6 ms·

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 CD

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.
  - thebean11 5y ago
    > There are popular creators publishing 3+ hour videos on YouTube, for free, generating millions of views from viewers watching most of the content. That doesn't really contradict what I'm saying does it? Are you claiming that most subscribers watch most of the videos they watch? I'd be interested in seeing that stat for 3 hour videos!
  - panzagl 5y ago
    I think the GPs point is that even if you watch the whole video, it probably takes you several sessions (i.e. 'views') to do so.
- HillRat 5y ago
  Her previous Vimeo charge ($200/year) equates to about 8min/video on a commercial CDN, so you can tweak the assumptions to figure out what that would look like under different scenarios. The key takeaway, I think, is that (A) she's an edge case, but (B) she's probably also a bellwether for what we're going to continue to see, which is a slow end to the subsidized free-riding that's both spurred online creativity and made certain services (hello, Uber!) artificially attractive. Vimeo was either going to have to monetize video-minutes (which breaks their enterprise value prop and forces them to compete with YouTube and other streamers, which in turn requires a whole new set of corporate core competencies), or control costs on the low-end tiers by shedding low- or negative-margin customers. We're going to see a lot more of this moving forward, I imagine, as valuations start slumping.
danShumway 5y ago
I do trust your math, but it's still wild to think that $300 a month of bandwidth might put someone in the top 1% of costly users for Vimeo. I don't know what I would expect those numbers to be, but my instinct is that it seems like a really bad indicator for Vimeo's popularity. Either that or my instinct on how much bandwidth costs and how many views popular video sites get is way off, which could also be the case.
- HillRat 5y ago
  My gut feeling is that Vimeo is playing a little fast and loose with that characterization -- it's almost certainly "1% of the users in her particular tier," not OTT customers or their enterprise tiers.
- kuboble 5y ago
  > wild to think that $300 a month of bandwidth might put someone in the top 1% of costly users for Vimeo. That doesn't surprise me. I imagine median customer as someone who created one video that 10 of her closest friends have watched. Anyone who has any following is immediately 95-th %-ile. Slightly relevant post https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ https://danluu.com/p95-skill/
- madars 5y ago
  Pretty sure the figure is relative to all accounts, including dormant ones. I probably have a Vimeo account that I have never used so contribute to 99% of "accounts" that are not costly to them.
  - bena 5y ago
    That would be a hell of a dark pattern. Encourage, if not outright require, people to create accounts to watch videos. That way you have a lot of accounts that will never upload a video ever so you can define as many creator account as being in the top 1% as possible.
    - madars 5y ago
      You can see this everywhere! For example, many colleges were proud about their very low COVID positivity rates, without remarking that negative people required twice-a-week testing (so a very high total # of tests) whereas positive cases went on a multi-month testing lockout (for a good reason as you can still shed virus without being infections). Positivity on campus is, of course, a useful signal but comparing positivity in populations with mandatory testing and ones without (e.g. city COVID testing sites used by people with symptoms or those who travel) is very much apples-and-oranges. Or, in patent cases the defendant will want to narrow the scope as much as possible, whereas the plaintiff will argue for a very broad reading.
randomsilence 5y ago
Why can't most people open a server on DigitalOcean or Vultr where the price is $0.01 per GB? 117 Subscribers, for $300 per month, it's almost possible to start a VM per customer.
- Inityx 5y ago
  Because most people aren't web developers or Linux sysadmins
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  The $0.05/GB pricing cited is for CDN delivery, which implies having a bunch of servers in different areas of the world ready to deliver your files wherever they need to be. I'm not sure which CDN. I looked at AWS EC2 and Fastly and they both cited outgoing bandwidth that was twice as high. Given that I can't find hosting providers with lower bandwidth costs, DO/Vultr either have very specific peering agreements or are subsidizing their bandwidth charges; either of which would be utterly broken by the amount of bandwidth that the person from the article appears to need for their multi-hour art tutorials. Even if they had an amazing deal on transit, or were peered with everyone[0], and were able to provide $0.01/GB to video hosting at scale, we're still talking 20-40GB/view (assuming 45Mbps delivery of multi-hour video content). Delivering that over 800 views will run about $320 per video. Vimeo's cited custom plan pricing in the article is basically assuming a video per month on average at those rates. [0] This is the particular reason why Google is able to provide YouTube at all. They are so big that every ISP absolutely has to peer with them, and that drives down their costs significantly.
  - PaywallBuster 5y ago
    i have my Vultr instance running for years it's probably using less than 10% of CPU or bandwidth most of the time multiply it by 1000x and you can imagine how much leftover bandwidth there's left for the heavier users (beside they're not selling unlimited, you have a generous tier included and you pay extra for overages) There's plenty of providers that can match the pricing I've also worked for a company heavily relying on vultr and they have no problems handing high volume bandwidth (they're not as cheap as Hetzner!)
enimodas 5y ago
5 cents per gb seems pretty expensive. A quick google puts azure at 4cents/gb, as the most expensive of the big ones, and ones i haven't heard from at 1cent/gb.
- HillRat 5y ago
  Yeah, you can optimize pricing by going through the cloud providers themselves (you can hit about $0.025/GB plus cache fill charges for small requirements), but, to be honest, if a user is having trouble with $3,500/year, they aren't in a position to build and maintain a whole video serving solution out of AWS (let alone figure out how the billing even works with cloud providers), so I stuck with turnkey CDNs that bring their own digital asset management features. (Also, the economics shift radically if you're doing tens of petabytes a month; you're comfortably under $0.01 per GB at that tier, and the largest players -- major streamers and game companies -- can push their prices under $0.001. It's basically the folks who push terabytes who are getting hammered.)
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Hosting video files on lots of inexpensive servers or even VPSes with unmetered traffic will get you quite far, especially with subscriber-only content where the demand is predictable and capped.
  - DanielBMarkham 5y ago
    Related question: I do hour-long, 4-10 party video conference calls about once a week. Each one might have between 10-200 viewers. This seems like a good area to get screwed, ie, pay a huge difference between a COTS black-box solution and just doing it myself. Last week I started playing around with setting up a RTMP server. But hell, I'm still back to bandwidth. Are you saying there's a way to directly cache realtime streaming video on the cloud providers, skip the store-and-publish route entirely? One thing I was amazed with was the huge amount of money a company could spend going into this area without doing some serious research. There are too many options and too many variables for most non-tech folks to consider. No problem if you don't want to answer. I thought it might be something other HNers would want to know.
michaelt 5y ago
Vimeo advertises [1] "Unlimited bandwidth" but that "Users in the top 1% of monthly bandwidth usage may be charged for excessive usage" According to [2] the 99th percentile of bandwidth usage "usually starts at 2-3 TB per month" Van Baarle has 4,446 patrons [3] and assuming a 1080p video stream is 5 Mbps, to hit the 2TB threshold would only need 12 minutes of video per patron, per month. And you're right, of course, that if you're paying $0.05/GB for outbound bandwidth and using 2-3 TB/month, you're using $1200-$1800 of bandwidth per year. So $3500 isn't entirely beyond belief. Still, the takeaway from this, for me, is that Vimeo's "unlimited bandwidth" is anything but. [1] https://vimeo.com/upgrade https://vimeo.com/upgrade [2] https://vimeo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037761072-Bandwidth-on-Vimeo- https://vimeo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037761072-Ban... [3] https://www.patreon.com/loish https://www.patreon.com/loish
- rstupek 5y ago
  History shows anyone claiming "unlimited bandwidth" isn't going to offer truly unlimited bandwidth. It's an old hoster lie which continues to be recycled for subscriber growth.
- HillRat 5y ago
  One point I'd make to clients when doing cost estimates was, essentially, that CPU and RAM want a long-term relationship, disk space likes to meet for a cup of coffee, per-use APIs say hi when they see you on the street, and bandwidth has an incandescent hate for you and is barely restraining itself from plunging a knife in your eye.
  - fifticon 5y ago
    I feel like I both understand and don't understand this analogy. In my experience, databases want your eternal soul, and not in a good way. At least they are 80% of our cloud costs.
    - HillRat 5y ago
      Yeah, it's really just a way to talk through cloud architectural choices when you're designing for cost: committing to reserved instances for VMs (goodbye, eternal soul -- for at least the next three years), minimizing your data retention or migrating through storage classes for bucket data, and ruthlessly optimizing your use of per-usage services (bucket ops, API calls, serverless functions, and charge-per-op databases like Firebase, to name a few). Bandwidth and network services, however, are insanely expensive for what you get, show up all over your service architecture, and are hard to forecast, so they like to jump out of dark corners at the end of your billing cycle and mug you. (The ever-invaluable Duckbill does a nice job of laying out all the places where AWS levies its bandwidth tax: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/dbg010-datatxfr-infographic-20191219.jpg https://www.duckbillgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/dbg...). Depending on what your application is, this may never be an issue, or, if you're pushing heavy file and content traffic, it could form a huge chunk of variable costs that you need to figure out cost recovery for in your business model. (All this gets upended if you're on something like SFDC or Dynamics, though, where costs looks nice and forecastable until you get to disk storage, where their pricing models appear to be put together by the kind of guys who usually present their invoices alongside a menacingly-brandished lead pipe.)
ryanbrunner 5y ago
Vimeo is paying far, far less than $0.05 unless their bandwidth is absolutely miniscule.
chmod775 5y ago
>per-GB CDN price at $0.05 That is a ridiculous cost for bandwidth. It can only be meant for "low-volume" users or those that just don't care for some reason. A platform like Vimeo should either negotiate a better deal, or start engineering their own CDN. After all content delivery is the main challenge for video platforms - everything else is boring and can be whipped together by a fund-less bored 15 year old on a weekend. If you're contracting content delivery out that's already kind of weird and pretty much guarantees everyone but yourself will make money with your platform.

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.
- thebean11 5y ago
  > There are popular creators publishing 3+ hour videos on YouTube, for free, generating millions of views from viewers watching most of the content. That doesn't really contradict what I'm saying does it? Are you claiming that most subscribers watch most of the videos they watch? I'd be interested in seeing that stat for 3 hour videos!
- panzagl 5y ago
  I think the GPs point is that even if you watch the whole video, it probably takes you several sessions (i.e. 'views') to do so.
HillRat 5y ago
Her previous Vimeo charge ($200/year) equates to about 8min/video on a commercial CDN, so you can tweak the assumptions to figure out what that would look like under different scenarios. The key takeaway, I think, is that (A) she's an edge case, but (B) she's probably also a bellwether for what we're going to continue to see, which is a slow end to the subsidized free-riding that's both spurred online creativity and made certain services (hello, Uber!) artificially attractive. Vimeo was either going to have to monetize video-minutes (which breaks their enterprise value prop and forces them to compete with YouTube and other streamers, which in turn requires a whole new set of corporate core competencies), or control costs on the low-end tiers by shedding low- or negative-margin customers. We're going to see a lot more of this moving forward, I imagine, as valuations start slumping.

danShumway 5y ago

I do trust your math, but it's still wild to think that $300 a month of bandwidth might put someone in the top 1% of costly users for Vimeo. I don't know what I would expect those numbers to be, but my instinct is that it seems like a really bad indicator for Vimeo's popularity. Either that or my instinct on how much bandwidth costs and how many views popular video sites get is way off, which could also be the case.

HillRat 5y ago
My gut feeling is that Vimeo is playing a little fast and loose with that characterization -- it's almost certainly "1% of the users in her particular tier," not OTT customers or their enterprise tiers.
kuboble 5y ago
> wild to think that $300 a month of bandwidth might put someone in the top 1% of costly users for Vimeo. That doesn't surprise me. I imagine median customer as someone who created one video that 10 of her closest friends have watched. Anyone who has any following is immediately 95-th %-ile. Slightly relevant post https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ https://danluu.com/p95-skill/
madars 5y ago
Pretty sure the figure is relative to all accounts, including dormant ones. I probably have a Vimeo account that I have never used so contribute to 99% of "accounts" that are not costly to them.
- bena 5y ago
  That would be a hell of a dark pattern. Encourage, if not outright require, people to create accounts to watch videos. That way you have a lot of accounts that will never upload a video ever so you can define as many creator account as being in the top 1% as possible.
  - madars 5y ago
    You can see this everywhere! For example, many colleges were proud about their very low COVID positivity rates, without remarking that negative people required twice-a-week testing (so a very high total # of tests) whereas positive cases went on a multi-month testing lockout (for a good reason as you can still shed virus without being infections). Positivity on campus is, of course, a useful signal but comparing positivity in populations with mandatory testing and ones without (e.g. city COVID testing sites used by people with symptoms or those who travel) is very much apples-and-oranges. Or, in patent cases the defendant will want to narrow the scope as much as possible, whereas the plaintiff will argue for a very broad reading.

randomsilence 5y ago

Why can't most people open a server on DigitalOcean or Vultr where the price is $0.01 per GB? 117 Subscribers, for $300 per month, it's almost possible to start a VM per customer.

Inityx 5y ago
Because most people aren't web developers or Linux sysadmins
kmeisthax 5y ago
The $0.05/GB pricing cited is for CDN delivery, which implies having a bunch of servers in different areas of the world ready to deliver your files wherever they need to be. I'm not sure which CDN. I looked at AWS EC2 and Fastly and they both cited outgoing bandwidth that was twice as high. Given that I can't find hosting providers with lower bandwidth costs, DO/Vultr either have very specific peering agreements or are subsidizing their bandwidth charges; either of which would be utterly broken by the amount of bandwidth that the person from the article appears to need for their multi-hour art tutorials. Even if they had an amazing deal on transit, or were peered with everyone[0], and were able to provide $0.01/GB to video hosting at scale, we're still talking 20-40GB/view (assuming 45Mbps delivery of multi-hour video content). Delivering that over 800 views will run about $320 per video. Vimeo's cited custom plan pricing in the article is basically assuming a video per month on average at those rates. [0] This is the particular reason why Google is able to provide YouTube at all. They are so big that every ISP absolutely has to peer with them, and that drives down their costs significantly.
- PaywallBuster 5y ago
  i have my Vultr instance running for years it's probably using less than 10% of CPU or bandwidth most of the time multiply it by 1000x and you can imagine how much leftover bandwidth there's left for the heavier users (beside they're not selling unlimited, you have a generous tier included and you pay extra for overages) There's plenty of providers that can match the pricing I've also worked for a company heavily relying on vultr and they have no problems handing high volume bandwidth (they're not as cheap as Hetzner!)

enimodas 5y ago

5 cents per gb seems pretty expensive. A quick google puts azure at 4cents/gb, as the most expensive of the big ones, and ones i haven't heard from at 1cent/gb.

HillRat 5y ago
Yeah, you can optimize pricing by going through the cloud providers themselves (you can hit about $0.025/GB plus cache fill charges for small requirements), but, to be honest, if a user is having trouble with $3,500/year, they aren't in a position to build and maintain a whole video serving solution out of AWS (let alone figure out how the billing even works with cloud providers), so I stuck with turnkey CDNs that bring their own digital asset management features. (Also, the economics shift radically if you're doing tens of petabytes a month; you're comfortably under $0.01 per GB at that tier, and the largest players -- major streamers and game companies -- can push their prices under $0.001. It's basically the folks who push terabytes who are getting hammered.)
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Hosting video files on lots of inexpensive servers or even VPSes with unmetered traffic will get you quite far, especially with subscriber-only content where the demand is predictable and capped.
- DanielBMarkham 5y ago
  Related question: I do hour-long, 4-10 party video conference calls about once a week. Each one might have between 10-200 viewers. This seems like a good area to get screwed, ie, pay a huge difference between a COTS black-box solution and just doing it myself. Last week I started playing around with setting up a RTMP server. But hell, I'm still back to bandwidth. Are you saying there's a way to directly cache realtime streaming video on the cloud providers, skip the store-and-publish route entirely? One thing I was amazed with was the huge amount of money a company could spend going into this area without doing some serious research. There are too many options and too many variables for most non-tech folks to consider. No problem if you don't want to answer. I thought it might be something other HNers would want to know.

michaelt 5y ago

Vimeo advertises [1] "Unlimited bandwidth" but that "Users in the top 1% of monthly bandwidth usage may be charged for excessive usage" According to [2] the 99th percentile of bandwidth usage "usually starts at 2-3 TB per month" Van Baarle has 4,446 patrons [3] and assuming a 1080p video stream is 5 Mbps, to hit the 2TB threshold would only need 12 minutes of video per patron, per month. And you're right, of course, that if you're paying $0.05/GB for outbound bandwidth and using 2-3 TB/month, you're using $1200-$1800 of bandwidth per year. So $3500 isn't entirely beyond belief. Still, the takeaway from this, for me, is that Vimeo's "unlimited bandwidth" is anything but. [1] https://vimeo.com/upgrade https://vimeo.com/upgrade [2] https://vimeo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037761072-Bandwidth-on-Vimeo- https://vimeo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037761072-Ban... [3] https://www.patreon.com/loish https://www.patreon.com/loish

rstupek 5y ago
History shows anyone claiming "unlimited bandwidth" isn't going to offer truly unlimited bandwidth. It's an old hoster lie which continues to be recycled for subscriber growth.
HillRat 5y ago
One point I'd make to clients when doing cost estimates was, essentially, that CPU and RAM want a long-term relationship, disk space likes to meet for a cup of coffee, per-use APIs say hi when they see you on the street, and bandwidth has an incandescent hate for you and is barely restraining itself from plunging a knife in your eye.
- fifticon 5y ago
  I feel like I both understand and don't understand this analogy. In my experience, databases want your eternal soul, and not in a good way. At least they are 80% of our cloud costs.
  - HillRat 5y ago
    Yeah, it's really just a way to talk through cloud architectural choices when you're designing for cost: committing to reserved instances for VMs (goodbye, eternal soul -- for at least the next three years), minimizing your data retention or migrating through storage classes for bucket data, and ruthlessly optimizing your use of per-usage services (bucket ops, API calls, serverless functions, and charge-per-op databases like Firebase, to name a few). Bandwidth and network services, however, are insanely expensive for what you get, show up all over your service architecture, and are hard to forecast, so they like to jump out of dark corners at the end of your billing cycle and mug you. (The ever-invaluable Duckbill does a nice job of laying out all the places where AWS levies its bandwidth tax: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/dbg010-datatxfr-infographic-20191219.jpg https://www.duckbillgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/dbg...). Depending on what your application is, this may never be an issue, or, if you're pushing heavy file and content traffic, it could form a huge chunk of variable costs that you need to figure out cost recovery for in your business model. (All this gets upended if you're on something like SFDC or Dynamics, though, where costs looks nice and forecastable until you get to disk storage, where their pricing models appear to be put together by the kind of guys who usually present their invoices alongside a menacingly-brandished lead pipe.)

ryanbrunner 5y ago

Vimeo is paying far, far less than $0.05 unless their bandwidth is absolutely miniscule.

chmod775 5y ago

>per-GB CDN price at $0.05 That is a ridiculous cost for bandwidth. It can only be meant for "low-volume" users or those that just don't care for some reason. A platform like Vimeo should either negotiate a better deal, or start engineering their own CDN. After all content delivery is the main challenge for video platforms - everything else is boring and can be whipped together by a fund-less bored 15 year old on a weekend. If you're contracting content delivery out that's already kind of weird and pretty much guarantees everyone but yourself will make money with your platform.