Why Does Vimeo Succeed?

About a year ago, I started using Vimeo. It allowed me to share videos while charging small fees to recoup expenses.

Sadly, Vimeo is a deeply flawed platform. It’s difficult to use. It’s unreliable. Customer service is awful.

If you don’t know Vimeo, it’s basically a tiny YouTube, with 22 million users. By comparison, YouTube has about 1 billion users.

Vimeo offers options YouTube doesn’t. For instance, you can pay Vimeo ($200 per year) to put videos behind a paywall and charge people to view them. This is handy when you have a number of people who are willing to pay a small fee for a video.

A filmmaker might sell a film. A musician might sell a music video. A workshop might distribute performances to participants.

Let’s say the hard costs of a project are $1000. If you sell to 50 Vimeo users who pay $20 each, the project breaks even. Sort of.

For one thing, Vimeo takes 10% of each sale. It also subtracts payment fees of 4–17%. So if you sell $1000, you keep between $730-$860. Keep in mind you already paid $200 to Vimeo for the service itself, so you net as little as $530 on a $1000 gross.

Vimeo’s interface is a frustrating pile of WTF. Files appear and disappear randomly. Error messages appear frequently. If you write to customer service, most of the time you’ll receive no reply. When you do get a reply, it’s something like, “I’m not sure what happened but it should be better now.”

Vimeo earns more than $40 million each year, mostly because there are few alternatives. Recently, they had some success in the world of original programming, a la Netflix and Amazon Prime. I wish them luck.

Meanwhile, I also wish they offered a better product. And yeah, it would be nice if they occasionally solved a customer problem. Meanwhile, there’s gotta be some entrepreneur somewhere developing a better alternative…