hour videos on YouTube, for free, generating millions of views from viewers watching most of the content... so paying subscribers doing the same is very much within the realms of possibility.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

xmodem 5y ago

This looks like a particularly egregious case of the toxic influence of VC money. Whey build a sustainable platform from day one when you can use the free money tap to attempt hypergrowth. Unfortunately, eventually it runs dry, and you have to justify your valuation based on whatever you did manage to build.

mschuster91 5y ago
> Whey build a sustainable platform from day one when you can use the free money tap to attempt hypergrowth. When the competition (mainly YouTube) has billions of dollars worth of R&D and deficit-coverage budget, you don't stand a chance building a "sustainable" platform because all potential customers of yours will rather go for the free option. The fact that egress data is ridiculously expensive, especially at the quantity you need to build a global high-performance network, only reduces the options you have.
- RubberbandSoul 5y ago
  Billions of dollars worth of R&D and I still can't organize my subscriptions. Sorry, I had to.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Those billions of dollars of R&D explicitly went into preventing you from organizing your subscription - since at scale that probably leads to more "engagement".
aserdf 5y ago
vimeo had their IPO last year (VMEO)
- sct202 5y ago
  -81% in about a year ($55->$10.4). Big yikes there.

AdmiralAsshat 5y ago

> In a letter to shareholders in February, Sud spells the shift out in black and white: “Today we are a technology platform, not a viewing destination. We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.” Vimeo did not respond to The Verge’s request for comment. Yup, that's pretty black and white. I plan to send that to everyone I know currently using Vimeo and advise them to jump off the sinking ship.

tootie 5y ago
This has pretty clearly been their business for years though. I'm glad she's spelling it out black and white but it's a great B2B platform and they absolutely can't ever catch YouTube so there's no point trying.
- llampx 5y ago
  Is there no point in trying unless you can dominate the segment?
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    For video, there isn’t if you don’t have a realistic plan to drive video serving costs and ad sales/platform costs low enough. For consumers that requires enormous scale. Perhaps a new entrant would burn investment to try but Vimeo is hopefully not going to want to roll dice on an established company with real customers, after having already been beaten by YouTube once.
    - llampx 5y ago
      I understand your point of view. I am not sure whether the notion that there's no space for #2 or #3 etc, is true myself.
      - tootie 5y ago
        I think the proof is in the pudding. Vimeo has been the #2 video sharing platform for a long time and are basically exiting the creator market because it's costing them money.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Bad idea to ask creators, better idea to ask advertisers, as it still costs the creators because someone has to make the bandwidth payments (they make slightly less), but then advertisers know better what their costs should be.

ypeterholmes 5y ago

Apparently it's not just OnlyFans and GoFundMe that like punching themselves in the nads. Mind boggling how these businesses make these decisions. Even if the strategy is to pivot, bungling the PR on this scale is just awful.

mschuster91 5y ago
Onlyfans saw what happened to Pornhub after Christian fundamentalist groups targetted them and were (IMO rightfully) scared that they would be the next in the crosshairs.
- contravariant 5y ago
  I must have missed that, what exactly ended happened?
  - ChoGGi 5y ago
    They lost Visa and MasterCard https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30441276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30441276
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    The banks reversed course after a huge shitstorm [1] that included a number of high-profile influencers... and the attempt of the fundamentalist groups to find actually objectionable material like "revenge porn", stolen content and pornography produced under extortionary conditions like Pornhub hosted failed, which killed their leverage. Additionally, the censorship debate started discussions in Europe to create an European-based, discrimination-free payment network [2] - and that would have been a bigger threat to the Visa/Mastercard duopoly's profits than the risk of angering a bunch of Evangelical nutcases in the US. Meanwhile as for Pornhub, they still only have Bitcoin, Ethereum and shitcoins, and IIRC direct bank wire transfers as payment method. [1]: https://time.com/6092947/onlyfans-sexual-content-ban/ https://time.com/6092947/onlyfans-sexual-content-ban/ [2]: https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/european-payments-initiative-die-letzte-chance-fuer-ein-100.html https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/european-payments-initi...

T3RMINATED 5y ago

klelatti 5y ago

They’re probably testing the price sensitivity of a group of customers who represent a tiny part of their revenue. Some will stay and pay the much higher price presumably - in the absence of alternatives and they’re not bothered about those who leave. Not good but not surprising.

rasz 5y ago
They have been doing it for couple of years. I think EEVBlog or Louis Rossmann got hit by >$1K/year bill 1-2 year ago and decided to bail.

jb1991 5y ago

So I guess there are no good options anymore. I always liked Vimeo, but what’s the alternative now? If you use YouTube, you’re at risk of some weird bot deciding to deactivate your account without notice. Seems like there’s just no good options anymore for indie video creators. Are there?

pmoriarty 5y ago
PeerTube: https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30445497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30445497
- jb1991 5y ago
  The comments in that thread are somewhat persuasive that it would not be the most appropriate choice for most video creatives.
- awiesenhofer 5y ago
  > https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/ That frontpage alone though... and no inplace search, it tries to open a popup to a completely different url doing the actual search, why!? If they want to be an alternative to anything make it ie. peertube.org, with integrated searching and show me the top X trending videos on the frontpage to showcase the content on the platform and suck me in!
anotherman554 5y ago
If you already have an audience you can upload a file directly to the Internet and link to it from your Patreon.
- jb1991 5y ago
  And where would you propose to upload it to? Video hosting is not cheap for heavy video streaming.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago

xemdetia 5y ago

I'm wondering since some of the cases were Patreon people with a large back catalogs that Vimeo is actually counting the bandwidth attributed to embedding their player or provide link previews as part of the total. A large list of embedded videos that never actually play might be costing Vimeo in bandwidth to just get them to where they could play. So a 'gallery' of posts might be burning them because Patreon isn't making effort to cache a preview image or something like that.

wccrawford 5y ago
>Vimeo bandwidth usage is calculated using factors like video plays, resolution, loading the player and thumbnail image, downloading, and livestreaming, according to the company’s website. Yeah, it sounds like the preview thumb is counted in the bandwidth, and that could very well impact them.

sevenf0ur 5y ago

If you are using Vimeo to host videos you charge for and put behind a paywall, I don't think it's unreasonable for Vimeo to charge you for it. People here are acting like Vimeo is betraying their users or something, heh.

MauranKilom 5y ago
> I don't think it's unreasonable for Vimeo to charge you for it. Those users are already paying on the order of one grand per year.

ssijak 5y ago

Ooops, I'm kind of in the same boat as the first described user. Having videos behind a custom paywalled website hosted by vimeo. Looked at analytics right now, 12k minutes played and 200gb transferred in the last month, let's hope that does not put me in the top 1%, I don't want to be forced into a painful migration to something like cloudflare stream. Edit: I'm paying for the "pro" vimeo option currently.

ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
200gb bandwidth should cost you a buck or 2 / month in streaming. What's your total storage size? Should we around .01 / GB.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  Thats maybe pure bandwidth costs with whoever you get bandwidth from. Most people can’t set up their own password protected video streaming service.
- buggeryorkshire 5y ago
  Plus reencoding costs? Hosting the video in multiple formats for different devices?
  - ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
    Encoding is often free such as at BunnyCDN
Nexxxeh 5y ago
>let's hope that does not put me in the top 1% It might be worth starting to look at before it suddenly becomes urgent... As the ship sinks, they've possibly already lost nearly a third of their previous "top 1%". ["The company noted that over 70 percent of users flagged for excessive bandwidth choose to either upgrade to a custom plan or lower their bandwidth usage." - Without further breakdown, that's 30% that didn't choose either option, who presumably jumped or were pushed.]

GiorgioG 5y ago

Sounds like Vimeo will be sold for scraps in a year or two.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
It is already public. Question is if anyone will be willing to buy it for scraps.
paxys 5y ago
Why would anyone buy them? Video hosting is already commoditized, and Vimeo barely has a public brand. The buyer would simply be taking on operating expenses for hosting 15+ years of videos for no reason.

root_axis 5y ago

That's a big price increase which is not very customer friendly, but 16 bucks a month to host 100+ multi-hour HD tutorials sounds way too good of a deal to be sustainable.

rasz 5y ago
~30 euro/m gets you Terabytes of storage and unmetered gigabit at hetzner.

pavlov 5y ago

A look at Vimeo's stock chart is enough to understand why they're doing this. Not much left to lose.

tyingq 5y ago
Oh, wow: 52-wk high 58.00 52-wk low 9.20 Today 10.47
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  Have they been public for 12 months/52 weeks? If you look at most non legacy/huge tech companies. They are within 1/3 of their 52 week low. A good many are right there within 10-15% like Vimeo. Vimeo’s drop off is steeper, for sure. Almost every IPO in 2021 is doing awful. Bumble’s stock is in the gutter too while still being popular enough (I believe, I haven’t looked at the numbers)
  - tyingq 5y ago
    They went public in May 2021, so 10 months.

lbriner 5y ago

I understand the shock people have with an unexpected bill but also, this is the result of people expecting and getting used to "free" stuff for too long and suppliers eventually realising that returns are diminishing with ads and they need to charge for stuff. What would happen if Google suddenly decided that GMail was not making money and were going to charge $50 per year per user? Outrage or just acceptance that people need to pay the bills (and in some cases, give their shareholders a nice Christmas bonus ;-) So the simple fact seems to be that people need to work out how much their videos are worth. 4000 videos is a lot, so is paying $3K per year really a lot to ask?

ipaddr 5y ago
Outrage. Offering people a free service to suddenly demand payment may get some to pay but the negative press might put them in front of regulators. Google will simply degrade the product and offer a better one for a fee. The bigger question is.. is watching that video worth 5 cents to someone. If not that video will disappear or be scaled down in quality so it costs 1 cent.
- hannasanarion 5y ago
  Vimeo was never a free service though. No matter how big your channel is, to upload to Vimeo, you have to pay, that's how it's always been. The fees have, to date, been on a flat schedule, ranging from $100-$600/yr for various weekly upload limits. This has apparently become unsustainable for Vimeo, as there are no longer enough "minnows" who upload fewer videos on the platform than their subscription pays to subsidize the "whales" who upload more than what their subscription pays for.
  - bdougherty 5y ago
    That's not entirely true. There has always been, and still is, a free account, but of course it doesn't have all the features and has a very low upload limit.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Vimeo was always a free service. Signup now and upload a video.

ravenstine 5y ago

I interviewed at Vimeo nearly 5 years ago. No hard feelings to anyone there, but let's just say I didn't get the impression that things at Vimeo were "booming" by any means. Somewhat small office for a company that old. When I asked what the interviewers liked about working there, I didn't get any specific answers. Nobody seemed excited at all. It was pretty clear that ship was sinking, and I'm surprised they've lasted this long before desperately clawing at the walls. Vimeo as a platform once had a sort of vibe not too far off from that of Instagram, but they chose to cater to artsy content even though that stuff really doesn't make much money. They should have pivoted to just being a sort of more hip YouTube for the descendants of the YouTube generation. Now TikTok, Instagram, and Rumble (to a small extent) have that.

smileybarry 5y ago
Recently during COVID lockdowns, one of the local cinemas with a niche movie club pivoted to offering at-home viewings powered by Vimeo. It was a bit crude, given as a password-protected video that they'd "enable" for specific hourly blocks, but it worked very well. Because they relied on Vimeo, that meant you could use any Vimeo apps or casting plugins, e.g.: Google Cast. Stuff like that might've kept them from sinking, basically companies who want to upload a private, copyrighted video file that they have rights to but would get taken down (or muted, or DMCA-censored) by YouTube in under an hour. I was pleasantly surprised the movie studios actually signed off on them uploading an unprotected video file, but obviously they did. I wonder if they charged them the same or more than the person in this article. They obviously generated more traffic than her, but I'm cynically assuming they "got away" with paying less.

WheelsAtLarge 5y ago

These creators have a following. It seems to me that they should be able to figure out how to finance their usage. Vimeo should give them a chance now that they feel they are too expensive to keep on their platform. The problem is not that Vimeo decided to charge. It sounds like they should have done it a long time ago. The problem is that Vimeo is not giving them enough time to adapt.

tarentel 5y ago
The person was already being charged $200 a year. The problem is that they are now being charged $3500 a year. You don't really adapt to that kind of price increase, you go somewhere else if you can find it.
- hannasanarion 5y ago
  The person also uploaded over 450 hours of video. That works out to $7 per hour of video per year, which does not strike me as unreasonable. Their patreon has only one subscription option: $5/mo, at which 4400 people are subscribed, so they're bringing in $20,000/mo after Patreon's cut. Vimeo is asking for $300/mo pay for services accessible to the people who are paying in total $20,000/mo so, I really don't see what standing they have to complain here.
  - tarentel 5y ago
    I don't think it really matters how much money the person is making. Being blind sided by 1750% increase in price would make anyone complain. Sure, they should have read the fine print and all that but to raise prices that much and say you have 9 days to comply or you don't exist to us seems like a scummy business practice. You may disagree.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

tyingq 5y ago

It would be interesting if there were an incentive for the various last mile ISPs to run a sort of "conglomerate" CDN where you could put bandwidth hungry things close to their users. Google and Netflix have these sorts of ISP hosted cache boxes, but as far as I can tell, they are the only ones with enough leverage so far.

judge2020 5y ago
Xfinity does as well for their own infrastructure edges, but I realize that's a little different. IMO Netflix and Google are only ones where doing this makes sense. Deploying and maintaining these edge CDN caches isn't cheap (For Netflix, probably a petabyte per machine to cache their largest shows in 4k with enough mirroring for the read bandwidth they need to they enable streaming terabits of data[0]. For Google it must be larger, or they just run it in raid 0 and have faults fallback to regular POPs). 0: https://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/how-netflix-built-its-openconnect-cache-to-speed-up-your-video-streams/2/#:~:text=We%20don%E2%80%99t%20have%20as%20many%20petabytes%2C%20but%20we%20have%20more%20terabits%20than%20anybody%20else https://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/how-netflix-built-its-openconn...
- tyingq 5y ago
  Feels like there would be some middle ground, if the various ISPs were working together as a conglomerate and caching at various regional peering points. I suppose that's dangerous ground legally though.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    The bigger issue with that is someone still needs to buy those hard drives and pay personnel to manager the hardware. The solution everyone came up with was to widely expand peering and put in 10 or 40 gig links at IXs, which keeps everyone happy with their opsec and still reduces the amount of backbone transit costs the parties incur.

endisneigh 5y ago

this right here is why YouTube is the most popular. most people don't want to pay what it truly costs. video hosting is very expensive.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

paxys 5y ago

Free service tracks users and shows ads – "This is a terrible business model, they should just ask users to pay." Service offers a flat monthly fee – "Why does everything have to be subscription based? They should bill based on usage." Service bills for hosting and bandwidth use – "How can creators afford to pay so much? This is exploitative." I'm starting to think people here don't like the idea of paying for things, period.

Macha 5y ago
I don't think the suggestion from _users_ suffering from subscription fatigue is usage based billing, as it still has the psychological worry of having to keep paying money or have something taken away. Usually they're complaining that e.g. the chess app on their phone wants a subscription. I actually agree that commercial video hosting should have some form of ongoing payment, they have real costs associated with extra usage, in a way that the aforementioned chess app doesn't. But simplifying different users with different concerns complaining into different users as "all users complain about everything" is an over simplificiation in my mind
tedivm 5y ago
That's not what people are saying at all actually. What they're annoyed about is finding out their bill is jumping from $120 a year to $7,000 a year with only a weeks notice to do anything about it. Vimeo changed what they want to focus on (they want to be a big enterprise focused organization) and are jacking up the prices for the customers they don't want to support anymore. Due to lock in many of them will be stuck around paying the higher bills for a bit, but in the end most people will end up moving.
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  Yes. But haven't we've seen this before? When the foundation of your biz model is built on what amounts to a single outlier, there is always risk. Or actually more risk. The expectation that this would go one forever simply - in the context of history - isn't reasonable. Agreed. More notice would have been helpful, but again this isn't some radical new slip. None of these platforms are too big to fail. We've all been warned. We need to stop forgetting about these warnings.

mdoms 5y ago

I don't know if it's a regional thing but I have never once had a Vimeo video play without stopping to buffer. Not once, in what, 15 years of serving videos? I'm on a gigabit fiber connection. My heart sinks when I see someone sharing a Vimeo link for something I really want to watch.

evan_ 5y ago

Vimeo isn't a destination in the same way that Youtube is, where people go to just browse videos, but creative professionals use it pretty widely. If you're an actor, editor, VFX artist, agency, etc. you put your demo reel and clips of your work up on Vimeo. It's kind of like Soundcloud in that regard, where they're the most popular, go-to destination for something that doesn't actually make any money. They also have a VOD offering and some interesting stuff for turning that into a set-top box channel which I have not dug into. Dropbox seems like a natural fit if they're to be acquired but who knows.

qiskit 5y ago
That's interesting. I never could figure out why vimeo even existed as everyone uses youtube. But I guess it has a niche. Any idea why creative professionals gravitated towards vimeo?
- evan_ 5y ago
  Couldn't say for sure but I would speculate it has to do with, you can link directly to a video and it won't show a bunch of links to other videos to watch, comments, ads, etc. Whereas if you post your serious acting monologue on Youtube, even unlisted, it's going to have a bunch of distractions and videos from other people that you probably don't want the casting director being pulled into. The fact that Vimeo doesn't have the same level of content match might play into it too, if you want to show off a clip from the episode of Modern Family where you had two lines you don't want ABC to pull it. I'm sure network effect drive it as well, if you're trying to break into an industry and you see that lots of already successful people are using Vimeo, you're going to use it too.
- voltaireodactyl 5y ago
  Video quality is significantly higher on Vimeo, and their support is much, MUCH more reachable than Google’s. Being able to contact someone to resolve issues is so critical to the film industry that even IMDb has added an option.
  - 5y ago

imchillyb 5y ago

> In a letter to shareholders in February, Sud spells the shift out in black and white: “Today we are a technology platform, not a viewing destination. We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.” > “I paid for this year, but I don’t intend on paying again next year,” he says. Goodbye Vimeo, you've just ensured your own demise; congratulations!

sequoia 5y ago

The solution I think most people want here is "give more notice for a change like this." Probably at least six months notice, i.e. enough time for someone to reasonably be able to put together and execute a migration plan. Vimeo is not obligated to subsidize clients they lose money on, but they don't need to screw them over by drastically changing their fees without enough notice for the user to reasonably be able to move.

Animats 5y ago

Since the demand from the video comes from Patreon, you can host anywhere. Why not try PeerTube? Free, no commercials. I put technical videos on Hardlimit, to illustrate bug reports and progress reports. So far, still up, despite numbers like 37 views. If usage from Patreon takes off, PeerTube will either collapse under the load or go mainstream.

dewey 5y ago

Just by looking at the Vimeo landing page over the years it was clear that they are aiming for the B2B market. Small time creators are clearly not the target group. One example is their "white label" streaming provider backend (Netflix as a service): https://vimeo.com/ott https://vimeo.com/ott

k__ 5y ago

Just a few minutes ago, I read about Glass, a Web3 video hosting platform. Guess they came at the right time! https://glass.xyz https://glass.xyz

Inityx 5y ago
Web3 is a Ponzi scheme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
- k__ 5y ago
  Thanks for the heads-up.

kregasaurusrex 5y ago

I've had one creator move all their hosting over to Mega- sure they might miss out on the analytics tools/dashboards, but if your audience is mostly desktop users then they generally won't see much difference in having to unzip a video file instead of playing it from Vimeo. It's generally niche enough that a portion of monthly Patreon subs can make up for a YouTube video being demonetized because of various arbitrary reasons while not disrupting their main income source. Heck, it's probably saving money being on the 10€/mo tier providing 2 TB of bandwidth while Vimeo wants to charge an order of magnitude more for essentially the same functionality, maybe only an inconvenience for those that want to watch on their phone during a commute or something similar.

Traster 5y ago

This is far less outrageous than I first thought. Firstly, the person in question has 4400 patrons at $5 a month. So she's bringing in $20k a month. That's not exactly some small time creator. But obviously the patreon isn't all about her videos. Let's just take her average views - 150 views, let's assume they're her patrons, so there's about $750/mo of revenue associated with those videos. So it's not like she can't actually afford to pay for this. And if you look at the other comments about the cost of hosting videos, the price Vimeo is charging isn't that far from the cost to serve the videos. So all in all this seems like an extremely well earning person who, from now on, isn't going to get below cost hosting from Vimeo. $3500 sounds a lot, but her income from Patreon alone is $240k, and if she's running her business reasonably, that $3.5k comes out pre-tax.

chii 5y ago
i dunno how patreon subscription works with vimeo now, but usually, the vimeo vid is just password protected and only patreon subscribers get a password. Therefore, the number of subscribers isn't gonna indicate video bandwidth, because it's easy to unsubscribe patreon, but still retain access to the vimeo access. May be it is different now - i haven't kept up for a long time in this segment of the world.
- quxbar 5y ago
  Patreon is introducing better integration with things like Discord, I wouldn't be surprised if the vimeo solution is also more sophisticated now (though with youtube it seems to still be just an unlisted video you can share around as you like)

8bitsrule 5y ago

Maybe its time for those Tier 1&2 companies (nobody seems to know their names) - to chip-in with some public-service servers for artists and creatives to use. Obviously they're making money. After users reach a certain level they could be switched to non-profit costing.

srg0 5y ago

A lesson to learn from this story: don’t use Vimeo if video is your business.

nunez 5y ago

I didn't know that Vimeo was spun out of IAC. (IAC owns Match and Tinder.)