Vimeo is owned by IAC, the $9 billion dollar market cap company that owns Match.com, Tinder, OKCupid, Dictionary.com, and lots of others[0]. I don't think this is proof that Vimeo's revenue model is working out unless it's clear that this is being funded by Vimeo revenues and not just the broader IAC war chest.
Connected Ventures, the company that owned CollegeHumor and Bustedtees was acquired by IAC. At the time Vimeo was a side project of Jake Lodwick and was part of the Connected Ventures business, but it wasn't making any money and didn't impact the IAC acquisition price. Long story short, Vimeo's cost to operate became very expensive and started to impact Connected Ventures core business (CollegeHumor and Bustedtees). So Vimeo was spun out of Connected Ventures and made its own division in IAC.
This is funny... Facebook and Google obviously have been around for a while, but before a year or two ago, I had never even heard of Vimeo. Now they're a "super fancy" company? I guess I haven't been paying attention.
Vimeo has $1b market cap and was looking at $100m in revenue this year. [1]
Sure it's not YouTube (yet), but it's nothing to sneeze at either.
> many video producers are extremely unhappy using youtube
YouTube basically created an entire new market around video production. If it weren't for YouTube (or a similarly popular service), I'd hazard a guess that many of those video production jobs simply wouldn't exist.
It's hard to complain about a market with a too-big-player when the player basically created the entire market.
In fact Vimeo's pricing and core audience (largely-independent semi-pro uploaders of high-quality media content for promotional purposes) is identical to SoundCloud's. And Vimeo recently doubled down on that model, abandoning a massive Netflix-like product line in development [0]. So someone from that culture will be very well suited to promote stability of that business model.
What remains to be seen is his degree of financial control, given that Vimeo's parent IAC could presumably spare relatively large amounts of funding for it due to its stake in Match and Tinder. I have high hopes for its stability though.
reply