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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
Assuming you have the skills, you can, but I wouldn't be surprised if it had buffering issues on the client side.
You'd also have to re-implement access controls and probably integrate a not-terrible video player. There might be open source software that does that, but nothing springs to my mind.
I've got the skills to do it, and $300/month seems high, but not unreasonable. That $300 a month frees me from doing updates, having to wake up at 3am because the site is down, having to transcode my own videos for lower-bandwidth clients, etc. It's probably roughly on par with paying someone else to do all of that stuff.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
To be honest, live streaming isn't something I've estimated before, so I wouldn't be able to give you an informed opinion. I do know that Cloudflare, at least, can save livestreamed content for later replay, so there's probably an efficiency there you can make use of. Whether they're cost-efficient for you is another question; as you say, it's easy to stumble into massive bills without realizing it until it's too late.
- they're unlikely to use public cloud providers (prohibitively expensive for high bandwidth use cases)
- they have more customers with similar needs to you
- its still a managed service, let them take care of it
the other comment already mentions Cloudflare, you could also consider https://bunny.net?ref=6akqfap0uq which is a small CDN provider focusing on cost effective solution (10x cheaper than AWS/GCP easily)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/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.)
Pricing relative to your rank as a percentile has some weird properties, one month you might be in the 99% then next month it cost you big $$ in the 1% with exactly the same traffic.
That would be surprising to most people I’d expect, totally not deterministic and kinda hostile. A more explicit “unlimited = 2TB/month” no matter your percentile would be more honest, but then you’ve said “unlimited == limited” which is a lie.
The percentile thing seems like a fairly obvious hack to keep using the word unlimited. Probably an MBAs idea..
> Pricing relative to your rank as a percentile has some weird properties, one month you might be in the 99% then next month it cost you big $$ in the 1% with exactly the same traffic.
Yeah, it seems like one thing that could happen as a result of this is that the current top 1% of users will leave the platform, creating a new top 1% from the people who used to be the top 2%. Then these people will probably leave the platform as well, creating a new top 1%, and so on. It's a nice algorithm for getting rid of your most successful creators.
Not sure how much Vimeo cares to keep their most expensive loss leaders. The algorithm seems like it would work well though if there's some retention. You lose 0.75% off the top. Then again, and again a few times, but after a few iterations you've identified a top 1% that's willing to pay, and still have the other 99% for word of mouth advertising.
interesting idea, expect vimeo would be paying for bandwidth as a flat rate per GB/sec not per GB transferred. So their costs vs what they are charging would be quite different, also if their bandwidth costs are roughly flat (not based on transfer) then culling/causing churn in the 1% reduces the utilisation of their fixed cost.. or maybe they are running a very high utilisation and culling the top 1% every month gives them more headroom =)
> 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.
This is extremely expensive compared to cloudflare stream. They price it by viewing time instead of by counting bandwidth and quotes ~$500 to serve 72,000 minutes of viewing time.
Or if you're on budget you can convert your video to HLS with ffmpeg and host it on your own server from providers with cheap bandwidth like hetzner or ovh to save on cdn cost.
True, but if you compare to AWS, the S3 "First 10 TB / Month" tier is $0.09 per GB [1], and the Cloudfront "First 10TB" north America tier is $0.085 per GB and more for other regions [2] - or if you look at KeyCDN [3] for America that's $0.04 per GB, and again more for other regions.
So HillRat's $0.05/GB figure isn't the most expensive out there :)
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
81% off its initial day of trading price. Are there ANY tech IPOS in the last 2 years that are currently trading above their IPO price? I get we are approaching a bear market today but some day the public will wise up to the fact that they get no chance at genuine growth opportunities for these niche tech companies and are being sold on illusory global market dominance narratives.
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.
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).
> 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.
People say the same thing when Youtube cancels them. Where are they going to go? Rumble? DailyMotion? These crap alternatives will then have the same problem in a few years.
> Most indie video creators are not developers, and most developers would still struggle with the extraordinary challenge of effective video hosting.
Huh? I didn't say "build a homebrew video hosting service". When you don't know how to do something you need done, you pay an expert to do it. I'm sure indie artists expect to be compensated for their own work, why shouldn't the people doing the technical work the artist is unable to do on their own be compensated?
It was easy to misunderstand you. You said pay for the hosting, which implies paying a hosting company. Of course, it would make more sense if you’re also paying an entire team to build it for you. But that wasn’t the initial reading of your comment.
Fair. I could have articulated my point more clearly. I was indeed implying that they "pay a hosting company" with the unstated implication that they also pay a company or individual to deal with the technical details surrounding that process. If I told someone to "build your own house" in the context of home ownership, I wouldn't expect them to understand that as literally building it themselves, I'd expect them to hire an architect, contractor etc, but on HN I can understand why the implication might sound like a DIY suggestion.
You don't need to "replicate a video streaming service like Vimeo" which is obviously a massive undertaking, you just need a system to deliver your own videos, minus all the infrastructure necessary for a platform that is meant to support a multi-tenant video publishing and billing service as a product.
That's like if I said "build your own web storefront" and you said "replicating shopify is not an easy task" or "build your own newsletter" and you said "replicating substack is not an easy task".
My emphasis was on the high-performance aspect, not the platform itself. It's not a trivial problem to host videos and have them easily watchable in a way like Vimeo does it. Bandwidth, streaming tech and other aspects can't be done adequately by the average development team without significant expense.
I'm going to copy and paste something I wrote somewhere else in this thread since it's the same point.
The tech stack necessary to host your own HD videos is open source and really quite simple for an experienced developer. ffmpeg, nginx (with a couple plugins) and one of the many open source web player clients and you're all set. Payments and subscriptions are a long solved problem via stripe or paypal, it's really not a massive endeavor. Most of the work would be on the aesthetic side, not the technical side.
That sounds very optimistic. I work for a start up right now which is private but valued in the 10 digits, and they have some video streaming features on their platform, and despite an engineering team spending a few years on this, it still causes some customers problems with freezing playback and stuttering video. On the surface, sure, you can probably get it to work in a basic way. But the reliability, consistency, the overall experience of the user, that is extremely hard to keep going. And I’m not even talking yet about the interface.
Building this with freelancers for an independent content creator has basically zero chance of being profitable in the end. There's a reason that the notion of an "independent video content creator" didn't really exist until YouTube existed - it's prohibitively expensive for every content creator to develop their own version of YouTube.
Not to mention that you need to deal with payment (or at least gating) and subscription management if you're not using other platforms.
First, the suggestion isn't that artists "build their own YouTube" any more than writers hosting their own blog are "building their own medium.com".
A lot has changed since the debut of YouTube, the tech stack necessary to host your own HD videos is open source and really quite simple for an experienced developer. ffmpeg, nginx (with a couple plugins) and one of the many open source web player clients and you're all set. Payments and subscriptions are a long solved problem via stripe or paypal, it's really not a massive endeavor. Most of the work would be on the aesthetic side, not the technical side.
So any http server capable of delivering the bandwidth and a <video> element?
Video isn't particularly latency sensitive so no need for edge nodes right by them. One of the many reasonably priced s3 compatable services would work.
It's still very raw, though. They're effectively giving you the edge storage, playlist streaming, etc. but you still need to setup the player and website surrounding it. Most indie creators would still (rightly) struggle with setting that up effectively.
I think the targeted market is just different. I don't expect cloudflare to ever offer some kind of self-hosted paywalled pages or something similar like vimeo.
You can upload your video to cloudflare stream, get the embed code and put in on your own webpage. No programming needed unless you want to access it via api for some custom integration.
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.
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.
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.
The other thing to consider is the that Google gets immense economy of scale from its other cloud business. So a one-product company like Vimeo will always struggle to compete in an economy-of-scale dominant vertical like storage.
Microsoft or AWS could compete here if they chose.
> We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.
Hasn’t this always been the case? As I recall, Vimeo was a tool that CollegeHumor built for themselves back before YouTube was YouTube, and it survived (thrived?) almost accidentally on the backs of its “professional” users.
Not always, but for a long time, yes. Back in the very early days (2007-2009 or so), it was a much more personal thing and not professional. It was actually a really awesome community of people. After that, we sort of shifted towards "semi-professional" and eventually more professional after that.
In my experience Vimeo is the place where you go to post creative-minded drivel without every viewer pointing out that it's drivel and then calling you an ethnic slur. Vimeo simply doesn't have a good reputation. When I see a Vimeo link I know it's going to be somebody talking about how taking ayahuasca while in VR makes you closer to God or how they programmed a Microsoft Kinect to only unlock their front door if they do a dance off Fortnite.
Hard disagree. Once upon a time it was a place where animators used to upload really crazy work, particularly at the end of the academic semester when students would post experimental stuff from thesis projects. A really creative community that basically evaporated. Lots of really cool music videos as well.
There is still a lot of stuff like this, but it's harder than ever to find, and certainly not anywhere near as much as it used to be. It's a real shame.
> "Today we are a technology platform, not a viewing destination. We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube."
I wonder what the strategy is for shifting though. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understand was that Youtube was able to hit dominance in part because it ran at a loss for a long time and basically encouraged everyone to just throw stuff on the platform. I don't know how you become the indie version of Youtube if people are nervous about putting experimental, indie, or even crappy videos on the site out of fear that those videos might contribute to their hosting costs.
My feeling is that there are two models:
- B2B hosting, where you shift costs to uploaders but let them interact directly with other businesses/customers without ads or excessive railroading. Basically getting businesses to pay for infrastructure to connect with clients/users.
- A media destination platform, where you shift costs to consumers (either through subscriptions or ads), and away from uploaders/businesses, because you're monetizing their content and they're allowing you to control the ecosystem -- the ecosystem is the monetization.
I'm no expert, nobody should assume I know anything about running a media company. But as a user/creator, I don't understand why I would upload to a media platform where I have to pay for the privilege of having them monetize my content. I tolerate uploading stuff to Youtube and having them monetize my stuff because their hosting is free. I tolerate paying for raw hosting and CDN services because they allow me to own my own ecosystem.
If the hosting isn't free, as a business I think I would want a lot more control over the platform, I wouldn't tolerate Youtube's railroading as much and I wouldn't tolerate Youtube's advertising. If I'm paying for hosting, I kind of expect a B2B solution, and increasing hosting costs if anything makes me expect even more control over the process -- for the cost of a CDN, I expect them to act like a CDN. Maybe other creators feel different about that? If it costs $3600 a year to upload to Youtube, are people going to be sticking a lot of indie music and Let's Plays and Twitch-stream mirrors on Youtube?
I would think that most of the clients who are fine with paying those kinds of costs are themselves businesses/entrepreneurs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is just a rehash of stereotypes. The main thrust of the attack against pornhub started after the NYT article that documented quite a few examples of revenge porn, lack of moderation from pornhub, etc. Maybe you should go read that since you don't seem aware that there are actual examples of what you say they weren't able to find. & NYT isn't exactly known to be a source of evangelical propaganda/zeal.
You can choose to ignore that, but to say that it was all the evil american evangelists boogeyman is just non sense. It's a tired trope that you often see coming from some europeans that have a very weird and misinformed view of American society. And ignoring the insane amounts of documented abuse in the porn industry.
Visa and Mastercard were also concerned by the potential for prostitution that onlyfans could have, and after what happened to backpage they did not need any outside pressure. Payment processors have always been hostile to porn.
This is all so widely documented that I just really fail to see how you got to that conclusion.
> The main thrust of the attack against pornhub started after the NYT article that documented quite a few examples of revenge porn, lack of moderation from pornhub, etc.
I won't say PornHub isn't without issues. But: Facebook, Twitter and Reddit have also been accused of the very same things and yet no one is calling for their ban.
> NYT isn't exactly known to be a source of evangelical propaganda/zeal
The particular author - Nick Kristof - is [1].
> And ignoring the insane amounts of documented abuse in the porn industry.
No one is ignoring that. The answer isn't to ban porn sites or prostitution, the answer is to go after the abusers directly, to establish a culture of holding people accountable.
> Visa and Mastercard were also concerned by the potential for prostitution that onlyfans could have, and after what happened to backpage they did not need any outside pressure. Payment processors have always been hostile to porn.
Yeah, and why is that? Because again of a campaign driven by anti-sex-work activists and politicians and AGs wanting an easy target for political gain [2], timed together with the passing of FOSTA/SESTA, yet another campaign by the same groups [3]. To this day, the government wasn't able to hold trial against the people behind Backpage, further giving evidence to the fact that the situation isn't as clear as the abolitionists painted it.
> Payment processors have always been hostile to porn.
Because online porn (in contrast to physical media) has incredibly high fraud rates - from legitimately stolen credit cards that have been used to buy premium accounts over men having their purchases found out by their wives and attempting to deflect by saying their card details got stole to clear cases of "post-nut regret" aka chargeback fraud.
> It's a tired trope that you often see coming from some europeans that have a very weird and misinformed view of American society.
You correctly identified me being an European. And you can hardly blaming us for our beliefs when you managed to elect an Evangelical nutcase to Vice President and the GQP is has been running efforts wherever they can to screw over sex workers, transgender and non-heterosexual people wherever the fuck they can.
You did ignore that though! You said it was all baseless and there was no single example of it happening. The reason pornhub did a 180° so quickly is because they also realized their moderation system was trash and full of holes. I don't disagree that they shouldn't be closed either, but the porn websites basically have had 0 oversight for the past 2 decades. The potential for abuse is so high, even if we assume there was none yet.
By the way I'm not American, but please it's hilarious to see europeans giving lessons about transgender rights, homophobia or racism. Let's ignore the fact that in most of Europe, trans people have way less rights/recognition, there are still debates around gay marriage and gay adoption, abortion laws are usually more draconian than even in Texas & the German state literally has a religious tax. Racism is also so ingrained that you get countries like France with 20-40% voting for a literal neo nazi party for decades now, and hatred against Roma peoples is so accepted and "natural" that it's basically a national sport.
The only difference is that in the US, there's actually a public debate around those issues, while in Europe it's much more accepted. So while I don't want to bash on europe your last paragraph does not reflect reality.
Pornhub isn't dependent on the credit card railroads to function as a business; Pornhub/MindGeek is largely ad supported. OnlyFans is subscription based; losing Mastercard/Visa would have ended the platform.
On the other hand, does OnlyFans have any future beyond adult content? Even if they announce their pivot tomorrow, I can't imagine anyone using it given the history associated with that brand, but rebranding also means essentially starting from scratch in a market with existing competition (Patreon, LiberaPay, etc) that already have a critical mass of creators.
> does OnlyFans have any future beyond adult content?
From a development cost perspective, moving into non-adult content would just require a page reskin and a domain name purchase. It would all be advertising.
Patreon was the goto place, until they decided to reject adult content - which spawned OnlyFans.
I doubt OnlyFans can pivot - they'd just be competing with patreon, which i dont think they will win if so. The OnlyFan niche is quite strong, and they would be stupid to pivot now. Case in point - the words "onlyfan" has become a verbage like google has.
It's definitely not well executed but I think it's more complicated than you're portraying it because the competition isn't even. The size of the social network is definitely a factor but that's been built up by Google subsidizing YouTube for years and YouTube's costs can be artificially low because Google keeps a higher percentage of the ad revenue from their own ad network — they conspicuously still don't report profitability for YouTube — and heavily favors YouTube in search results to keep usage high.
Right now, if I search for “Lois van Baarle” on Google I see her Twitter account and then a bunch of YouTube hits. I have to add "Vimeo" to the query before I see a single hit from her preferred platform before the third page of results.
If this is true it seems pretty blatantly anticompetitive and a good reason for the EU to hit Google with another few €billion in fines until they knock it off.
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?
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!
Serious question - dedicated servers/VPSes with unmetered bandwidth are still a thing. Get a few of those, point your DNS name at all of them (for redundancy & load balancing) and rsync/FTP your files to all of them.
I can see this being a problem with viral, publicly-available content, but for subscription-only content the traffic patterns should be relatively predictable and capped.
Yes, all those cheap servers and VPS with “unlimited” bandwidth have fair use policies and qos metering that will likely be very similar to vimeo’s. They certainly don’t mean TB of high quality video streaming every month when they say unlimited bandwidth
I'm sure fly by night, cheap providers do that, but there are long-term reputable providers such as OVH offering unmetered bandwidth on pretty much all their services. Are those also problematic?
There is this one built by some edu creators from YouTube called Nebula[0] it’s part of Curiosity Stream to subscribe and to publish you probably need to contact StandardTV which are the creators behind it.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.]
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
The people interviewed were paying. Someone going from $900 to $3000, which is a lot and at least according to one of the people interviewed isn't worth it as they plan on switching platforms. Actually, everyone interviewed it sounded like they plan on leaving.
A payment model of "your bandwidth is unlimited unless you hit this barely mentioned and completely opaque threshold, at which point you'll be charged a completely arbitrary amount" is downright predatory, and is nowhere near the same as being asked to pay for services (which the creator in question already was doing)
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.
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.
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. Sounds like the should have done it a long time ago. The problem is that Vimeo is not giving people enough time for them to adapt.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Switch from a $200 cost to thousands, with very little notice, is going to hurt users regardless of how "fair" the new system is.
Maybe companies should be upfront and consistent with their pricing? Running at a loss to gain market share, followed by jacking up prices once users are commited to your platform, does not make for a pleasant business partnership.
>I'm starting to think people here don't like the idea of paying for things, period.
Not accurate at all. This is a very destructive attitude to hold on to.
Creators create the content that makes platforms worth while. They ARE the main product that platforms rely upon. Popular platforms make billions of dollars on advertising integration, but the average creator makes pennies. The balance is dramatically skewed.
The platforms make profit from sponsors that they don't share with creators after paying overhead... This is a problem, especially when employees and investors get overpaid (relatively to creators) for their contributions to a platform's success.
It's pretty crazy that musicians that publish music to Spotify are asked to pay for subscriptions to the service and promotion on the platform. It's like spending $20 to earn $4.
These platforms know it too, but they hire marketing companies and influencers to promote false hope to creators. It's exactly the reason why ponzi schemes are so rampant everywhere online.
That's only true for platforms that make money from users, eg ad based platforms, not platforms that loses money from users, like vimeo. You have an opportunity to be on a platform where you are the customer and not the product, but i think it's pretty obvious that people would rather be the product.
Vimeo is losing money because they are not innovating anything beyond youtube. They also run a fairly closed off community from the rest of the Internet. People don't upload because YouTube is much more far-reaching and free to use.
The "kickstarter culture" move is usually always a bad idea for running and growing a business, companies that go the route of being subscriber funded eventually fail in highly competitive markets.
SoundCloud is doing the same thing and that is why they've lost most of their relevance to creators.
The future is in platforms that find ways to not tax and undervalue their creators, that's what the best creators will move to.
> The platforms make profit from sponsors that they don't share with creators after paying overhead... This is a problem, especially when employees and investors get overpaid (relatively to creators) for their contributions to a platform's success.
> It's pretty crazy that musicians that publish music to Spotify are asked to pay for subscriptions to the service and promotion on the platform. It's like spending $20 to earn $4.
YouTube keeps 45% of the advertising revenue according to [1]. So creators keep a narrow majority of the revenue, which doesn't feel wholly unfair since YouTube is paying all the costs. Doing the math on a billion hours of viewed video per day at an average 11.7 minute video and $28B in revenue gives me an average revenue per view of $0.015 for YouTube.
I also think you're over-valuing creators a little bit. YouTube needs creators, but the creators are largely replaceable. Creators need somewhere to host their videos, and there's pretty much only YouTube. I don't think I've ever seen a creator successfully get off YouTube without switching to another format entirely. Meanwhile I've seen lots of creators rise, fall, and get replaced by someone else.
Spotify is basically the same way. Musicians don't like it, but people don't buy music anymore, so you either put up with the streaming services or you go do something else for a living. Spotify will likely be fine if you leave, but you won't be fine if Spotify cuts you off.
There is also definitely strong anchoring effect at free price point. I think another effect going on here is how simple uploading a video and sharing a link is. Storage and bandwidth costs are completely non-obvious to an unsophisticated user. So it feels unjust when they are asked to pay for them.
I think the issue here is that they appear to misrepresent the sitution on their pricing page [0].
For example the Premium tier which is required for live streaming is £70 per month, billed annually.
For that they claim "Unlimited live streaming".
If you click on "View all features" to see the hidden detail, you can read:
"Unlimited bandwidth (subject to fair use)" and if you then hover over the question mark, you can see more hidden text describing the 99 percentile blurb.
Nowhere do they state any numbers defining what overuse is.
So people are sucked into what appears on the surface to be a great service, at a great price relative to the competition (DaCast etc), and as soon as Vimeo has you dependent on their service, the "you're in the top 1%" email comes.
I don't think this is a great business model. They should be upfront and honest from the get go.
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.
Vimeo isn't a destination in the same way that Youtube is, where people go to just browser 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.
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 as well, 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.
it stopped being "significantly" better a long time ago. The bitrate used to be much higher than YouTube but now they are similar. People only keep repeating this because it was true in the earlier days of HD video hosting.
True, but bitrate is only one part of the equation, and not the biggest factor for creative work. Preserving color space, frame rate, etc are of higher importance to anyone other than editors and the most-technical of DPs.
Back in the day it was a true community of creatives and creative professionals. There was a lot of effort put into fostering a positive community, unlike what you saw on many sites at the time. Video quality was always much more of a priority than elsewhere, but basically everyone else has caught up now.
> 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!
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.
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.
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
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 a couple thousand for essentially the same functionality, maybe only an inconvenience for those that want to watch on their phone during a commute or something similar.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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