Live data from Hacker News

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

ymcinema.com

221–230 of 317 posts

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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy, search for "unmetered dedicated server", bunch of offers all over the place. Many hosters also have "server auctions" where you can rent second-hand servers that are already setup but the one who initially ordered it stopped using it, those are also cheap.

That's awesome, thank you. I did not realize hosting prices were so cheap now... good to know for the future.

You're not alone! So many people are being "brought up" in the web/server world only knowing cloud hosting which is super expensive, and not many know about the "old world" of dedicated instances. Prices haven't changed a lot for a long time, for as long as I know, just that people are being steered to use cloud more and more.

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

#222

This is a response to the Patreon story from last week[0]. The thing with Vimeo charging that much for videos is that it doesn’t look like they actually needed Vimeo. Ya, it’s nice to have rich analytics, but it sounded like they would have been just fine simply distributing the MP4 to subscribers via some file transfer service, eg. WeTransfer. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30686704

It's so funny how that discussion goes exactly the same as the discussion in this article. It's like, you could have predicted all of the comments here before they were even posted.

That's true of surprisingly many follow-up threads—nearly all of them in fact. Most don't contain significant-enough new information to budge the gravity of the discussion.

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

#224
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> includes only very basic hosting of an application package Only basic hosting if you ignore all of the other services. You might consider the App Store's revenue share high but don't pretend the App Store is just a dumb file host.

What else do they do besides provide a payments gateway ( that they force you to use)? As seen with Android, you don't need to use the official app store to use the official SDKs and platform APIs.

Developing 3rd party frameworks is a meaningful expense. AOSP means Google made a business decision to incur that expense and sign away rights to it, but Apple hasn't.

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

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add, this is why people serious about their business generally will enter into contracts with other businesses to ensure either side can't screw each other over. And it provides a clear transition plan if one party wants to leave.

For something thats $200/yr no one would be offering that.

No but you would expect price changes like this to be given advanced notice and implemented only after a current contract ends

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

#226
post #27
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that it excuses what's happening, or that it really puts her in the "top 1 percent"...but despite the low views, she could still be using a lot of bandwidth. Her videos appear to be tutorials that are pretty long, most of them 1 hour+: https://loish.net/tutorials/ It wouldn't take many views/month to use a lot of bandwidth, assuming her customers watch the whole thing. That's perhaps not worth $3500/year, but I c…

With this amount of views you can just rent a cheap VPS with a few terabytes of included egress traffic, put up a very basic index.html, and stream those videos via the browser's HTML5 video player. This costs about $5 per month, maybe add $5 for more storage. I get that not everybody has the skills to do this and payments are handled by Vimeo but $3500 is outrageous.

Cloudflare stream is 60% of that cost . Vimeo doesn't have CDN network advantage of cloudflare so not it that outrageous.

A lot of tech products are as not that much more complex than you say. There are plenty of open source software you could stick into VPS that people pay SaaS service providers with similar features a lot of money for .

For someone with the skills it is hard to understand the markup, but those skills are really valuable.

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

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even a sensible or pro-rated increase. Just a shakedown.

Tell that to Sunny Singh, the other Vimeo user who was featured in the Verge article, who did the math himself and had to admit that he was costing Vimeo $2500/yr.

A customer shouldn't really need to concern themselves with the profitability of a service provider though. The price Vimeo demanding is reasonable - what's not reasonable is hiding that prices could increase, and being basically as opaque as possible about the conditions to trigger that increase and what the increased cost was.

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

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single provider deciding to charge you 16% of your revenue is kind of unusual.

It's $3500 per year so costs more like 16%/12. Intentionally deceptive and also a very reasonable cost

Not with a week to decide on such a massive hike

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

#229
post #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."

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.

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

#230
post #201

This is a response to the Patreon story from last week[0]. The thing with Vimeo charging that much for videos is that it doesn’t look like they actually needed Vimeo. Ya, it’s nice to have rich analytics, but it sounded like they would have been just fine simply distributing the MP4 to subscribers via some file transfer service, eg. WeTransfer. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30686704

Unlisted YouTube video or Patreon's native video sharing both sound more appealing than some direct download.

Unlisted Youtube Videos aren't great for content producers though, because if the URL ever gets posted publicly you are screwed.
Post reply on HN