5 ms·

> "I was already paying $200 a year, which I think is pretty expensive," In other words, she has no idea what bandwidth or server costs are and doesn't realize

by bryans 5y ago

> "I was already paying $200 a year, which I think is pretty expensive," In other words, she has no idea what bandwidth or server costs are and doesn't realize Vimeo is definitely losing money on distributing her videos, but still arrogantly believes she is entitled to infinite bandwidth for free because "that's what YouTube does."

hackernewds 5y ago
I wouldn't read it as entitled since other companies have found models that can successfully support revenue scaling with distribution
gundmc 5y ago
Not for free, for $200.
technobabbler 5y ago
But should it be her job as a content producer to understand Vimeo's costs and margins? Vimeo is one of those who liked to advertise seemingly unmetered bandwidth behind an fine-print fair-use policy, luring people into a cheap pro plan with the hopes that most of them won't take off and become viral. That was their bet, one that they're now regretting. They could've just easily put a bandwidth meter on every account and let people decide what to do if they get close to that limit. It's not even like the early days of Gmail abuse where people were using it as a cheap web disk, consuming way more storage and bandwidth than Gmail could've reasonably estimated. This person is just using Vimeo as they intended: hosting and serving videos. She wasn't trying to abuse the service, just using it the way they sold it to her, as a place to host videos for $200/year. Whose fault is it that they underpriced their plans as loss leaders on purpose, and the bet didn't quite pay off? If they want to up their price because they want to change their business model, you know, more power to them... but sheesh, at least give her 60-90 days to figure out next steps. Some home internet connections can't even download all those videos and reupload them within 7 days. (edit: to be clear, Gmail didn't offer unlimited disk, just a LOT of disk)
- gruez 5y ago
  >It's not even like the early days of Gmail abuse where people were using it as a cheap web disk, consuming way more storage and bandwidth than Gmail could've reasonably estimated Was this actually a thing? AFAIK even at the start they had hard limits. The only thing "unlimited" about it was that they promised to steadily increase the storage cap.
  - technobabbler 5y ago
    Yeah... back in the day, someone made a virtual file system layer that could span 1 or more Gmail accounts, basically using it as a block storage thing. IIRC (it's been a while) there was also some built-in redundancy, like the same file would be stored redundantly across multiple Gmail accounts in case one got deleted. Kinda like an early cloud RAID. That was before even CAPTCHAs were common, I think, and so getting new Gmail accounts was very easy. Eventually Google revised their ToS and clamped down, of course. I'll see if I can track down some historical links, but it was a long time ago... Edit: one of them was called GmailFS: https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS Old slashdot (remember that?) post from 2004: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/04/08/29/0237213/gmailfs---the-google-file-system https://linux.slashdot.org/story/04/08/29/0237213/gmailfs---...
  - throwaway09223 5y ago
    Right. They announced with a 1GB limit. At the time, this felt unlimited. The competition was offering around 5-10MB.
    - technobabbler 5y ago
      Yeah, I apologize if I was unclear. Didn't mean to imply that Gmail was unlimited, only that it was in a similar situation (i.e. offering way more disk than most users needed, with the bet that 99% of them won't use anywhere near the limit).
    - to11mtm 5y ago
      Yup. And back then upload sites were fairly uncommon... MegaUpload was 2 years after G-Mail, but IIRC you had to pay to do a whole lot without time/bandwidth limits. And as an idea of scale, no, you can't fit a DVD in 1GB. but you could definitely hold a CD, or something between VHS and DVD quality of a movie. Me? I just used it to hold on to base drivers for my systems and pictures I wanted to not lose. It worked great for a few years.
mikechalmers 5y ago
Why is it arrogant or entitlement when there are several services which allow video uploads for free, never mind $200/year? If you look at her play counts and read her position, I don't think there's indication of her expecting "infinite bandwidth".
- ozim 5y ago
  There are several services which allow video uploads for "free" not really for free. People have to understand that those companies are burning VC money to bait and switch people. It is basically "dumping" and starving any competition until they find way to extract money from users ... or just sell BS to investors that they will get money from users.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    In general I'm starting to think that we should be worried with many of these "free" or VC funded services if there is a big market correction any time soon. It might be viable model currently, but clearly not forever... And I hope the legislation wisens up for next round. Clearly many markets just aren't healthy.
- cruano 5y ago
  Just because I gave you free candy doesn't mean you can go to the store and take it for free too And if you want the free candy, stay with the guy giving you free candy don't complain about the rest
TameAntelope 5y ago
Curious; I’m pretty tech savvy, how much video could I self host (or in the cloud) for $200/yr?
- gruez 5y ago
  see: 1. https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=us https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=us 2. https://www.scaleway.com/en/virtual-instances/general-purpose/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/virtual-instances/general-purpos...
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  This depends on multiple factors. Entities like YouTube which use a lot of bandwidth own boxes in datacenters (well in Google's case, they own the datacenter as well). From there it depends on the DC. Most IP transit is charged based on the max of your egress or ingress costs. Some DCs offer you unmetered bandwidth but then charge you more than you would have paid for transit. The big cloud companies, like AWS, GCP, Linode, or Hetzner usually have these deals in place already and then charge you for egress to recoup/profit off their bandwidth costs. At $200 / yr, you're going to be playing big cloud egress costs as most IP transit is a lot more expensive. Cloudflare [1] has a series of posts about this though the costs are probably very out of date by now. [1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...
chockchocschoir 5y ago
Seems you are the one who doesn't have any idea about how much "bandwidth" really costs, which is $0. When peering happens, do you think they put quota on how much bandwidth you can send through? No, you have a throughput limit but then after that its unmetered. No way Vimeo is paying per TB served if they hope to one day make profits (unless they already do so). You can easily setup your own personal video hosting site serving TB of traffic per month (over a 1gbps port) for less than $100/month, as long as you stay away from anything "cloud" that is just trying to extract as much money from you as possible. I'm surprised that you somehow think someone else is less experienced than yourself when you don't know even know these basic facts on how the internet is priced.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  You’re generally correct although it’s slightly more nuanced. There are places in the world where peering isn’t free (eg Australia) and even mandated by law not to be (Eg SK).
  - chockchocschoir 5y ago
    I'm not saying the peering itself is free (it depends wildly, peering conditions/agreements are setup on a case-by-case basis often), but the amount of TB/month you include in the peering is not something I've seen before. Could you share what law mandates that traffic has to be priced by amount send in a time interval in peering agreements? Or is this just a misunderstanding?
    - vlovich123 5y ago
      http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=89261 http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=8... https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world... Both links talk about SK regulations, the latter more directly: > This may be driven by new regulations from the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, which mandate the commercial terms of domestic interconnection, based on predetermined “Tiers” of participating networks It could be a miscommunication but you’re being a little unclear with your language. If you’re saying that the $/TB is $0 then you’re not strictly true everywhere. Additionally, even if peering is 0-rated between large cloud providers, it isn’t necessarily true for Vimeo if they’re a customer. It depends on the agreements they’re able to strike with their providers, or the terms they’re able to get for their own peering agreements (even if large cloud providers 0-rate each other’s traffic, they may not do so for smaller customers). If you’re saying that costs are variable based on how many TB you transfer I can’t say, but practically I doubt it would matter. But the contract can state that peering is charged $x/TB above the Y TB included in your annual minimum spend of Z hundreds of dollars. Of course amortized over Vimeo’s volume this (wildly speculating on my part) probably amounts to several dollars per month or even per year and most of their customers are unlikely to be in SK or Australia where this issue is most prevalent. So in practice most businesses do often see 0-rated transit costs. Disclaimer: this all my secondary hand information and I’m not particularly knowledgeable in this space. I would defer to anyone who actually strikes these peering deals regularly.
shuckles 5y ago
Vimeo is losing money, but cost of revenue is only 26% of sales. This is an upper bound on hosting fees, since it also includes platform fees, card processing fees, building rents, and customer support.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Kina 5y ago
> In other words, she has no idea what bandwidth or server costs are and doesn't realize Vimeo is definitely losing money on distributing her videos Why is Vimeo using an unsustainable business model here anyway? Oh, right. They wanted growth. This is in the same vein of the bait-and-switch that Blockbuster Video did in the early 1990s. Grow unsustainably and hope you can snuff out your competition before you run out of funding.
mkishi 5y ago
It's the customer's fault they didn't know Vimeo is losing money? A pretty big reason for that could be that they've been with Vimeo for over a decade in some cases and have always been led to believe they were paying for the service they were getting. I'm confident customers' reactions would be very different had Vimeo told them "hey, you're actually costing us money, please upgrade to this plan that'll cost you about 30% more." In fact, Vimeo could have done that at 2x, 3x, 4x... But nope, let's pretend they're paying customers and reveal we've actually been subsidizing the service the whole time, but we need 17.5x the money now. And the customer is the arrogant one?
bsder 5y ago
"Nice videos you got there. Shame if something were to happen to them. Now pay us $3,000 by the end of the week." Now do you understand why people are mad? The price isn't relevant. Giving someone less than a week to completely uproot themselves is extortion, plain and simple. It may even be illegal--I smell a class-action incoming. My guess is that most people will cough up for a month or two and then leave. I know that I would definitely migrate off of a company which extorted me once. However, that is equivalent to a quick infusion of a couple years of cash to Vimeo for quite a few of these customers. A quick pump of the numbers might get them a deal with somebody if this doesn't net them enough bad press.

by bryans 5y ago

hackernewds 5y ago

I wouldn't read it as entitled since other companies have found models that can successfully support revenue scaling with distribution

gundmc 5y ago

Not for free, for $200.

technobabbler 5y ago

But should it be her job as a content producer to understand Vimeo's costs and margins? Vimeo is one of those who liked to advertise seemingly unmetered bandwidth behind an fine-print fair-use policy, luring people into a cheap pro plan with the hopes that most of them won't take off and become viral. That was their bet, one that they're now regretting. They could've just easily put a bandwidth meter on every account and let people decide what to do if they get close to that limit. It's not even like the early days of Gmail abuse where people were using it as a cheap web disk, consuming way more storage and bandwidth than Gmail could've reasonably estimated. This person is just using Vimeo as they intended: hosting and serving videos. She wasn't trying to abuse the service, just using it the way they sold it to her, as a place to host videos for $200/year. Whose fault is it that they underpriced their plans as loss leaders on purpose, and the bet didn't quite pay off? If they want to up their price because they want to change their business model, you know, more power to them... but sheesh, at least give her 60-90 days to figure out next steps. Some home internet connections can't even download all those videos and reupload them within 7 days. (edit: to be clear, Gmail didn't offer unlimited disk, just a LOT of disk)

gruez 5y ago
>It's not even like the early days of Gmail abuse where people were using it as a cheap web disk, consuming way more storage and bandwidth than Gmail could've reasonably estimated Was this actually a thing? AFAIK even at the start they had hard limits. The only thing "unlimited" about it was that they promised to steadily increase the storage cap.
- technobabbler 5y ago
  Yeah... back in the day, someone made a virtual file system layer that could span 1 or more Gmail accounts, basically using it as a block storage thing. IIRC (it's been a while) there was also some built-in redundancy, like the same file would be stored redundantly across multiple Gmail accounts in case one got deleted. Kinda like an early cloud RAID. That was before even CAPTCHAs were common, I think, and so getting new Gmail accounts was very easy. Eventually Google revised their ToS and clamped down, of course. I'll see if I can track down some historical links, but it was a long time ago... Edit: one of them was called GmailFS: https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS https://handwiki.org/wiki/GmailFS Old slashdot (remember that?) post from 2004: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/04/08/29/0237213/gmailfs---the-google-file-system https://linux.slashdot.org/story/04/08/29/0237213/gmailfs---...
- throwaway09223 5y ago
  Right. They announced with a 1GB limit. At the time, this felt unlimited. The competition was offering around 5-10MB.
  - technobabbler 5y ago
    Yeah, I apologize if I was unclear. Didn't mean to imply that Gmail was unlimited, only that it was in a similar situation (i.e. offering way more disk than most users needed, with the bet that 99% of them won't use anywhere near the limit).
  - to11mtm 5y ago
    Yup. And back then upload sites were fairly uncommon... MegaUpload was 2 years after G-Mail, but IIRC you had to pay to do a whole lot without time/bandwidth limits. And as an idea of scale, no, you can't fit a DVD in 1GB. but you could definitely hold a CD, or something between VHS and DVD quality of a movie. Me? I just used it to hold on to base drivers for my systems and pictures I wanted to not lose. It worked great for a few years.

mikechalmers 5y ago

Why is it arrogant or entitlement when there are several services which allow video uploads for free, never mind $200/year? If you look at her play counts and read her position, I don't think there's indication of her expecting "infinite bandwidth".

ozim 5y ago
There are several services which allow video uploads for "free" not really for free. People have to understand that those companies are burning VC money to bait and switch people. It is basically "dumping" and starving any competition until they find way to extract money from users ... or just sell BS to investors that they will get money from users.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  In general I'm starting to think that we should be worried with many of these "free" or VC funded services if there is a big market correction any time soon. It might be viable model currently, but clearly not forever... And I hope the legislation wisens up for next round. Clearly many markets just aren't healthy.
cruano 5y ago
Just because I gave you free candy doesn't mean you can go to the store and take it for free too And if you want the free candy, stay with the guy giving you free candy don't complain about the rest

TameAntelope 5y ago

Curious; I’m pretty tech savvy, how much video could I self host (or in the cloud) for $200/yr?

gruez 5y ago
see: 1. https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=us https://www.hetzner.com/cloud?country=us 2. https://www.scaleway.com/en/virtual-instances/general-purpose/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/virtual-instances/general-purpos...
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
This depends on multiple factors. Entities like YouTube which use a lot of bandwidth own boxes in datacenters (well in Google's case, they own the datacenter as well). From there it depends on the DC. Most IP transit is charged based on the max of your egress or ingress costs. Some DCs offer you unmetered bandwidth but then charge you more than you would have paid for transit. The big cloud companies, like AWS, GCP, Linode, or Hetzner usually have these deals in place already and then charge you for egress to recoup/profit off their bandwidth costs. At $200 / yr, you're going to be playing big cloud egress costs as most IP transit is a lot more expensive. Cloudflare [1] has a series of posts about this though the costs are probably very out of date by now. [1]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...

chockchocschoir 5y ago

Seems you are the one who doesn't have any idea about how much "bandwidth" really costs, which is $0. When peering happens, do you think they put quota on how much bandwidth you can send through? No, you have a throughput limit but then after that its unmetered. No way Vimeo is paying per TB served if they hope to one day make profits (unless they already do so). You can easily setup your own personal video hosting site serving TB of traffic per month (over a 1gbps port) for less than $100/month, as long as you stay away from anything "cloud" that is just trying to extract as much money from you as possible. I'm surprised that you somehow think someone else is less experienced than yourself when you don't know even know these basic facts on how the internet is priced.

vlovich123 5y ago
You’re generally correct although it’s slightly more nuanced. There are places in the world where peering isn’t free (eg Australia) and even mandated by law not to be (Eg SK).
- chockchocschoir 5y ago
  I'm not saying the peering itself is free (it depends wildly, peering conditions/agreements are setup on a case-by-case basis often), but the amount of TB/month you include in the peering is not something I've seen before. Could you share what law mandates that traffic has to be priced by amount send in a time interval in peering agreements? Or is this just a misunderstanding?
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=89261 http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=8... https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world... Both links talk about SK regulations, the latter more directly: > This may be driven by new regulations from the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, which mandate the commercial terms of domestic interconnection, based on predetermined “Tiers” of participating networks It could be a miscommunication but you’re being a little unclear with your language. If you’re saying that the $/TB is $0 then you’re not strictly true everywhere. Additionally, even if peering is 0-rated between large cloud providers, it isn’t necessarily true for Vimeo if they’re a customer. It depends on the agreements they’re able to strike with their providers, or the terms they’re able to get for their own peering agreements (even if large cloud providers 0-rate each other’s traffic, they may not do so for smaller customers). If you’re saying that costs are variable based on how many TB you transfer I can’t say, but practically I doubt it would matter. But the contract can state that peering is charged $x/TB above the Y TB included in your annual minimum spend of Z hundreds of dollars. Of course amortized over Vimeo’s volume this (wildly speculating on my part) probably amounts to several dollars per month or even per year and most of their customers are unlikely to be in SK or Australia where this issue is most prevalent. So in practice most businesses do often see 0-rated transit costs. Disclaimer: this all my secondary hand information and I’m not particularly knowledgeable in this space. I would defer to anyone who actually strikes these peering deals regularly.

shuckles 5y ago

Vimeo is losing money, but cost of revenue is only 26% of sales. This is an upper bound on hosting fees, since it also includes platform fees, card processing fees, building rents, and customer support.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Kina 5y ago

> In other words, she has no idea what bandwidth or server costs are and doesn't realize Vimeo is definitely losing money on distributing her videos Why is Vimeo using an unsustainable business model here anyway? Oh, right. They wanted growth. This is in the same vein of the bait-and-switch that Blockbuster Video did in the early 1990s. Grow unsustainably and hope you can snuff out your competition before you run out of funding.

mkishi 5y ago

It's the customer's fault they didn't know Vimeo is losing money? A pretty big reason for that could be that they've been with Vimeo for over a decade in some cases and have always been led to believe they were paying for the service they were getting. I'm confident customers' reactions would be very different had Vimeo told them "hey, you're actually costing us money, please upgrade to this plan that'll cost you about 30% more." In fact, Vimeo could have done that at 2x, 3x, 4x... But nope, let's pretend they're paying customers and reveal we've actually been subsidizing the service the whole time, but we need 17.5x the money now. And the customer is the arrogant one?

bsder 5y ago

"Nice videos you got there. Shame if something were to happen to them. Now pay us $3,000 by the end of the week." Now do you understand why people are mad? The price isn't relevant. Giving someone less than a week to completely uproot themselves is extortion, plain and simple. It may even be illegal--I smell a class-action incoming. My guess is that most people will cough up for a month or two and then leave. I know that I would definitely migrate off of a company which extorted me once. However, that is equivalent to a quick infusion of a couple years of cash to Vimeo for quite a few of these customers. A quick pump of the numbers might get them a deal with somebody if this doesn't net them enough bad press.