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Media Businesses

Vimeo's B2B Pivot Has Hit Patreon Users Particularly Hard (theverge.com) 46

Posted by BeauHD from the no-choice-but-to-jump-ship dept.
Vimeo, the video sharing platform once considered a YouTube alternative, has been surprising top Patreon creators with unexpected price hikes as the company shifts to a purely B2B corporate strategy. Several Patreon creators told The Verge they've been quoted thousands of dollars to upgrade to a custom plan, decrease bandwidth usage, or leave Vimeo.

"Over the past four to five years, Vimeo has made a hard pivot away from being the YouTube alternative that [Patreon video creators] originally signed up for," reports The Verge. "In a letter to shareholders in February, [Vimeo CEO Anjali 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.'" From the report: The change in strategy has hit Patreon users particularly hard: Patreon has encouraged the use of Vimeo as a hosting platform, with Vimeo even offering a small discount for Patreon creators. Patreon also has a Vimeo integration that allows creators to upload gated content directly. [...] Vimeo says it offers users ways to track their bandwidth usage, and that the company has been in touch with Patreon throughout the partnership.

Some creators have jumped ship from Vimeo in the face of increasing hosting fees. Van Baarle says she plans to manually re-upload her video content to YouTube, where she can host it for free instead of paying for a custom plan on Vimeo. [Channel 5, a popular account doing man-on-the-street-style interviews] eventually was able to recover their content with Patreon's help, according to a brief update in early February. With no paid upgrade, their Vimeo account was "wiped from the face of the earth," they say in the post. The next Channel 5 video would instead be hosted on Patreon directly -- the service has started developing its own video platform, though for now it's only available to select users. One of the Patreon creators says the site "has a responsibility to notify creators that their content could be at risk if they're hit with a Vimeo notice of excessive bandwidth usage," reports The Verge. "And he worries that even new Patreon creators who gain traction quickly could leap into Vimeo's top user base and get the same email he and others did, with few options."

Patreon declined to comment on whether it would continue to recommend Vimeo as a hosting platform.
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Vimeo's B2B Pivot Has Hit Patreon Users Particularly Hard More

Vimeo's B2B Pivot Has Hit Patreon Users Particularly Hard

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  • B2B (Score:5, Informative)

    by cs96and ( 896123 ) on Friday March 18, 2022 @05:44AM (#62368247)

    Thanks for not describing what B2B is. For those (like me) who have no idea what this is talking about, it stands for "Business to Business"
    https://www.investopedia.com/t... [investopedia.com]

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Vimeo, the video sharing platform once considered a YouTube alternative

      I LOL'd.

      But seriously, the problem is that people have gotten spoiled by YouTube. Google makes 800 Gazillion dollars a year from advertising, and as a result, they can make a massive video hosting platform available for free.

      If you don't have all those gazillions of ad dollars rolling in (e.g. Vimeo) , you have to charge people for what it actually costs to host their shitty pointless videos.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Essentially Vimeo started out as a YouTube clone, but then changed to offering video streaming services to other businesses instead. So if a site wants to have some streaming video, they contract with Vimeo to provide the streaming servers, bandwidth and technology.

      Problem is that people who signed on back when it was a YouTube clone and built up a following there are now getting treated like business partners. Instead of everything being offered for free with a split of ad revenue like YouTube, they are no

  • Vimeo's player still buffers on non-perfect connections, a decade later. I don't get why people still use it.

    Rumble started as a b2b service c. 2014 and from what I've seem they offer the best infrastructure and pricing for that kind of service.

    I'm not sure if they have a retail self-hosting platform, but contact their sales if you're one of those affected.

    • That's a fact. I watched several livestream videos in 2020/21 and they had tons of buffering issues and dropouts. Most of the artists I watched offered free downloads later(and they would NOT have any of the previously mentioned issues) but a couple didn't and as such I became very wary of using Vimeo at all. Thank gawd for OBS.

    • I'm pretty sure 99% of buffering video is related to DRM. There's no fix for stupid.

  • Bottom line: Video hosting isn't cheap.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mysidia ( 191772 )

      Bottom line: Video hosting isn't cheap.

      Wdym? Actual storage and bandwidth necessary to distribute video are cheap a few $$ covers hundreds of gigabytes. For sure thousands of dollars a month isn't a reasonable price for hosting the videos of an individual creator by any stretch of the imagination.

      The cost is in the development of platform, website, and user-interface.. that they have already built, and that Youtube and Facebook, etc, also already have

      • Actual storage and bandwidth necessary to distribute video are cheap

        Good luck with your video hosting empire.

      • Wdym? Actual storage and bandwidth necessary to distribute video are cheap a few $$ covers hundreds of gigabytes

        Some searching finds that 4K requires about 100 MB of streaming per minute of video. If you upload a 10 minute 4K video and it gets a measly 1000 views, congratulations, you've just burned through a terabyte of data. Even if "a few $$ covers hundreds of gigabytes" you'd still be on the hook for thousands of dollars for hosting a moderately popular video.

    • Bottom line: Video hosting isn't cheap.

      I post stuff for free on YouTube and everyone can access it for free.

      So what am I missing?

      Why should I pay anyone else to host videos?

      • When youtube decides on their own that while monetizing other ridiculousness, they will no longer monetize [insert random topic here] despite your million followers, you are left seeking other options. And to be clear, when they demonetize a category, they still advertise the shit out of it, and still make millions. They just arent sharing with you any more. If it was really the moral delimma they fake, then they wouldnt allow ads to play at all. You might have had a channel dedicated to hunting and surviv

        • But your posting for free. You shouldn't have an expectation of monetization. Every penny YT pays their content creators is a form of charity to support the arts.

          • I believe that was what the team owners used to say before those strikes back in the 90s. The players argued they were the talent that brought money in the first place. Without them, there would have been no millions in the first place.

            • YouTube is like the Medici family. They have a stable of well paid artists who spread the correct narrative, and this largesse becomes the germ of the larger online video renaissance. But just because they paid Michaelangelo doesn't mean that every sculptor or painter taking part in the renaissance deserves a patron.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Hentes ( 2461350 )

        To be fair, Google is likely running Youtube at a massive loss, which Vimeo can't afford.

        • Youtube brings $15-20 billions a year (according to a google search... conflict of interests maybe?).
          How much of that is profit, how much is re-invested, how much are the capital (servers, ...), operational (bandwidth, ...), age appropriate validation, how much goes to development might be unclear. What is clear though is that creators get paid less and less, and the videos got peppered with more and more ads, even some "un-skippable" ones.
          Basically, right now Youtube is a monopoly that could (and maybe did

        • To be fair, Google is likely running Youtube at a massive loss, which Vimeo can't afford.

          WHAT? YouTube is one of Alphabet's most profitable businesses.

          • Really? Do you have a source for that? Because everything I've ever seen has said that Google won't disclose what it costs to run YouTube, which makes any calculation of its profitability impossible.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by splutty ( 43475 )

        Google makes their money off advertising, and Youtube is the platform to push that advertising to the masses.

        So advertising income - Youtube running costs = profit.

        For Vimeo that advertising income doesn't really exist, so their running costs don't get offset by anything.

        And the running costs for a streaming service are considerable.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by raynet ( 51803 )

      Hosting single authors videos is cheap and simple. Just get VPS from OVH or Hetzner, unlimited traffic at 100Mbps for 5-15eur/month. Scale up more servers, or host them on their webservice which is even cheaper.

      • Hosting single authors videos is cheap and simple. Just get VPS from OVH or Hetzner, unlimited traffic at 100Mbps for 5-15eur/month. Scale up more servers, or host them on their webservice which is even cheaper.

        Sure, you could go off in the woods by yourself, but then what YouTube-like algorithm is going to suggest your content to millions of viewers?

  • https://joinpeertube.org/ [joinpeertube.org]

    Free Software, self-hostable, and uses peer-to-peer between viewers, so scales with popularity.

    • And people will totally download some piece of software they've never heard of in order to view your Patreon content. I'll get right on that.
      • What do you mean? If I go to youtube, I see a blank page with the stop-third-party-tracking filters on. The first video I clicked on peertube just played. Newpipe supports it, and your browser does as well.

      • And people will totally download some piece of software they've never heard of in order to view your Patreon content.

        What percentage of patrons have never heard of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Edge? I suspect that already having a web browser installed is universal among folks who send money to people on Patreon, who won't need to download any additional software.

  • It seems that everybody is a professional creator now and real jobs are so yesterday. Where is all of the money coming from? Patreon, OnlyFans, thing of the week. There's so much money floating around that half the population can make six or seven figures a year just posting pictures and videos? Great if you can get it. Are the people who spend a grand a month on OnlyFans the same ones complaining about gas prices?

    • Your perceptions are biased by the "new shiny" effect -- most people still have pure functional jobs. But more people are able to have creative jobs because the barriers to entry are so much lower than past history, so they are in the news, so it colors your perceptions of how widespread the effect is. In this particular case, the "new shiny" is self-promoting, which makes the bias effect worse.

    • In theory it makes sense that as the need for labor to produce goods decreases due to automation (as evidenced by the ever-decreasing Labor Share [wikipedia.org]), a larger fraction of 'work' is what people innately like to do - socialize.
  • Experience tells me most users are going to switch to another centralized platform because it's not YouTube and it's not Vimeo but they can put an end to this cycle by hosting videos on federated FOSS like PeerTube. Yes, those can go commercial as well but for the bigger concerns, it's not hard to setup an instance and host all of your own video.

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