Popular Patreon creators are being hit with Vimeo price hikes

https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/15/22979126/vimeo-patreon-creators-price-increase

by usermi • 4 years ago

217 225 4 years ago

h2odragon• 4 years ago

117 subscriber-only videos ... around 150 views on average ... 815 for the most viewed.

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.

barrkel• 4 years ago

Likely an extremely long tail of almost-never-viewed videos.

closetohome• 4 years ago

If that qualifies as top 1% and Vimeo is hitting people up for $3000+/year, they must be in utterly dire financial straits.

Which is really sad, as they've generally been the only nominally-competitive youtube alternative.

lotsofpulp4• 4 years ago

And yet people complain about YouTube ads, even though YouTube gives an option to pay to not see ads.

nathanyz3• 4 years ago

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.

kmeisthax3• 4 years ago

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.

contravariant3• 4 years ago

So that's about 150 full downloads a month (give or take)? Even for particularly huge video files that's not a whole lot of bandwidth.

protomyth• 4 years ago

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.

contravariant3• 4 years ago

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.

cronix• 4 years ago

I cannot imagine ~18,000 views is the top 1%

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.

HillRat7• 4 years ago

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.

thebean112• 4 years ago

Is that assuming every view watched the entire four hour video? Highly doubt that, even if all views were from subscribers.

danShumway2• 4 years ago

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.

randomsilence• 4 years ago

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.

enimodas• 4 years ago

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.

michaelt2• 4 years ago

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.

[1] https://vimeo.com/upgrade [2] https://vimeo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037761072-Ban... [3] https://www.patreon.com/loish

ryanbrunner3• 4 years ago

Vimeo is paying far, far less than $0.05 unless their bandwidth is absolutely miniscule.

chmod775• 4 years ago

per-GB CDN price at $0.05

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.

xmodem• 4 years ago

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.

mschuster914• 4 years ago

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.

RubberbandSoul• 4 years ago

Billions of dollars worth of R&D and I still can't organize my subscriptions. Sorry, I had to.

aserdf• 4 years ago

vimeo had their IPO last year (VMEO)

sct202• 4 years ago

-81% in about a year ($55->$10.4). Big yikes there.

fullshark• 4 years ago

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.

nathanyz3• 4 years ago

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.

HelloNurse• 4 years ago

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).

AdmiralAsshat• 4 years ago

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.

nebula8804• 4 years ago

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.

root_axis9• 4 years ago

Where are they going to go

Pay for your own hosting.

tootie2• 4 years ago

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.

llampx2• 4 years ago

Is there no point in trying unless you can dominate the segment?

culturestate• 4 years ago

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.

belval• 4 years ago

I didn't know that! Crazy to think that a business with $200M in revenue came from a side-project from CollegeHumor.

slig• 4 years ago

TIL. Also, collegehumor.com redirects to their youtube channel.

bdougherty4• 4 years ago

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.

causi• 4 years ago

not the indie version of YouTube

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.

nr2x2• 4 years ago

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.

danShumway2• 4 years ago

"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.

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

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.

ypeterholmes• 4 years ago

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.

mschuster914• 4 years ago

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.

contravariant3• 4 years ago

I must have missed that, what exactly ended happened?

hyperbovine• 4 years ago

The immediately vanished into a poof! of sanctimony and are no longer in the Alexa top 50. Oh wait...

acdha• 4 years ago

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.

Analemma_• 4 years ago

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.

sxv• 4 years ago

Also Couchsurfing in May 2020 (RIP) [0]

[0]https://www.inputmag.com/features/rise-and-ruin-of-couchsurf...

klelatti• 4 years ago

They’re probably testing the price sensitivity of a group of customers who represent a tiny part of their revenue.

Some will stay and pay the much higher price presumably - in the absence of alternatives and they’re not bothered about those who leave.

Not good but not surprising.

rasz2• 4 years ago

They have been doing it for couple of years. I think EEVBlog or Louis Rossmann got hit by >$1K/year bill 1-2 year ago and decided to bail.

jb19918• 4 years ago

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?

pmoriarty• 4 years ago

PeerTube:

https://joinpeertube.org/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30445497

jb19918• 4 years ago

The comments in that thread are somewhat persuasive that it would not be the most appropriate choice for most video creatives.

awiesenhofer• 4 years ago

https://joinpeertube.org/

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!

anotherman5542• 4 years ago

If you already have an audience you can upload a file directly to the Internet and link to it from your Patreon.

jb19918• 4 years ago

And where would you propose to upload it to? Video hosting is not cheap for heavy video streaming.

LegitShady2• 4 years ago

It seems got be Rumble, but then you have to deal with the negative associations of that site (deserved or not).

sdfhbdf• 4 years ago

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.

[0] https://nebula.app [1]: https://standard.tv

xemdetia• 4 years ago

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.

wccrawford• 4 years ago

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.

sevenf0ur• 4 years ago

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.

MauranKilom• 4 years ago

I don't think it's unreasonable for Vimeo to charge you for it.

Those users are already paying on the order of one grand per year.

ssijak3• 4 years ago

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.

ilrwbwrkhv2• 4 years ago

200gb bandwidth should cost you a buck or 2 / month in streaming. What's your total storage size? Should we around .01 / GB.

LegitShady2• 4 years ago

Thats maybe pure bandwidth costs with whoever you get bandwidth from. Most people can’t set up their own password protected video streaming service.

buggeryorkshire• 4 years ago

Plus reencoding costs? Hosting the video in multiple formats for different devices?

Nexxxeh• 4 years ago

let's hope that does not put me in the top 1%

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.]

max5992• 4 years ago

they've possibly already lost nearly a third of their previous "top 1%".

I suspect a lot of them won't be leaving for real when they start shopping around for alternatives. The numbers I see looks in line with what you would normally pay for cloud services.

GiorgioG• 4 years ago

Sounds like Vimeo will be sold for scraps in a year or two.

lotsofpulp4• 4 years ago

It is already public. Question is if anyone will be willing to buy it for scraps.

paxys2• 4 years ago

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.

root_axis9• 4 years ago

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.

rasz2• 4 years ago

~30 euro/m gets you Terabytes of storage and unmetered gigabit at hetzner.

pavlov• 4 years ago

A look at Vimeo's stock chart is enough to understand why they're doing this. Not much left to lose.

tyingq4• 4 years ago

Oh, wow:

  52-wk high 58.00 
  52-wk low   9.20
  Today      10.47

skinnymuch• 4 years ago

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)

lbriner• 4 years ago

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?

ipaddr2• 4 years ago

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.

hannasanarion2• 4 years ago

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.

throwmeariver1• 4 years ago

All the examples in the article are from paying customers…

tarentel3• 4 years ago

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.

ryanbrunner3• 4 years ago

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)

ravenstine• 4 years ago

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.

smileybarry2• 4 years ago

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.

WheelsAtLarge• 4 years ago

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. 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.

tarentel3• 4 years ago

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.

hannasanarion2• 4 years ago

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.

tyingq4• 4 years ago

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.

judge20202• 4 years ago

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).

0: https://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/how-netflix-built-its-openconn...

tyingq4• 4 years ago

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.

endisneigh• 4 years ago

this right here is why YouTube is the most popular. most people don't want to pay what it truly costs. video hosting is very expensive.

paxys2• 4 years ago

Free service tracks users and shows ads – "This is a terrible business model, they should just ask users to pay."

Service offers a flat monthly fee – "Why does everything have to be subscription based? They should bill based on usage."

Service bills for hosting and bandwidth use – "How can creators afford to pay so much? This is exploitative."

I'm starting to think people here don't like the idea of paying for things, period.

Macha• 4 years ago

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

tedivm• 4 years ago

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.

chiefalchemist• 4 years ago

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.

rurp2• 4 years ago

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.

winternett2• 4 years ago

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.

KaoruAoiShiho2• 4 years ago

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.

everforward3• 4 years ago

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.

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-money-youtube-creat...

TrainedMonkey• 4 years ago

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.

w14• 4 years ago

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.

[0] https://vimeo.com/upgrade

bezospen15• 4 years ago

That's because all of this shit used to be free... Capitalism sucks

sofixa3• 4 years ago

Publishing video available for the whole world to see, was free? When? While YouTube were bleeding money trying to find a business model?

mdoms• 4 years ago

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.

evan_2• 4 years ago

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.

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.

qiskit• 4 years ago

That's interesting. I never could figure out why vimeo even existed as everyone uses youtube. But I guess it has a niche.

Any idea why creative professionals gravitated towards vimeo?

evan_2• 4 years ago

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 too, 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.

voltaireodactyl2• 4 years ago

Video quality is significantly higher on Vimeo, and their support is much, MUCH more reachable than Google’s.

Being able to contact someone to resolve issues is so critical to the film industry that even IMDb has added an option.

bdougherty4• 4 years ago

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.

imchillyb• 4 years ago

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!

sequoia2• 4 years ago

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.

Animats• 4 years ago

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.

dewey• 4 years ago

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

k__2• 4 years ago

Just a few minutes ago, I read about Glass, a Web3 video hosting platform. Guess they came at the right time!

https://glass.xyz

Inityx2• 4 years ago

Web3 is a Ponzi scheme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

k__2• 4 years ago

Thanks for the heads-up.

kregasaurusrex• 4 years ago

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 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.

Traster• 4 years ago

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.

chii2• 4 years ago

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.

quxbar• 4 years ago

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)

8bitsrule• 4 years ago

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.

srg0• 4 years ago

A lesson to learn from this story: don’t use Vimeo if video is your business.

nunez• 4 years ago

I didn't know that Vimeo was spun out of IAC. (IAC owns Match and Tinder.)

Popular Patreon creators are being hit with Vimeo price hikes

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