[HN Gopher] Popular Patreon creators are being hit with Vimeo pr...
___________________________________________________________________
Popular Patreon creators are being hit with Vimeo price hikes
Author : usermi
Score : 177 points
Date : 2022-03-15 15:42 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| sequoia wrote:
| 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.
| evan_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| bdougherty wrote:
| 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.
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| 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.
| max599 wrote:
| >Video quality is significantly higher on Vimeo
|
| it stopped being "significantly" better a long time ago.
| The bitrate used to be much higher than YouTube but now
| they are similar. People only keep repeating this because
| it was true in the earlier days of HD video hosting.
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| True, but bitrate is only one part of the equation, and
| not the biggest factor for creative work. Preserving
| color space, frame rate, etc are of higher importance to
| anyone other than editors and the most-technical of DPs.
| evan_ wrote:
| 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.
| h2odragon wrote:
| 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.
| protomyth wrote:
| 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.
| cronix wrote:
| > 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.
| contravariant wrote:
| 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.
| barrkel wrote:
| Likely an extremely long tail of almost-never-viewed videos.
| [deleted]
| closetohome wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| And yet people complain about YouTube ads, even though
| YouTube gives an option to pay to not see ads.
| neonnoodle wrote:
| But what you can't do on YouTube is pay to not show ads to
| those viewing your videos. If it were an option, I would
| pay to have my videos be hosted ad-free on YT for the other
| features the platform offers. Unfortunately YT doesn't have
| this option.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Yes, that would be nice. I meant to illustrate how good
| the viewers of YouTube have it (it could not be better,
| of course), given that the main alternative is tapping
| out.
| rurp wrote:
| Sure, but there's a specific reason there are no Youtube
| alternatives. Google leveraged their funds from a
| separate monopoly to drive out competitors on this space,
| and now that they have no viable competition they are
| free to massivly crank up the ads.
|
| If the US weren't so allowing of anti-trust behavior from
| big tech companies we might live in a world with several
| major video streaming sites that actually had to compete
| for creators and viewers.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Maybe. Or maybe we'd live in a world with _no_ major free
| video sites, because the bandwidth costs of hosting such
| a thing would be too great for any competitive business
| to bear.
|
| Google gets to run YouTube because they can afford to
| store a _lot_ of video, and every ISP needs to peer with
| them just to reduce their _own_ bandwidth costs. Few, if
| any other companies have that advantage. The monopoly in
| online video is almost certainly being caused by upstream
| monopolies in last-mile Internet service, which makes
| them able to decide what companies can and cannot
| economically run an online video service.
| wasmitnetzen wrote:
| I think there is such an option, it's just not openly
| advertised. German public broadcasters put a lot of their
| videos in YouTube, and they're always ad-free (since that
| is a legal requirement for the broadcaster).
| bena wrote:
| Would you pay $3000+/yr?
| withinboredom wrote:
| I refuse to pay USD$35 (EUR32) a month for that (the cost
| of two accounts). That's outrageous.
| nathanyz wrote:
| 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.
| contravariant wrote:
| 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.
| HillRat wrote:
| 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.
| randomsilence wrote:
| 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.
| Inityx wrote:
| Because most people aren't web developers or Linux
| sysadmins
| everforward wrote:
| Assuming you have the skills, you can, but I wouldn't be
| surprised if it had buffering issues on the client side.
|
| You'd also have to re-implement access controls and
| probably integrate a not-terrible video player. There might
| be open source software that does that, but nothing springs
| to my mind.
|
| I've got the skills to do it, and $300/month seems high,
| but not unreasonable. That $300 a month frees me from doing
| updates, having to wake up at 3am because the site is down,
| having to transcode my own videos for lower-bandwidth
| clients, etc. It's probably roughly on par with paying
| someone else to do all of that stuff.
| lesuorac wrote:
| I guess it all depends on how nice you want things to
| look but hls.js [1] & rtsp-simple-server [2] are pretty
| easy to integrate.
|
| Works well enough for me as a slingbox alternative but
| I'm also not running it as a business.
|
| [1]: https://hls-js.netlify.app/demo/ [2]:
| https://github.com/aler9/rtsp-simple-server
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The $0.05/GB pricing cited is for CDN delivery, which
| implies having a bunch of servers in different areas of the
| world ready to deliver your files wherever they need to be.
|
| I'm not sure which CDN. I looked at AWS EC2 and Fastly and
| they both cited outgoing bandwidth that was twice as high.
| Given that I can't find hosting providers with lower
| bandwidth costs, DO/Vultr either have very specific peering
| agreements or are subsidizing their bandwidth charges;
| either of which would be utterly broken by the amount of
| bandwidth that the person from the article appears to need
| for their multi-hour art tutorials.
|
| Even if they had an amazing deal on transit, or were peered
| with _everyone_ [0], and _were_ able to provide $0.01 /GB
| to video hosting at scale, we're still talking 20-40GB/view
| (assuming 45Mbps delivery of multi-hour video content).
| Delivering that over 800 views will run about $320 _per
| video_. Vimeo 's cited custom plan pricing in the article
| is basically assuming a video per month on average at those
| rates.
|
| [0] This is the particular reason why Google is able to
| provide YouTube at all. They are so big that every ISP
| absolutely _has_ to peer with them, and that drives down
| their costs significantly.
| enimodas wrote:
| 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.
| HillRat wrote:
| Yeah, you can optimize pricing by going through the cloud
| providers themselves (you can hit about $0.025/GB plus
| cache fill charges for small requirements), but, to be
| honest, if a user is having trouble with $3,500/year, they
| aren't in a position to build and maintain a whole video
| serving solution out of AWS (let alone figure out how the
| billing even works with cloud providers), so I stuck with
| turnkey CDNs that bring their own digital asset management
| features.
|
| (Also, the economics shift radically if you're doing tens
| of petabytes a month; you're comfortably under $0.01 per GB
| at that tier, and the largest players -- major streamers
| and game companies -- can push their prices under $0.001.
| It's basically the folks who push terabytes who are getting
| hammered.)
| DanielBMarkham wrote:
| Related question: I do hour-long, 4-10 party video
| conference calls about once a week. Each one might have
| between 10-200 viewers.
|
| This seems like a good area to get screwed, ie, pay a
| huge difference between a COTS black-box solution and
| just doing it myself. Last week I started playing around
| with setting up a RTMP server.
|
| But hell, I'm still back to bandwidth. Are you saying
| there's a way to directly cache realtime streaming video
| on the cloud providers, skip the store-and-publish route
| entirely?
|
| One thing I was amazed with was the huge amount of money
| a company could spend going into this area without doing
| some serious research. There are too many options and too
| many variables for most non-tech folks to consider.
|
| No problem if you don't want to answer. I thought it
| might be something other HNers would want to know.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Hosting video files on lots of inexpensive servers or
| even VPSes with unmetered traffic will get you quite far,
| especially with subscriber-only content where the demand
| is predictable and capped.
| gruez wrote:
| >A quick google puts azure at 4cents/gb
|
| This seems incorrect. Azure changes at least 8 cent per
| gigabyte https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
| us/pricing/details/bandwidth/
| thebean11 wrote:
| Is that assuming every view watched the entire four hour
| video? Highly doubt that, even if all views were from
| subscribers.
| HillRat wrote:
| Her previous Vimeo charge ($200/year) equates to about
| 8min/video on a commercial CDN, so you can tweak the
| assumptions to figure out what that would look like under
| different scenarios. The key takeaway, I think, is that (A)
| she's an edge case, but (B) she's probably also a
| bellwether for what we're going to continue to see, which
| is a slow end to the subsidized free-riding that's both
| spurred online creativity and made certain services (hello,
| Uber!) artificially attractive.
|
| Vimeo was either going to have to monetize video-minutes
| (which breaks their enterprise value prop and forces them
| to compete with YouTube and other streamers, which in turn
| requires a whole new set of corporate core competencies),
| or control costs on the low-end tiers by shedding low- or
| negative-margin customers. We're going to see a lot more of
| this moving forward, I imagine, as valuations start
| slumping.
| gnicholas wrote:
| The question is when a "view" is determined to have
| accrued. It's possible there are many more partial views
| that aren't counted, or that they're somehow aggregating
| partial views into full 'views' for the purposes of their
| calculations.
| phphphphp wrote:
| I definitely believe that paying subscribers would, on
| average, watch most of the video. There are popular
| creators publishing 3+ hour videos on YouTube, for free,
| generating millions of views from viewers watching most of
| the content... so paying subscribers doing the same is very
| much within the realms of possibility.
| thebean11 wrote:
| > There are popular creators publishing 3+ hour videos on
| YouTube, for free, generating millions of views from
| viewers watching most of the content.
|
| That doesn't really contradict what I'm saying does it?
| Are you claiming that most subscribers watch most of the
| videos they watch? I'd be interested in seeing that stat
| for 3 hour videos!
| panzagl wrote:
| I think the GPs point is that even if you watch the whole
| video, it probably takes you several sessions (i.e.
| 'views') to do so.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| How much of the video gets loaded/buffered when someone
| only watches 15m or so?
| Saris wrote:
| Usually seems about 30 seconds ahead in my experience.
| danShumway wrote:
| 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.
| madars wrote:
| Pretty sure the figure is relative to all accounts,
| including dormant ones. I probably have a Vimeo account
| that I have never used so contribute to 99% of "accounts"
| that are not costly to them.
| bena wrote:
| That would be a hell of a dark pattern. Encourage, if not
| outright require, people to create accounts to watch
| videos. That way you have a lot of accounts that will
| never upload a video ever so you can define as many
| creator account as being in the top 1% as possible.
| madars wrote:
| You can see this everywhere! For example, many colleges
| were proud about their very low COVID positivity rates,
| without remarking that negative people required twice-a-
| week testing (so a very high total # of tests) whereas
| positive cases went on a multi-month testing lockout (for
| a good reason as you can still shed virus without being
| infections). Positivity on campus is, of course, a useful
| signal but comparing positivity in populations with
| mandatory testing and ones without (e.g. city COVID
| testing sites used by people with symptoms or those who
| travel) is very much apples-and-oranges. Or, in patent
| cases the defendant will want to narrow the scope as much
| as possible, whereas the plaintiff will argue for a very
| broad reading.
| HillRat wrote:
| My gut feeling is that Vimeo is playing a little fast and
| loose with that characterization -- it's almost certainly
| "1% of the users in her particular tier," not OTT customers
| or their enterprise tiers.
| kuboble wrote:
| > wild to think that $300 a month of bandwidth might put
| someone in the top 1% of costly users for Vimeo.
|
| That doesn't surprise me. I imagine median customer as
| someone who created one video that 10 of her closest
| friends have watched. Anyone who has any following is
| immediately 95-th %-ile.
|
| Slightly relevant post https://danluu.com/p95-skill/
| michaelt wrote:
| 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
| HillRat wrote:
| One point I'd make to clients when doing cost estimates
| was, essentially, that CPU and RAM want a long-term
| relationship, disk space likes to meet for a cup of coffee,
| per-use APIs say hi when they see you on the street, and
| bandwidth has an incandescent hate for you and is barely
| restraining itself from plunging a knife in your eye.
| fifticon wrote:
| I feel like I both understand and don't understand this
| analogy. In my experience, databases want your eternal
| soul, and not in a good way. At least they are 80% of our
| cloud costs.
| rstupek wrote:
| History shows anyone claiming "unlimited bandwidth" isn't
| going to offer truly unlimited bandwidth. It's an old
| hoster lie which continues to be recycled for subscriber
| growth.
| nhoughto wrote:
| Pricing relative to your rank as a percentile has some
| weird properties, one month you might be in the 99% then
| next month it cost you big $$ in the 1% with exactly the
| same traffic.
|
| That would be surprising to most people I'd expect, totally
| not deterministic and kinda hostile. A more explicit
| "unlimited = 2TB/month" no matter your percentile would be
| more honest, but then you've said "unlimited == limited"
| which is a lie.
|
| The percentile thing seems like a fairly obvious hack to
| keep using the word unlimited. Probably an MBAs idea..
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Pricing relative to your rank as a percentile has some
| weird properties, one month you might be in the 99% then
| next month it cost you big $$ in the 1% with exactly the
| same traffic.
|
| Yeah, it seems like one thing that could happen as a
| result of this is that the current top 1% of users will
| leave the platform, creating a new top 1% from the people
| who used to be the top 2%. Then these people will
| probably leave the platform as well, creating a new top
| 1%, and so on. It's a nice algorithm for getting rid of
| your most successful creators.
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| Vimeo is paying far, far less than $0.05 unless their
| bandwidth is absolutely miniscule.
| lbriner wrote:
| 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?
| throwmeariver1 wrote:
| All the examples in the article are from paying customers...
| tarentel wrote:
| 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.
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| 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)
| ipaddr wrote:
| 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.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| 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.
| bdougherty wrote:
| That's not entirely true. There has always been, and still
| is, a free account, but of course it doesn't have all the
| features and has a very low upload limit.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Vimeo was always a free service. Signup now and upload a
| video.
| xmodem wrote:
| 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.
| aserdf wrote:
| vimeo had their IPO last year (VMEO)
| fullshark wrote:
| 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.
| sct202 wrote:
| -81% in about a year ($55->$10.4). Big yikes there.
| naoqj wrote:
| Predictable. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=
| all&geo=US&q=v...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Billions of dollars worth of R&D and I still can't organize
| my subscriptions. Sorry, I had to.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Those billions of dollars of R&D explicitly went into
| _preventing_ you from organizing your subscription - since
| at scale that probably leads to more "engagement".
| nathanyz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| dewey wrote:
| 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__ wrote:
| Just a few minutes ago, I read about Glass, a Web3 video hosting
| platform. Guess they came at the right time!
|
| https://glass.xyz
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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.
| smileybarry wrote:
| 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.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| root_axis wrote:
| > _Where are they going to go_
|
| Pay for your own hosting.
| sequoia wrote:
| To be fair that's what they were doing, with Vimeo (who
| they paid).
| jb1991 wrote:
| Most indie video creators are not developers, and most
| developers would still struggle with the extraordinary
| challenge of effective video hosting.
| root_axis wrote:
| > _Most indie video creators are not developers, and most
| developers would still struggle with the extraordinary
| challenge of effective video hosting._
|
| Huh? I didn't say "build a homebrew video hosting
| service". When you don't know how to do something you
| need done, you pay an expert to do it. I'm sure indie
| artists expect to be compensated for their own work, why
| shouldn't the people doing the technical work the artist
| is unable to do on their own be compensated?
| jb1991 wrote:
| It was easy to misunderstand you. You said pay for the
| hosting, which implies paying a hosting company. Of
| course, it would make more sense if you're also paying an
| entire team to build it for you. But that wasn't the
| initial reading of your comment.
| root_axis wrote:
| Fair. I could have articulated my point more clearly. I
| was indeed implying that they "pay a hosting company"
| with the unstated implication that they also pay a
| company or individual to deal with the technical details
| surrounding that process. If I told someone to "build
| your own house" in the context of home ownership, I
| wouldn't expect them to understand that as literally
| building it themselves, I'd expect them to hire an
| architect, contractor etc, but on HN I can understand why
| the implication might sound like a DIY suggestion.
| jb1991 wrote:
| Even still, hiring a team to basically replicate a high-
| performance video streaming service like Vimeo is not an
| easy task.
| root_axis wrote:
| You don't need to "replicate a video streaming service
| like Vimeo" which is obviously a massive undertaking, you
| just need a system to deliver your own videos, minus all
| the infrastructure necessary for a platform that is meant
| to support a multi-tenant video publishing and billing
| service _as a product_.
|
| That's like if I said "build your own web storefront" and
| you said "replicating shopify is not an easy task" or
| "build your own newsletter" and you said "replicating
| substack is not an easy task".
| tnzk wrote:
| This. You would need to be capable of not just hosting
| but providing convincing playback experience to end
| users.
| root_axis wrote:
| Right... those are the things they are paying for...
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| Building this with freelancers for an independent content
| creator has basically zero chance of being profitable in
| the end. There's a reason that the notion of an
| "independent video content creator" didn't really exist
| until YouTube existed - it's prohibitively expensive for
| every content creator to develop their own version of
| YouTube.
|
| Not to mention that you need to deal with payment (or at
| least gating) and subscription management if you're not
| using other platforms.
| root_axis wrote:
| First, the suggestion isn't that artists "build their own
| YouTube" any more than writers hosting their own blog are
| "building their own medium.com".
|
| A lot has changed since the debut of YouTube, the tech
| stack necessary to host your own HD videos is open source
| and really quite simple for an experienced developer.
| ffmpeg, nginx (with a couple plugins) and one of the many
| open source web player clients and you're all set.
| Payments and subscriptions are a long solved problem via
| stripe or paypal, it's really not a massive endeavor.
| Most of the work would be on the aesthetic side, not the
| technical side.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| So any http server capable of delivering the bandwidth
| and a <video> element?
|
| Video isn't particularly latency sensitive so no need for
| edge nodes right by them. One of the many reasonably
| priced s3 compatable services would work.
| bombcar wrote:
| I assume the major CDNs have to offer "video as a service"
| - anyone have experience with them?
| root_axis wrote:
| I'm not sure about the CDNs themselves, but there are
| many dozens of commercial video hosting services on the
| web.
| ssijak wrote:
| cloudflare has "stream" product which offer both
| livestreaming and on demand video options.
| smileybarry wrote:
| It's still very raw, though. They're effectively giving
| you the edge storage, playlist streaming, etc. but you
| still need to setup the player and website surrounding
| it. Most indie creators would still (rightly) struggle
| with setting that up effectively.
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| llampx wrote:
| Is there no point in trying unless you can dominate the
| segment?
| 1123581321 wrote:
| For video, there isn't if you don't have a realistic plan
| to drive video serving costs and ad sales/platform costs
| low enough. For consumers that requires enormous scale.
|
| Perhaps a new entrant would burn investment to try but
| Vimeo is hopefully not going to want to roll dice on an
| established company with real customers, after having
| already been beaten by YouTube once.
| danShumway wrote:
| > "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.
| causi wrote:
| _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.
| nr2x wrote:
| 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.
| bdougherty wrote:
| There is still a lot of stuff like this, but it's harder
| than ever to find, and certainly not anywhere near as much
| as it used to be. It's a real shame.
| nr2x wrote:
| Yeah, tragedy.
| culturestate wrote:
| _> 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 wrote:
| I didn't know that! Crazy to think that a business with $200M
| in revenue came from a side-project from CollegeHumor.
| slig wrote:
| TIL. Also, collegehumor.com redirects to their youtube
| channel.
| bdougherty wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 PS70 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
| Macha wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rurp wrote:
| 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.
| winternett wrote:
| >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.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| 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.
| winternett wrote:
| Vimeo is losing money because they are not innovating
| anything beyond youtube. They also run a fairly closed off
| community from the rest of the Internet. People don't
| upload because YouTube is much more far-reaching and free
| to use.
|
| The "kickstarter culture" move is usually always a bad idea
| for running and growing a business, companies that go the
| route of being subscriber funded eventually fail in highly
| competitive markets.
|
| SoundCloud is doing the same thing and that is why they've
| lost most of their relevance to creators.
|
| The future is in platforms that find ways to not tax and
| undervalue their creators, that's what the best creators
| will move to.
| [deleted]
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Yes, platforms that sell their creators as the product, I
| get it.
| xemdetia wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| mdoms wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| 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.
| tarentel wrote:
| 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.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| 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.
| tarentel wrote:
| I don't think it really matters how much money the person
| is making. Being blind sided by 1750% increase in price
| would make anyone complain. Sure, they should have read the
| fine print and all that but to raise prices that much and
| say you have 9 days to comply or you don't exist to us
| seems like a scummy business practice. You may disagree.
| [deleted]
| tyingq wrote:
| 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.
| judge2020 wrote:
| 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...
| tyingq wrote:
| 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.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| Sounds like Vimeo will be sold for scraps in a year or two.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It is already public. Question is if anyone will be willing to
| buy it for scraps.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| endisneigh wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| acdha wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| If this is true it seems pretty blatantly anticompetitive and
| a good reason for the EU to hit Google with another few
| EURbillion in fines until they knock it off.
| sxv wrote:
| Also Couchsurfing in May 2020 (RIP) [0]
|
| [0]https://www.inputmag.com/features/rise-and-ruin-of-
| couchsurf...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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.
| contravariant wrote:
| I must have missed that, what exactly ended happened?
| vincentmarle wrote:
| The crusade on Pornhub started with this NYTimes column by
| Nicholas Kristof:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/opinion/sunday/pornhub-
| ra...
| ChoGGi wrote:
| They lost Visa and MasterCard
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30441276
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The banks reversed course after a _huge_ shitstorm [1] that
| included a number of high-profile influencers... and the
| attempt of the fundamentalist groups to find actually
| objectionable material like "revenge porn", stolen content
| and pornography produced under extortionary conditions like
| Pornhub hosted failed, which killed their leverage.
|
| Additionally, the censorship debate started discussions in
| Europe to create an European-based, discrimination-free
| payment network [2] - and _that_ would have been a bigger
| threat to the Visa /Mastercard duopoly's profits than the
| risk of angering a bunch of Evangelical nutcases in the US.
|
| Meanwhile as for Pornhub, they still only have Bitcoin,
| Ethereum and shitcoins, and IIRC direct bank wire transfers
| as payment method.
|
| [1]: https://time.com/6092947/onlyfans-sexual-content-ban/
|
| [2]: https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/european-
| payments-initi...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| FYI, Visa and Mastercard are not banks.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| The immediately vanished into a poof! of sanctimony and are
| no longer in the Alexa top 50. Oh wait...
| nemothekid wrote:
| Pornhub isn't dependent on the credit card railroads to
| function as a business; Pornhub/MindGeek is largely ad
| supported. OnlyFans is subscription based; losing
| Mastercard/Visa would have ended the platform.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| On the other hand, does OnlyFans have any future beyond
| adult content? Even if they announce their pivot
| tomorrow, I can't imagine anyone using it given the
| history associated with that brand, but rebranding also
| means essentially starting from scratch in a market with
| existing competition (Patreon, LiberaPay, etc) that
| already have a critical mass of creators.
| nomel wrote:
| > does OnlyFans have any future beyond adult content?
|
| From a development cost perspective, moving into non-
| adult content would just require a page reskin and a
| domain name purchase. It would all be advertising.
| T3RMINATED wrote:
| klelatti wrote:
| 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.
| imchillyb wrote:
| > 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!
| jb1991 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| PeerTube:
|
| https://joinpeertube.org/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30445497
| jb1991 wrote:
| The comments in that thread are somewhat persuasive that it
| would not be the most appropriate choice for most video
| creatives.
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| > 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!
| anotherman554 wrote:
| If you already have an audience you can upload a file directly
| to the Internet and link to it from your Patreon.
| jb1991 wrote:
| And where would you propose to upload it to? Video hosting is
| not cheap for heavy video streaming.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| I kickstarted a indie movie once and they just gave me a
| direct download link. There was no streaming involved.
|
| Supposing the movie was 5GB what do you think it would cost
| per download?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Serious question - dedicated servers/VPSes with unmetered
| bandwidth are still a thing. Get a few of those, point your
| DNS name at all of them (for redundancy & load balancing)
| and rsync/FTP your files to all of them.
|
| I can see this being a problem with viral, publicly-
| available content, but for subscription-only content the
| traffic patterns should be relatively predictable and
| capped.
|
| Am I missing something?
| villaaston1 wrote:
| Yes, all those cheap servers and VPS with "unlimited"
| bandwidth have fair use policies and qos metering that
| will likely be very similar to vimeo's. They certainly
| don't mean TB of high quality video streaming every month
| when they say unlimited bandwidth
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I'm sure fly by night, cheap providers do that, but there
| are long-term reputable providers such as OVH offering
| unmetered bandwidth on pretty much all their services.
| Are those also problematic?
| LegitShady wrote:
| It seems got be Rumble, but then you have to deal with the
| negative associations of that site (deserved or not).
| ssijak wrote:
| 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.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| 200gb bandwidth should cost you a buck or 2 / month in
| streaming. What's your total storage size? Should we around .01
| / GB.
| buggeryorkshire wrote:
| Plus reencoding costs? Hosting the video in multiple formats
| for different devices?
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Encoding is often free such as at BunnyCDN
| LegitShady wrote:
| Thats maybe pure bandwidth costs with whoever you get
| bandwidth from. Most people can't set up their own password
| protected video streaming service.
| Nexxxeh wrote:
| >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.]
| max599 wrote:
| >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.
| root_axis wrote:
| 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.
| kregasaurusrex wrote:
| 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 10EUR/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.
| pavlov wrote:
| A look at Vimeo's stock chart is enough to understand why they're
| doing this. Not much left to lose.
| tyingq wrote:
| Oh, wow: 52-wk high 58.00 52-wk low
| 9.20 Today 10.47
| skinnymuch wrote:
| 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)
| tyingq wrote:
| They went public in May 2021, so 10 months.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-03-15 23:02 UTC)