Goodbye Vimeo 👋

Brad Chmielewski
Sep 7, 2018 ¡ 4 min read

It’s time to say goodbye to Vimeo because why are we still there? Let’s pour a bit out on the curb and move on.

I know myself, and many other creatives got on to the Vimeo platform pretty early on. It was a welcome escape from the low quality and limits of YouTube. Vimeo has or was seen as “the high-quality home for video hosting and watching.” But that was ten years ago, and Vimeo didn’t stay ahead of YouTube. Instead, they let YouTube catch up and build a better platform.

I know many friends have already done away with Vimeo or at least stopped paying. The site hasn’t worked correctly for years, videos often don’t play and finding anything is downright frustrating.

This weeks announcement was the final nail in the coffin.

“Vimeo Launches Stock Footage Marketplace for Creators”

Sigh...

I stayed with Vimeo over the years because you honestly do get some nice hosting features for your videos. It’s also one of the reasons I know a lot of people moved to Wistia too.

Currently, most of the videos on the LooseKeys website are using the Vimeo player, and it looks great. Not just the work, but the player too. 😂

Studios like mine and agencies loved Vimeo because the focus was on the work you made, it didn’t showcase similar videos when the video ended or auto-played the next video like YouTube. The attention was on the video, which is excellent for showcasing yourself to clients and fellow creative nerds but horrible for being discovered.

Few people now remember a time when YouTube wouldn’t let you upload more than 15 minutes, and Facebook capped that at 20 minutes. This limitation is what made Vimeo great for more extended form content. This longer video length was the main reason I used the site for Hop Cast. The process was great, and we never had any issues but it also likely hurt the podcast in the long run. Not making a move to YouTube when they upped the video length limit meant our podcast wasn’t as discoverable, Google was always going to weight search result for YouTube over Vimeo. YouTube had a competitive advantage, and if you didn’t play Google’s game, you were out.

Even after those drawbacks, Vimeo felt like the underdog, the punk rocker fighting big business. This fight against YouTube is what I believed drove so many creatives to the platform over the years and why they stayed.

Being a smaller community for creatives, you could always find some great work. That was until it got overrun by people hosting their videos showing off their latest videohive template. You can’t search “motion graphics” or “explainer” without getting a sea of videos of people shilling their most recent $30 template. So it makes sense to see Vimeo making a move to a stock service provider. But the reason they are giving is total bullshit.

Vimeo didn’t know what they wanted to be and still don’t. YouTube is the ONLY place you’re going to upload your work if you’re going to share it with a massive audience (maybe Facebook but that’s a closed and dying garden).

Then Vimeo tried to build a base where filmmakers could upload and charge people to watch or rent their videos. I think this was a good idea, but no one is coming to Vimeo to watch. The amount of creative programming we have to view on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon continue to grow like a weed. These tech giants are willing to invest billions in original content, and Vimeo can’t, they were turning to the average filmmaker.

And now the latest move. In Vimeo’s release, they say, “The pivot allows Vimeo to go after a less competitive social “SaaS” (software as a service) market that focuses on stock video, as opposed to all the saturated original content viewing on the market.”

LESS COMPETITIVE!?

There is ZERO shortage of stock footage sites out there; iStock, VideoHive, Getty, Storyblocks, Shutterstock, Pond5, and the list goes on.

So what is Vimeo?

Moving forward, Vimeo will still be considered by many as a useful tool but not sure what else. Features like commenting on videos like what Frame.io offers is nice but why would someone upload and host their videos on Vimeo? And that’s where I struggle with Vimeo.

If you’re not able to be discovered, you might as well not be sharing your work. Use Vimeo as a tool, but for anyone that is marketing themselves, their business or their work, do that on YouTube, it’s where you’ll get the most attention.

Brad Chmielewski
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