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 to a custom plan. Her quoted price: $3,500 a year. She was given a week to upgrade her content, decrease her bandwidth usage, or leave Vimeo.
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.
$3500 for hosting on top of what they already paid for hosting for the current length of their plan, with 7 days notice to vacate otherwise. And then how much next week? The week after that?
How could anyone trust Vimeo as a provider for their business after this?
The amount almost doesn't matter (it's definitely on the high side compared to alternatives). They can definitely afford it if they have a reasonable budget. However, how Vimeo has treated them as a paying customer is terrible.
It's an ad supported video platform that will give data to google, advertise your competitors to your customers, distract your customers from your product by being an entertainment social network site, have relatively poor analytics, etc. It's a non-starter for many businesses.
But of course not using it only makes sense if you can monetize your videos yourself by selling it or another product.
When you upload on YT you are the product, YT sells you and your data and they profit. What vimeo is selling is hosting, saas, and bandwidth. They dont' profit at all except for what you pay them. vimeo comparatively to CDNs and SaaS hosting providers have a decent price. If you don't think so then hire someone to set up cloudflare stream and your own website.
Youtube is ad-supported. You can't upload videos more than 15 minutes long without letting Youtube put preroll and mid-roll ads all over them, and the only access-control method it supports is "unlisted", where anybody with the URL can see it.
Creators don't want to force their paying Patreon supporters to watch ads for content that they paid for, and that can be leaked to the whole world if somebody merely ctrl-vs a bit of text.
> the only access-control method it supports is "unlisted", where anybody with the URL can see it.
Google Workspace supports videos which are private to an organization, but it's annoying to use (you have to switch your active account to the Workspace one) and much, much more expensive than Vimeo's new pricing scheme if you used it just for private videos.
In the use case of this context, where the business (patreon creator) publishes a video, none of the viewers will be in a Workspace organisation, unfortunately.
I have many videos on YouTube, several over an hour long, and have only monetized one video with ads as an experiment. What do you mean you can’t upload videos without ads being put on them?
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.
What? Of course they would. Send salespeople over to your office to negotiate terms, probably not. Standard contract with clear statement of fees, durations, renewals, etc? Pretty much any subscription service will have that. VPS on an annual plan, for example.
Here in Europe, some brands (that I consistently stay away from) like BP have consistently higher prices than rest of the market. We talk about competition of Eni, Shell, Total, Agip etc. Not meaning no-name questionable shops.
I don't think they are that ineffective in manufacturing, renting/buying land, building infrastructure or paying much more. Some locations ask for higher prices just because they don't have any competition in area.
And yes they charge easily 3x for stuff they know you will buy like redbulls, chocolate and so on.
Which makes sense. They've found the best locations to sell gas from, and also the best places to receive large gas shipments and store enough gas to sell safely
That is also egregious, but Apple and Google are getting away with it because they have a duopoly over mobile phone app stores. Not so with video hosting.
Definitely educate me, but: what is Vimeo doing for a B2B solution that Youtube can't provide? You can provide unlisted videos (and that is something a few pareon users have done).
It's odd because Vimeo was most known to me for hosting art portfolios, so seeing it denounce it's "indie" status is bewildering. I assume the advantage comes from providing uncompressed videos with extremely high bitrate. Which is an admittedly extremely niche market.
I have never understood how pointing out another unethical policy justifies the first unethical policy
It seems we as a society have lost the axiom of "2 wrongs do not make a right" as it is not just this area were I see people attempting to justify their wrongs based on the wrongs of others...
> 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.
"Less than 1000" is 3 digits rather than 4. What does the $7/hour mean? If it's $7/hour of viewing time, that is completely nuts. How many videos are there? If there is 1 video/week at 2 hours each and 1000 views each (this sounds like an overestimate), that's ~ 100k viewing hours, or 30 cents per hour, which seems like a lot, and it is a lower bound. At 1 mbit/second (this will vary but figure lots of mobile device clients) it's 45TB transferred or 7 cents per GB. Less crazy than AWS, but still pretty steep. Maybe this is an opportunity for someone. I'd like to know the actual numbers.
Added: is there really even such a thing as B2B video on any scale? I would almost never think of watching video as a good use of company time. Any idea how much of previous Vimeo content could be reasonably described that way?
> "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."
But should it be her job as a content producer to understand Vimeo's costs and margins? Vimeo is one of those who liked to advertise seemingly unmetered bandwidth behind an fine-print fair-use policy, luring people into a cheap pro plan with the hopes that most of them won't take off and become viral. That was their bet, one that they're now regretting. They could've just easily put a bandwidth meter on every account and let people decide what to do if they get close to that limit.
It's not even like the early days of Gmail abuse where people were using it as a cheap web disk, consuming way more storage and bandwidth than Gmail could've reasonably estimated. This person is just using Vimeo as they intended: hosting and serving videos. She wasn't trying to abuse the service, just using it the way they sold it to her, as a place to host videos for $200/year. Whose fault is it that they underpriced their plans as loss leaders on purpose, and the bet didn't quite pay off?
If they want to up their price because they want to change their business model, you know, more power to them... but sheesh, at least give her 60-90 days to figure out next steps. Some home internet connections can't even download all those videos and reupload them within 7 days.
(edit: to be clear, Gmail didn't offer unlimited disk, just a LOT of disk)
>It's not even like the early days of Gmail abuse where people were using it as a cheap web disk, consuming way more storage and bandwidth than Gmail could've reasonably estimated
Was this actually a thing? AFAIK even at the start they had hard limits. The only thing "unlimited" about it was that they promised to steadily increase the storage cap.
Yeah... back in the day, someone made a virtual file system layer that could span 1 or more Gmail accounts, basically using it as a block storage thing. IIRC (it's been a while) there was also some built-in redundancy, like the same file would be stored redundantly across multiple Gmail accounts in case one got deleted. Kinda like an early cloud RAID.
That was before even CAPTCHAs were common, I think, and so getting new Gmail accounts was very easy.
Eventually Google revised their ToS and clamped down, of course.
I'll see if I can track down some historical links, but it was a long time ago...
They also had a “gimmick” where you could literally watch your storage increase down to the billionth percentile or something like that. I seem to remember a counter at the bottom saying my free space available was “1.053746843GB” and it would be moving.
Yup. And back then upload sites were fairly uncommon... MegaUpload was 2 years after G-Mail, but IIRC you had to pay to do a whole lot without time/bandwidth limits.
And as an idea of scale, no, you can't fit a DVD in 1GB. but you could definitely hold a CD, or something between VHS and DVD quality of a movie.
Me? I just used it to hold on to base drivers for my systems and pictures I wanted to not lose. It worked great for a few years.
Yeah, I apologize if I was unclear. Didn't mean to imply that Gmail was unlimited, only that it was in a similar situation (i.e. offering way more disk than most users needed, with the bet that 99% of them won't use anywhere near the limit).
Why is it arrogant or entitlement when there are several services which allow video uploads for free, never mind $200/year? If you look at her play counts and read her position, I don't think there's indication of her expecting "infinite bandwidth".
There are several services which allow video uploads for "free" not really for free.
People have to understand that those companies are burning VC money to bait and switch people.
It is basically "dumping" and starving any competition until they find way to extract money from users ... or just sell BS to investors that they will get money from users.
In general I'm starting to think that we should be worried with many of these "free" or VC funded services if there is a big market correction any time soon. It might be viable model currently, but clearly not forever... And I hope the legislation wisens up for next round. Clearly many markets just aren't healthy.
> 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
Why is Vimeo using an unsustainable business model here anyway? Oh, right. They wanted growth. This is in the same vein of the bait-and-switch that Blockbuster Video did in the early 1990s. Grow unsustainably and hope you can snuff out your competition before you run out of funding.
Seems you are the one who doesn't have any idea about how much "bandwidth" really costs, which is $0. When peering happens, do you think they put quota on how much bandwidth you can send through? No, you have a throughput limit but then after that its unmetered. No way Vimeo is paying per TB served if they hope to one day make profits (unless they already do so).
You can easily setup your own personal video hosting site serving TB of traffic per month (over a 1gbps port) for less than $100/month, as long as you stay away from anything "cloud" that is just trying to extract as much money from you as possible. I'm surprised that you somehow think someone else is less experienced than yourself when you don't know even know these basic facts on how the internet is priced.
Your insistence that access, peering and infrastructure costs equal $0 couldn't be further from the truth, and unmetered doesn't mean infinite, so your entire premise is false to begin with. Vimeo is not running on a $100/mo server, and that you believe you understand their costs better than they do is ridiculous and shameful.
That is not at all what I am saying. I'm saying that the $/month "bandwidth" charge cloud entities charges is $0, which is true, they don't pay per volume, they pay for other things in their agreements for peering and so on.
> Vimeo is not running on a $100/mo server, and that you believe you understand their costs better than they do is ridiculous and shameful.
Who have said such a thing? Not me, so it's a bit ridiculous and shameful you're writing this in a reply to me.
> That is not at all what I am saying. I'm saying that the $/month "bandwidth" charge cloud entities charges is $0, which is true, they don't pay per volume, they pay for other things in their agreements for peering and so on.
I used the colloquial phrase "bandwidth and server costs" to describe all of the things that go into delivering packets, without needing to discuss individual expenses, because those weren't relevant and don't mean anything to anyone not in a tech role. You decided to redefine that to mean "exclusively per-TB transfer charges" -- you even nitpicked the word "bandwidth" and ignored the word "server" because you needed to change the truth to fit your narrative.
You’re generally correct although it’s slightly more nuanced. There are places in the world where peering isn’t free (eg Australia) and even mandated by law not to be (Eg SK).
I'm not saying the peering itself is free (it depends wildly, peering conditions/agreements are setup on a case-by-case basis often), but the amount of TB/month you include in the peering is not something I've seen before.
Could you share what law mandates that traffic has to be priced by amount send in a time interval in peering agreements? Or is this just a misunderstanding?
Both links talk about SK regulations, the latter more directly:
> This may be driven by new regulations from the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, which mandate the commercial terms of domestic interconnection, based on predetermined “Tiers” of participating networks
It could be a miscommunication but you’re being a little unclear with your language. If you’re saying that the $/TB is $0 then you’re not strictly true everywhere. Additionally, even if peering is 0-rated between large cloud providers, it isn’t necessarily true for Vimeo if they’re a customer. It depends on the agreements they’re able to strike with their providers, or the terms they’re able to get for their own peering agreements (even if large cloud providers 0-rate each other’s traffic, they may not do so for smaller customers).
If you’re saying that costs are variable based on how many TB you transfer I can’t say, but practically I doubt it would matter. But the contract can state that peering is charged $x/TB above the Y TB included in your annual minimum spend of Z hundreds of dollars.
Of course amortized over Vimeo’s volume this (wildly speculating on my part) probably amounts to several dollars per month or even per year and most of their customers are unlikely to be in SK or Australia where this issue is most prevalent. So in practice most businesses do often see 0-rated transit costs.
Disclaimer: this all my secondary hand information and I’m not particularly knowledgeable in this space. I would defer to anyone who actually strikes these peering deals regularly.
The bandwidth itself maybe essentially 0$, but I don't think same can be said of hardware, physical space or power. Or even the contracts involved with these. So clearly price must be more than 0.
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.
Those are only unmetered at small scale, if you start to use a lot of their bandwidth they will start charging you for it. Of course a single instance wont be enough to offset all the other users who don't use their bandwidth so it wont be an issue for them, but lets say you buy a thousand instances and use all bandwidth possible, then they will change the terms very quickly.
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.
How reliable are those "unmetered old world hostings", because "old world" hostings for me mean they can go down any time and I can call them as much as I want and no one will pick up.
If AWS is down I don't have to call anyone, half of the internet is already twitting/posting it and they will be up quite soon.
> How reliable are those "unmetered old world hostings", because "old world" hostings for me mean they can go down any time and I can call them as much as I want and no one will pick up.
Yeah, that's not what that means at all. When you're on a dedicated instance, your greatest enemy is no longer the data center or the company you rent from, but it is yourself, and you'll probably be the biggest cause for any downtime as the hoster will leave your instance alone for as long as they possibly can. If someone goes wrong, you usually have access to support that can physically reset it for you and they'll do it quickly. Dedicated instance also doesn't mean with redundancy, so you'll survive with one or more instances down for some period of time.
But you don't have to trust me for it. Check what kind of uptime famous companies like Hurricane Electric Vultr or Hetzner typically have so you could update your outdated view on dedicated hosting.
It's the customer's fault they didn't know Vimeo is losing money? A pretty big reason for that could be that they've been with Vimeo for over a decade in some cases and have always been led to believe they were paying for the service they were getting.
I'm confident customers' reactions would be very different had Vimeo told them "hey, you're actually costing us money, please upgrade to this plan that'll cost you about 30% more." In fact, Vimeo could have done that at 2x, 3x, 4x... But nope, let's pretend they're paying customers and reveal we've actually been subsidizing the service the whole time, but we need 17.5x the money now. And the customer is the arrogant one?
This depends on multiple factors. Entities like YouTube which use a lot of bandwidth own boxes in datacenters (well in Google's case, they own the datacenter as well). From there it depends on the DC. Most IP transit is charged based on the max of your egress or ingress costs. Some DCs offer you unmetered bandwidth but then charge you more than you would have paid for transit.
The big cloud companies, like AWS, GCP, Linode, or Hetzner usually have these deals in place already and then charge you for egress to recoup/profit off their bandwidth costs. At $200 / yr, you're going to be playing big cloud egress costs as most IP transit is a lot more expensive. Cloudflare [1] has a series of posts about this though the costs are probably very out of date by now.
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.
"Nice videos you got there. Shame if something were to happen to them. Now pay us $3,000 by the end of the week."
Now do you understand why people are mad?
The price isn't relevant. Giving someone less than a week to completely uproot themselves is extortion, plain and simple. It may even be illegal--I smell a class-action incoming.
My guess is that most people will cough up for a month or two and then leave. I know that I would definitely migrate off of a company which extorted me once.
However, that is equivalent to a quick infusion of a couple years of cash to Vimeo for quite a few of these customers. A quick pump of the numbers might get them a deal with somebody if this doesn't net them enough bad press.
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.
If so, he is not saying that he is costing Vimeo $2500/year, he is saying what amount of bandwidth he has "consumed"/"produced" from Vimeo, which for sure doesn't cost Vimeo $2500/year, as otherwise they would be bankrupt by now. They pay static sums for the internet connection, no TB/$ crap that people using cloud are used to.
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.
Your comment is false. Singh did an analysis and used the analysis to negotiate to a $2,500/year rate. He didn't "admit" anything about what it could be costing Vimeo.
This also seems like a great way to get everyone to leave. If what I wanted was a B2B platform, I wouldn't choose one with a history of suddenly changing its policies and only giving one week to catch up.
In fact, it's often much more difficult for a larger business to move that quickly than an independent user.
"We want you to leave" is a pretty ok thing for them to say. "You have a week to leave" is not. It's sleazy and unprofessional, and it's a signal that it's best for anyone to avoid them in the future.
they probably don’t want to be known as forcing users out unilaterally, so a false offer becomes the diplomatic move, now backfiring from public exposure.
coupled with the "we are a B2B solution" statement, i think they're trying to shake down patreon, not the individual creators - it sounds like vimeo wants patreon to start sending them money.
We have used Vimeo for some corporate clients' customer facing websites.
This is because Vimeo's embed offers:
1) No recommendations at the end
2) Customisable player controls
3) Control over where it can be embedded, etc
4) No ads
The downside is that they don't have much transparency over TOS / content policy removals. We had a random violation in one instance where the uploader recorded a screencast of something. Our best guess is that the system flagged it because the screens showed a UI with a user's profile and some dummy information which was likely understood to be real private information.
We've been using Wistia for 2 years for our business that serves Security Awareness Training content directly in Slack. It works perfectly fine. The pricing isn't that bad either. It seems like Vimeo is going after this type of market. Which is totally fine. I think the biggest issue with the current situation is just how little notice Vimeo gave the client in question. 90 days is a pretty standard price increase notice for B2B. They should have just done that.
Wait, so Vimeo removes videos of paying customers, and does not even tell you why/let you talk to a human about it to understand and appeal the decision?
It's one thing when a free service does this, but a paid provider?!?
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.
For what it's worth, I think Vimeo doesn't have great authentication support. Most of the Patreons and Kickstarters which I know used it for distribution had a single word password to gate access to content.
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.
Bandwidth pricing is always a difficult topic. E.g. one comparison: 2 TB traffic out of AWS CloudFront is $85-120/month (first TB free, per TB cost as listed for the second TB, depending on region), and that's traffic only, no storage, processing, ... Of course AWS traffic is not exactly cheap, but Vimeo is an all-in-one service handling more than just traffic.
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 using Akamai.
It’s not fair to compare premium cloud providers with dollar store providers like Hetzner. Especially if you’re going to ignore the cost of paying someone to set up and maintain that infrastructure, which is easily more than $3500/yr.
I didn't think it was fair to use CloudFront as the only example for CDN pricing, when it's one of the more expensive ones. Granted, I used an extreme counter-example but the point was that implying "this customer costs them $80-$120/month" is misleading (and wrong).
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 <embed> 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.
The problem with comparing themselves with cloudflare/bunnycdn is that Vimeo is making big chunk of their money on "pro" creators who pay 20 bucks for what would be 0,5 usd costs those CDNs have. They have few videos with few streams - but Vimeo is their portfolio. They are limited by monthly upload sizes but thats all.
I really think this shift is not smart one for them. Because these creators will move especially once they realize they would pay 3usd on cloudflare. And cloudflare/bunny smartly include pretty similar upload area and even videoplayers/iframes so there is not much difference to vimeo for these "creative pros".
Cloudflare charges by the minutes delivered though, so if one of your videos unexpectedly gets popular, your monthly bill might spike up. That's a scary level of unpredictability when you're a small team (or lone wolf) that doesn't know ahead of time how viral a video would get.
You can't compare Hetzner boxes with CDNs. Imagine someone trying to stream a 4K video from your Hetzner box in Finland to Australia. Not the same as directly from local CDN node
Not the same, but I wanted to present the counter-point that bandwidth in general is not as expensive as AWS and such make it out to be. Hetzner is an extreme counter-example but I thought that just using CloudFront's pricing in this thread is misleading as well.
That Hetzner price doesn't include acceptable peering with Telekom (Germany's largest telco), I can only imagine how bad the international peering will be.
I was just pointing to an example of not streaming from the cloud. Vimeo uses a combination of GCP and Fastly I believe https://cloud.google.com/customers/vimeo
It is low for just bandwidth, but I imagine the assumption is that it also represents the relative scale/cost for transcoding, storage, etc, as well. It still isn't cheap compared to diy, but that's what you're paying for, I guess.
I was trying to say the amount of bandwidth does not correctly relate to the other components. Someone uploading things at that plan will very quickly hit 2TB in bandwidth.
I don’t believe her when she says this is because of bandwidth. Given Vimeo’s scale, they must have insanely low data out fees. The only way I can see what she’s saying being true is if there’s gross incompetence at the company and their cloud architecture is highly inefficient.
> She’s uploaded 117 subscriber-only videos so far, and each one only gets around 150 views on average. Her most viewed video has around 815 views. … Her bandwidth usage was within the top 1 percent of Vimeo users, the company said
Well that’s telling. Sounds like a company that’s on the rocks trying to squeeze money out of a small number of users to survive.
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 can see why she might need a higher end plan with such long videos. $25/month may not be enough to cover the bandwidth.
What's confusing, though, is that their pricing page shows the highest-tier plan as $75/month, which is $900/year and described as "Unlimited live streaming - 7TB total storage". There's also the next plan down, at $50/month ($600/year), described as "No weekly Limits - 5TB total storage". So I'm curious where the $3500/year is coming from.
You get it wrong, she consumed $2106 worth of service and has paid $200 so far, that is a fantastic deal for her. Vimeo then says that next year since she consumed so much she will have to pay $3100. Vimeo here takes the risk that she gets more popular and therefore will cost them even more, they have to take a premium cut to cover for that risk.
A regular hosting provider would just send her the $2106 bill, but she went to Vimeo to avoid surprise bills. But instead she has to deal with price hikes like this, note that it isn't a bill, she can just not pay for it and cancel the service, that is the product she paid for.
> You do realize that's ~60% of what they attempted to shake them down for, right?
Well, Cloudflare Stream is underlying tech, you would need to write some code on top of it anyway. 40% of premium does not sound like something unreasonable either.
I agree that treating existing customer like that is not a good thing. I just tried to understand whether that price is reasonable at all.
She was already a paying customer, willing to pay them the price they had set before (which might have been too low, but that's their fault then, not hers). So up until this point she was a paying and "legit" customer. And they didn't know if she would be willing to pay significantly more if they asked for that.
>"I was already paying $200 a year [...]. Her quoted price: $3,500 a year. She was given a week to upgrade her content, decrease her bandwidth usage, or leave Vimeo.
A week's notice for a 17.5x price hike you unilaterally declared? That's not what you should do to such a customer, ever. To me, that's either a shakedown, or a deliberate step to make her stop using the service, e.g. because such "small" account are no longer worth your time, or you try to be a b2b business now, and those "small" customers do not fit with that image, or whatever.
If something changed for vimeo that increased the their own expenditures over night, then I'd have a little more understanding for them. But that's not what they said or even hinted at happening.
> If you're not willing to pay for bandwidth you're not a legit customer.
If they're not willing to pay a hefty premium for it? I don't follow your comment, buddy. They're already a paying customer paying what was asked of them.
Why would you not just use Cloudfare Stream or another option and save roughly 40% of the cost?
If Vimeo has no value-add, then that's what people should be doing. It's not like Vimeo is a platform for content discovery like YouTube so it should be no problem for anyone to switch.
It's what everybody will start doing. This will be bane of Vimeo. You must realize most of the cinematographers or people in creative industry don't even know about alternatives. Vimeo had great MOAT exactly because they were "youtube for creatives".
Also services like cloudflare stream/bunnycdn stream/mux are fairly recent.
Another issue is reuploading of all the media. It's not that easy to switch. But people will flee to some other solutions.
It's basically a fact that she's underpaying for what she's using. That she gets no value out of the service isn't the fault of the service, she's just literally not using the service. Since that's the case she shouldn't use the service and use a different service that actually does what she wants and has the correct value proposition for her. It sounds like that's exactly what's happening and there's no problem anywhere. There's lots of comments here pitying vimeo for losing "customers" like her but err, vimeo's the one kicking her out. She gets on a service that's more appropriate for her, vimeo gets rid of a money losing customer. Everyone wins.
Cloudflare (and, obviuosly, vimeo) allows for good scalability and provides plenty of services underneath. You would need to code a lot of stuff to provide scalability (like imagine that your video became virus and thousands of people want to watch it at the same time, that's hundreds of gigabits of traffic). You would need to recode it for different devices. You would need to recode it for different network speeds. You would need to make reliable backups to prevent data loss.
Maybe you don't even need all that stuff and simple gigabit dedicated server with <video> tag would be good enough for your use-case. That would allow to save a lot of money for sure.
viral traffic is possible if the video is free and public. Her videos are subscriber only. Scalabity is not a factor.
A simple video tag is good enough, you can store it on object storage (anyone but s3) . This she should do anyway for backup, any provider can kick her out for copyright violations and block her access to her own content.
Transcoding is not that difficult anymore video editing software allows you to transcode for the web directly . Unlike 5-10 years back every brower recognizes mp4 h264 today just one file is adequate.
I’ve implemented literally all of those things besides >100gbps which is a totally different discussion. I also had the additional constraint of realtime GPU encoding and low latency live streaming. Without that, the 1 year project would have been a weekend project.
And yeah a single server with 1G transit can easily solve the problem that this thread is about.
And if her videos are multiple hours long, but not being watched all the way through, yet the Vimeo client downloads the entire video when you click play (i believe this is how it works, it's not a rolling buffer like YouTube, could be wrong)...that sounds like an issue Vimeo should fix, not the creator.
But why would they invest time and energy fixing a flaw for a customer spending $200/yr? That pays for like 2 hours of a senior engineer. More expedient to ask them to pay more or leave.
I think this announcement is firmly stating that they don't have the volume of small customers for that to be economical. YouTube can spend tens of millions a year shaving every last byte off their egress because they have such enormous volume that is pays off in aggregate. Vimeo can't do that so they don't try.
The problem is that the acount in question would be a “low” to “midling” usage account in youtube or twitch terms. The kind where your friends tell you “just keep at it and one day you might find success”.
Obviously vimeo is free to shed this user, as they are free to change business and open a goat farm in El Paso or a hair saloon in Brooklyn. This is not about vimeo’s rights or freedoms.
The idea behind service providers is that they pool together many similar needs and serve them more efficiently than individual users alone could. For example if vimeo would have tens of thousands of accounts who need an optimisation to make their video serving more efficient that could start to make sense for vimeo.
Now the problem is that it seems vimeo either doesn’t have the scale to pull this off, or decided to not do it. That is fine, but then why would anyone go into business with them? It sounds like vimeo is sinking and anyone who is a paying customer of them now is better get off and quick.
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.
I built a system that does just this (it's a little bit more complex, of course, but the gist is the same) but for videos that are self-hosted (on our own bare metal servers and data storage) and automatically uploaded from devices in the field. I've never bothered to check costs because they're trivially insignificant for us; We just don't have that many users / devices. It's a niche hobby project that nets us enough money to support itself. I haven't even had to touch any of this infrastructure in literally years. My co-founder occasionally needs to plug a new data drive into the primary and/or back up storage (the server closets are on-premise in his garage) and run an interactive python script to get things configured. Otherwise it all "just works" and maintains itself perfectly well.
It seems they're using akamai adaptive media delivery. Unfortunately akamai doesn't seem to have pricing on the page.
So maybe akamai is just milking them and they're passing the cost on to their customers. Though I do have to wonder about a video hosting "technology platform" that's just selling a thin webinterface on top of akamai.
I agree, you can do this on $10 per month yourself if you have the skills and $3500 is ridiculous.
At the scale I presume Vimeo operates at, for US/EU CDN traffic they should be under 1 cent per gigabyte transferred.
Perhaps a bit more since it requires more work to obtain competitive pricing from Akamai, and Akamai AMD is a value added service and not just the bulk data CDN.
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.
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 $500 an hour for an initial setup would be fair, since you can template the server deployments and set up small business video hosting pretty trivially. Really, though, you could follow a one page tutorial using Linode or Digital Ocean and the like, and scale your hosting to their plans.
Vimeo is not going to survive long being the "bad guy" in this market. They need a visionary, but they've got conservative plodders.
Once you get done with the consulting fees and follow up work, 3500$ a year isn't bad.
Vimeo isn't doing this to be mean.
If it was easy to do it an affordable manner, I'm a sure one of us techies could whip it up ( a Video hosting service )in about a week or two, but I strongly suspect you'd end up losing money.
I suspect not. A VPS on the order of £10/month could do this fairly well, and I've seen managed services options at £50/hour/month. Even assuming half a day to set up standard monitoring services etc, and another to set up someone's choice of FLOSS video hosting and blogging platform of choice. Subsequent years won't have the outlay of the first either.
Depends on what you mean by "have them made" You can definitely do it yourself on-demand for less than a couple bucks. I think you could have a semi-pro looking package, and still do it yourself for less than $10
I wouldn't be surprised if "99th percentile of users" is calculated across all user accounts, including ones who logged in once a decade ago and never uploaded a video.
Wouldn't you expect that number of 1% for essentially any content uploading. Where out of every group of users, 80% don't interact at all, another 19% only comment, and the last 1% are the only ones that do anything more than comment?
It probably could be expressed in a more resource representative way, but being in their top 1% and therefore needing to negotiate a custom plan apparently only requires 2TB of monthly bandwidth.
"top 1%" with these figures tells you more about the problems Vimeo have than anything else, surely. Even if they are all very long videos.
It sounds almost like they've abandoned any attempt to find cost-savings through scale and they are heading towards being dependent on the services of an off-the-shelf developer-focussed competitor.
I don't think that's true. Vimeo is very competitive in the B2B space which is more lucrative per customer and has relatively simpler engineering challenges compared to scaling up to billions of views required for low-margin B2C.
These really feel more like YouTube alternatives. Are there any alternatives to Vimeo as a B2B service (e.g. hosting unlisted videos embedded behind paywalls)?
Feels like Vimeo missed an opportunity to be the home of creatives.
They had the right brand perception for it, and were there early.
A video producer friend persevered hard to continue using it from 2012 to 2019, but out of chronic frustration with its product design, sadly moved to youtube.
I got the sense of a general stubborn "we know what's right for you, you don't" attitude in their product design. And it seemed to satisfy no significant public well.
Great to see them be more clear, wish them the best.
This has been happening for the better part of a decade already. Back around 2012, I had already stopped seeing Vimeo come across my browsing history completely, but I was reminded of it's existence at a film festival where I heard about and saw vimeo being used to screen most of the more independent films. When I asked some of the festival organizers about how movies were screened, they said there were two ways (again, back in 2012): Digital Cinema Package (DCP) for more mainstream films (a DRM-laden harddrive package that was carried around to the screening location in a locked, nondescript hardcase), and password-protected Vimeo.
Since then, the only time I've interacted with Vimeo was to watch episodes of IKEA Heights[0], as at the time this was the only place where it was officially distributed (i.e. in original quality, rather than re-encoded and re-uploaded to youtube). Great, weird, short series if you are interested. The play between the drama/acting, and then being brought back to reality by being caught, is very fun.
If I recall correctly, this was around when they removed recommendation type features from their site, which was the first sign that I saw, personally, that they were moving away from something consumer focused.
The DCP system was intriguing to me. They made DCP sound like a pain in the ass, requiring expensive projection equipment and some kind of special internet connection (they weren't familiar with that part) to receive films not distributed physically or to receive updates to films. Later, I looked up DCP on Wikipedia[1] and found it enlightening. The thing that stood out to me was the use of asymmetric encryption to ensure a particular DCP distribution was only able to be played on a particular projector, thanks to a symmetric key for the film being encrypted with a projector's public key, and decrypted using the private key stored on some kind of FIPS compliant HSM.
It's not much at all in the days of 1080p @ 60fps and 4k videos.
I think Vimeo is doing some creative accounting to come up with the 1% number. It's probably 1% of all users on the site even if the vast majority of users have < 5 views.
I have over 500 unlisted (meaning you need to have the link to watch it) tutorial videos (30-180mins each) on Youtube. They are used for various programming classes that I teach. Each gets 10-100 views depending on class size.
I know that Youtube is a ticking time bomb for those not monetizing the videos to Google liking. Enough horror stories from HN and friends.
So I would love to find an alternative but each time I investigate alternatives such as Vimeo I go back to Youtube.
Of course, I could self host, but dealing with various transcoding issues is not the best use of my time.
Self hosting is a fairly straight forward option: A simple VPS (linode, digital ocean, etc) and upload your .mp4 videos. If your videos are in a weird format all it takes is a single pass through Handbrake to make them stream-able friendly. You will have native HTML5 playback in the browser and have full control of your files and links.
AWS charges $0.05/GB for outbound transfer. Lets say the streams are worst case, 1080p. That's 52.65TB in monthly transfer.
117 videos * 3 gb * 150 average views * 0.05 = $2,632.50/month for transfer (!)
So AWS is about 1/4th the cost for storage, but almost double for transfer. Suffice to say I'm not sure I understand the economics around video streaming.
Vimeo felt like a good solution for someone who might be selling video courses. This is a use case where you might have 400-500x 5-10 minute videos spread over a few courses that were streamed to folks who purchased one of your courses using Vimeo's embedded video player that's sitting in a custom site you've built.
I think their old plan was like $200 / year (I didn't use them personally since I didn't have a custom platform running) and it felt reasonably priced for that use case. When I eventually release my custom platform I was planning to use them and be happy about it. Thankfully I haven't gotten to the video playing component of the platform yet because I wouldn't want to use them under this new pricing strategy.
Wistia's pricing plans aren't much better (they are a competitor to Vimeo). It's $1,200 / year but also 25 cents per video on top of that. If you have a lot of small videos you get crushed. Suddenly 400x 5 minute videos means another $100 / month ($2,400 / year total). I don't understand why they would make their pricing model based on something that punishes folks who make smaller videos. Breaking up a single 50 minute video into 10x 5 minute videos shouldn't cost you 10x the price IMO.
It's unfortunate because it might take you years of producing videos before you even make a few hundred bucks a month, $150-300 a month on day 1 is a ton relative to that especially since that's only 1 component of your costs, then there's web hosting, payment provider transaction fees, refund fees, various taxes, etc.. Kind of makes it hard to get into a position to succeed unless you're able to invest many thousands of dollars up front.
In my work, I have to create and share a lot of videos, and Vimeo is superior to YouTube for my needs. Doesn't auto-play some unrelated content when they are done with my videos, I can easily make basic edits like a custom thumbnail or branding, and it doesn't cover it in their own branding like YouTube. Integrates better into my site as well. So yeah - Vimeo is better than YouTube for B2B needs.
This seems like a job for archive.org. But I don't think even they could deal with the scale of something like Vimeo with only a week's notice. Sad days.
I find it ironic since they essentially booted me off their platform for creating some vaguely-commercial content (I was a paying customer at the time). Left a very sour taste in my mouth esp. since other people they seemed to ignore.
So according to the cited creators Patreon she is now using Patreon's homegrown video hosting. [0]
If 117 videos with about 800 views are 99th percentile of bandwidth usage among the customers I'd argue the company is dead. All the standard plans on their website are (according to the article) useless, since they get cancelled if you
actually make use of the platform. Leaves the question which companies would rely on Vimeo for their videos. YouTube does it for free...
Vimeo has transitioned through different strategic directions, and seems to have settled on B2B -- if this doesnt work for a platform user, move platform.
The scenario with Channel 5 was even more silly, since Vimeo was just a service that Patreon was using. This not only looked like a shakedown, it was from a hosting platform the group wasn't even directly using.
Interesting. There's one Patreon I subscribe to that used Vimeo. I didn't realize it was what Patreon apparently exclusively used? This sounds like a BIG problem for Patreon, then.
Patreon video has 2 solutions, Vimeo, and URL. If you use vimeo you can upload videos to vimeo right through the patreon page (though that stopped working for me some while ago so I started just using vimeo directly). For the URL it doesn't want like, a link to a video file. That will result in the patreon page just having a download link. But if you provide it with basically the same thing vimeo does (a whole ass player through the page's meta information) it can embed the video just fine, same as Vimeo.
I had planned to switch off Vimeo anyway because of the weekly upload limit being so low for my tier (I could tier up but my patreon income is like, 7 dollars so it wouldn't really be worth it). And this is pretty much the motivation I need. It's something I had already messed around with, for the purposes of embedding a custom HLS livestream. And since the only real security Vimeo offers is an unlisted URL and a domain whitelist, my plan was to require actual Patreon Oauth to watch the videos.
As I understand it, Patreon creators explicitly sign up to a paid Vimeo account and link that with their Patreon account, and then can upload to Vimeo through the Patreon posting UI. E.g. the post says they "tried to log into my Vimeo account".
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
If you meant that Vimeo is shaking down small business clients, that might be true. But the way you phrased things it sounded like you were saying small business services in general are a shakedown, and Vimeo was just another example of this.
They're doing a horrible job at "B2B" atm then. Have a client that is thinking of using them, and I'm starting to think that Vimeo is a "Bad Idea". I can't safely or with any confidence advise them what their costs are going to be a few months down the line. You know it's a bad sign when you have to go through a sales or "contact us for a custom plan" process in order to get details. That's not B2B anymore, that's now "B 2 VeryLarge-B".
First, the rather clumsy manner in which this was handled - even if certain customers aren't profitable, asking 'em to suddenly pay 10x what they paid before is a recipe for bad press.
Second, if Vimeo is unwilling to exert the effort to handle niche customers, there are folks waiting in the wings like (https://instillvideo.com/) for health and fitness folks.
Third, long-term incentives suggest growing a customer base rather than short-term plays for larger clients.
How does it eliminate egress cost? It just makes bolting their different services together free, at some point you'll pay for egress eventually, even if just a little.
I also use Vimeo as a B2B solution and the “indie YouTube” side really frustrates me. Every time I search my own videos to find something, Vimeo defaults to scouring all its public videos and throwing up all kinds of twee college projects and thumbnails with laurel wreaths from film festivals.
Now Vimeo is grown up I wonder if it’s time it decided what it’s going to be.
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.
You can but you've created a shitty experience. With AV1 you've excluded at least half your potential viewers. Even for people with a browser with AV1 support your files likely have a higher bitrate than your viewers can stream in real-time.
If you want to just "upload files" you're going to be encoding a dozen different versions and bundling them as HLS/MPEG-DASH to not have a shitty client experience. You're going to need a fair amount of storage and a big pipe to handle multiple simultaneous streams. Also caching is a Hard Problem since not every version of a piece of content has equal levels of viewership at any given time.
YouTube and Vimeo (and the rest) handle all the storage, bandwidth, and transcoding. It's not something that you're going to do well without a lot of domain knowledge first. The market is littered with the corpses of companies that underestimated the difficulty and expense of streaming video over the web. It's certainly not so difficult as to be impossible, it's just non-trivially difficult and potentially expensive.
This.
And it seems the cost of networking is on the rise. Not per kb of course, but relative to the media economy at play. I don't see how a small player can enter the market:
- creators expect no fees or a low fee and no ads
- viewers now expect 1080p or even 4k option, and 60 frames/s.
Thanks h265, but even with the best compression out there the math doesn't add up to make a profit.
Perhaps that comes down to the fact feeding data is more expensive, even as a business and at scale, than to pull data as an individual with a home broadband. Unless you are Google, aws, or cloudflare and have leverage over other networks providers.
Decentralized solutions is our last hope. I say hope because it still isn't quite working performance-wise for the use case of streaming.
I strongly recommend indie creators use a personal domain link for each video that they publish. For our indie conference -- Handmade Seattle [0] -- we own the link to someone's talk.
We embed a Vimeo player but after this announcement we can switch out providers and still have the permalink. Invest on your own infrastructure as soon as you can.
1. roc-lang by Richard Feldman. A high level pure functional language with low level language performance in runtime and compile time. Looks like the holy grail, but it seems like it'll be a few years to see if it lives up to that.
2. github.com/dion-systems/metadesk . A DSL/meta-data format that is a superset of json for that is more readable and does not encode data structure like json.
3. Some good tips on designing your data structures for efficient memory usage. I won't call it "Data Oriented Design" based on the things in the talk. The sudden exponential jump in "good" code after years of plateau leave me disappointed overall. I don't see how the code can have an exponential jump in "better-ness" based on topics in the talk.
Yeah, it's almost like people who make things for a living want to be paid for things they make or something. Don't they know that I deserve everything for free because I know how to apt-get transmission?
But it doesn't have the infrastructure to handle different resolution delivery based on connection speed and such, on good connections sure but on unreliable connections it's not the same story.
A clear pivot. Yet it will definitely anger plenty of people. Like... a lot of people. Still, I don't appreciate the apparently short notice they gave. That's a significant change in their terms I'd be wary of in future. Something happened and there was a knee-jerk reaction or decision made. Not sure if I read that right however.
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.
2TB egress a month (the quotes figure to be in top 1%) on AWS is ~$200/m. For a full solution charging $300 a month doesn’t seem unreasonable.
These ad-supported giants skew peoples idea of cost. They make it harder for others to compete - generating outrage when people compare the relative price to “free”.
So basically they want Patreon to be their customer instead of the individual creators? Probably not actually Patreon any more since they’ve upset all their mutual customers, but that kind of deal I guess?
The basic plan was always pretty limited. And you certainly aren't safe from deletion if you hit that top 1% percentile of bandwidth use. Keep your channels unpopular just in case.
At my job we used Vimeo's OTT solution and it's been a pretty bad experience. We were promised features that didn't exist, and working with them has been like pulling teeth.
Is there a reason YouTube/Alphabet have not entered into the URL-Locked video embed business? Seems like a simple thing they could easily implement in a few weeks.
Is is possible to do password protected torrent streaming? Like uploading your videos as a torrent and having webtorrent stream them only if a password was given?
my comment has nothing to do with economy. vimeo hasn't been doing anything good for years to gather users. it's just weird that they describe themselves as a movie site just because someone is uploading their amateur movies.
ok you meant about Vimeo being stale for many years, with that I fully agree. They could have easily become the indie creators platform, and the top end of that. I even think they could even have become by now a serious threat to YouTube because creators is what makes the platform in the longer term, mainstream audience follow the elite eventually.
I think it’s a shakedown of those users. They probably think they can get a big cash infusion while those people migrate out. If you had a business hosting training videos then 1 week isn’t enough time to migrate you might end up eating a month or 2 at extortion pricing
This doesn't sound like a good long term strategy, you're losing a lot of goodwill from your small paying customers and they'll jump ship when the opportunity arises.
It’s a good short term play. If you extract 3k instead of 70/month you basically get paid for 3 years in one month. Clients are lost but good will isn’t that valuable when you have given up on growing and moved to extraction
As a consumer of Vimeo content from musicians and comedians, I can translate this to English: “We have given up trying to produce a competitive consumer solution because we can’t be bothered to hire a UX designer or do any basic consumer-level testing of our product at all. Fuck if we know how to make things work. But business don’t care.”
I wonder whether YouTube actually makes money yet or even if it does, would if it were standalone (as they can benefit from Google scale and Google infrastructure).
Most of what youtube needs is the non-time-critical filler of Google's workload so it's pretty flexible and cheap to host in whatever space is free in Google's data centers, which are already the most efficient ones. And with such a large amount of compute needed they can justify hiring a lot of people to optimize every little part of software and hardware involved with Youtube.
Google's infrastructure scale is such a big advantage for Youtube compared to competitors
I have switched to Twitch and have been encouraging people to switch to Twitch. Twitch is a better platform in every aspect, not to mention boycotting spyware company like Google, which keeps users hostage for money.
Popular Patreon creators are being hit with Vimeo price hikes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30686704 - March 2022 (223 comments)