117 subscriber-only videos ... around 150 views on average ... 815 for the most viewed.<p>so "bandwidth usage was within the top 1 percent of Vimeo users" says they have <i>no audience</i> and <i>no traffic</i>, doesn't it? The whole platform.
Free service tracks users and shows ads – "This is a terrible business model, they should just ask users to pay."<p>Service offers a flat monthly fee – "Why does everything have to be subscription based? They should bill based on usage."<p>Service bills for hosting and bandwidth use – "How can creators afford to pay so much? This is exploitative."<p>I'm starting to think people here don't like the idea of paying for things, period.
> 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.<p>Yup, that's pretty black and white.<p>I plan to send that to everyone I know currently using Vimeo and advise them to jump off the sinking ship.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Dropbox seems like a natural fit if they're to be acquired but who knows.
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.<p>$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.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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 ;-)<p>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?
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?
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 <i>could</i> 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.
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.
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.<p>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.
They’re probably testing the price sensitivity of a group of customers who represent a tiny part of their revenue.<p>Some will stay and pay the much higher price presumably - in the absence of alternatives and they’re not bothered about those who leave.<p>Not good but not surprising.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>One example is their "white label" streaming provider backend (Netflix as a service): <a href="https://vimeo.com/ott" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/ott</a>
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.
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.<p>If usage from Patreon takes off, PeerTube will either collapse under the load or go mainstream.
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.
> 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.”<p>> “I paid for this year, but I don’t intend on paying again next year,” he says.<p>Goodbye Vimeo, you've just ensured your own demise; congratulations!
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.<p>Edit: I'm paying for the "pro" vimeo option currently.
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.
Just a few minutes ago, I read about Glass, a Web3 video hosting platform. Guess they came at the right time!<p><a href="https://glass.xyz" rel="nofollow">https://glass.xyz</a>
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.
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.
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.