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Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

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Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

#131
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's CloudFront, one of the most expensive CDNs out there. (And that's before considering customers like Vimeo can get special rates, even 50% off is common) Another example on the opposite end is a host like Hetzner, where you get 20TB of traffic at 10Gb/s uplink for any cloud VM at $5+/month (or any root server at $40+/month). Comparably, AWS EC2 is $0.17/GB IIRC. On another note -- it looks like Vimeo are us…

Cloudfront is an example for "premium B2B service", which apparently Vimeo wants to be too. So they clearly have cheaper underlying prices, and then have costs for non-bandwidth and and want to make money on top. Same way that AWS is not for everybody that means that clearly Vimeo is not for everybody who is not willing to pay premium, but for the market , it's not totally out of order.

What's the point of "premium" if you only want bits delivered at an acceptable rate?

Bunny CDN would give you 2TB for about 20 bucks/month.

I know you'd then have to use your own website/player but that's not really a big deal, most people that use Vimeo have a website anyway, it's not that hard to code an tag ...

I don't think this was a good move by Vimeo, but maybe they're doing so bad (financially, as I think their product is great) that they don't really have a choice.

Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

#132
Just a side rant, but Vimeo always had this perception (to me), that it was a Ruby of Rails clone of YouTube. It had that very clean minimalist pastely UI with very easy to understand player, but always felt static.

Compared to YouTube with a world of content at my fingertips, either from comments, or the endless recommendations surrounding the pages, Vimeo's insistence on the early Web 2.0 clean aesthetic kept it from ever becoming sticky.

I can see how early filmmakers gravitated towards Vimeo for that very reason, but then you're sort of left with just a hosting site for embeddable videos at the end of the day. Unfortunately, Vimeo as a brand never gets any mindshare and it fades into the background of the content hosted on it. That's fine and there's lots of space to explore on the tooling side for content producers, and actually, I see it as very similar to Stripe's business model.

HOWEVER, and something a bit more nuanced here, yes, Vimeo can provide all the tools a creator could possibly ever need, except, and a big one, discovery.

YouTube also supports non-searchable content, along with its discoverable content. So they can continue to dominate from mindshare alone.

Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

#133
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3500 a year is significantly less than hiring someone to do it for you.

Let's not kid ourselves that this requires a full-time position. I bet you can hire some agency to do this for you for a few hundred bucks.

Pricing designed to exploit people who don't know what they don't know, when it boils down to 30 seconds or less of information about vps hosting - that's pretty crappy to do to people.

It does create a market opportunity for small shops / agencies. Even charging $500 an hour for an initial setup would be fair, since you can template the server deployments and set up small business video hosting pretty trivially. Really, though, you could follow a one page tutorial using Linode or Digital Ocean and the like, and scale your hosting to their plans.

Vimeo is not going to survive long being the "bad guy" in this market. They need a visionary, but they've got conservative plodders.

Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

#134
post #29

This sounds like a potentially great business clarity move: > We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube” But this part -- bait&switch, with only one week to decide or move, (if that's accurate) -- is not what you want from your B2B solution provider: > “I was already paying $200 a year, which I think is pretty expensive,” [...] if she wanted to keep hosting her content on the site, she’d need to upgrade…

> "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."

Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

#136
According to Wikipedia as of November 2020 Vimeo had over 200 million users. I imagine most of those users have never uploaded a video, have upload very few for a limited audience or haven't uploaded a video in quite a while. I believe I have a Vimeo account that I haven't thought about for years and might have uploaded a video to years ago upon first signing up. The fast majority of their users are likely using no bandwidth. According to the same Wikipedia article as of November 2020 they had 1.6 million paying customers. I would wager that their paying customers account for the majority of bandwidth usage. 1% of 200 million is 2 million which means it is likely almost the entirety of their paying customers and a good number of active uploading non-paying customers fall within the top 1% of bandwidth users.

Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

#138
post #29

This sounds like a potentially great business clarity move: > We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube” But this part -- bait&switch, with only one week to decide or move, (if that's accurate) -- is not what you want from your B2B solution provider: > “I was already paying $200 a year, which I think is pretty expensive,” [...] if she wanted to keep hosting her content on the site, she’d need to upgrade…

She makes around $25k a month from her videos, so paying $3.1k for hosting doesn't seem like an unusual cost. However, it's obvious that she derives no benefit from being able to control her own branding or whatever value-add that vimeo provides over youtube so putting it on an ad-supported platform like youtube probably just makes more sense for her.

Where did you find the $25k/mo figure? TFA says that her most popular video has less than a thousand views.

Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

#140
post #58
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s the point. If you are running b2b services it’s a shakedown of small business clients

I think a lot of people here offer b2b services that are not shakedowns.

You misunderstood. The small b2b are the ones getting shook down. Small b2b content providers are getting hit with huge cost so they can buy time to migrate off
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