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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 t

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.
        everforward 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. The storage costs have to be astronomical as well. The latest stat I can find is that 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (~720k hours per day). Even assuming it's all standard definition, that's ~260MB per hour of video, which comes out to ~130GB of data uploaded per minute or roughly 187.2 TB per day. Full HD is roughly 5 times the size, so nearly a petabyte per day. People were estimating YouTube uses an exabyte of storage about 6 years ago. There are very few companies with the economies of scale to support running YouTube the way it currently is.
    - wasmitnetzen 5y ago
      I think there is such an option, it's just not openly advertised. German public broadcasters put a lot of their videos in YouTube, and they're always ad-free (since that is a legal requirement for the broadcaster).
    - bena 5y ago
      Would you pay $3000+/yr?
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    I refuse to pay USD$35 (€32) a month for that (the cost of two accounts). That’s outrageous.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      That's for up to 5/6 people, which you can split with. It also includes music streaming, the competition for which charge around ~$10/10€ a month. And you can download stuff for offline viewing on mobile. All in all, it's not a bad deal.
      - withinboredom 5y ago
        In the EU? At least in my locale, it’s €16 a month, per person. I don’t care about music streaming, and the ads got so bad I ended up installing an ad blocker, which prior to that, it didn’t bother me. But interruptions every 10-15 seconds was ridiculous.
        sofixa 5y ago
        In France it's 12€ per person, or 18€ for "family" (5-6 people). That's quite a good deal with the music, even for just two people.
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]

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.
        everforward 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. The storage costs have to be astronomical as well. The latest stat I can find is that 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (~720k hours per day). Even assuming it's all standard definition, that's ~260MB per hour of video, which comes out to ~130GB of data uploaded per minute or roughly 187.2 TB per day. Full HD is roughly 5 times the size, so nearly a petabyte per day. People were estimating YouTube uses an exabyte of storage about 6 years ago. There are very few companies with the economies of scale to support running YouTube the way it currently is.
  - wasmitnetzen 5y ago
    I think there is such an option, it's just not openly advertised. German public broadcasters put a lot of their videos in YouTube, and they're always ad-free (since that is a legal requirement for the broadcaster).
  - bena 5y ago
    Would you pay $3000+/yr?
- withinboredom 5y ago
  I refuse to pay USD$35 (€32) a month for that (the cost of two accounts). That’s outrageous.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    That's for up to 5/6 people, which you can split with. It also includes music streaming, the competition for which charge around ~$10/10€ a month. And you can download stuff for offline viewing on mobile. All in all, it's not a bad deal.
    - withinboredom 5y ago
      In the EU? At least in my locale, it’s €16 a month, per person. I don’t care about music streaming, and the ads got so bad I ended up installing an ad blocker, which prior to that, it didn’t bother me. But interruptions every 10-15 seconds was ridiculous.
      - sofixa 5y ago
        In France it's 12€ per person, or 18€ for "family" (5-6 people). That's quite a good deal with the music, even for just two people.

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]