Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>From now on I will stay 100% with Vimeo but, as we know, they have a fraction of the viewership of You Tube – primarily because so few people know they even exist.

Websurfer awareness is not the primary reason Vimeo has less viewership.

The cause & effect before the buildup of awareness is the incentives that prevent content creators to upload videos to Vimeo in the first place:

- platform membership fees: Youtube is $0 to upload and host, Vimeo used to be $240 and now has some new pricing plans[1] with a low-use free tier (too limited for high-res 4k uploads)

- no advertising partners : Youtube enables monetization without content creators asking audiences to pay for subscriptions. This financial model covers a wide variety of videos especially for unknown creators.

The financial model of Vimeo is fine but its inherent costs will keep it smaller than Youtube because both the uploaders and the viewers don't want to pay.

[1] https://vimeo.com/upgrade

It’s not only that. Vimeo explicitly markets itself for a more niche market and has since the early days of video streaming.

I don’t think they ever wanted to be YouTube. Sometimes carving out a niche IS the business goal.

Exactly.

If you're an actual filmmaker making films (and not just a content creator) you're more likely to favor Vimeo over YouTube, but you probably care more about iTunes/Google Play/Amazon/Netflix/etc.

Doesn't Vimeo also license their platform out for other private streaming services? I thought I read that the Criterion Channel, for example, was hosted on Vimeo. I don't really think that YouTube is designed for that.

Yeah they do. I’m a fan of the comedian Tim Heidecker and and he recently launched a small subscription-based streaming site (https://www.heinetwork.tv/) for some of his projects that’s built on Vimeo

Off topic but I love his work so much. The universe that On Cinema has spawned is so much fun, not to mention all the previous stuff with Eric. I could watch this clip a thousand times, not yet taken down from YouTube:

https://youtu.be/wjG-LJ5PP0o

The biggest of all being that Vimeo has essentially no discovery system?

To a viewer, Vimeo is just a crude way to host a video.

As a viewer I want my discovery algorithm decoupled from who hosts my videos.

The problem with that for creators is the information on who is watching what gets much poorer when that happens so the algorithm has much less to go off of so no one has really done it. Also how do you monetize that? The host will be the one inserting ads.

Can I ask how that would work?

Like, are you saying that you'd rather use Google to search for content (including videos) and then find the videos on whichever web site hosts that individual video?

I do enjoy listening to music on YouTube and I actually like that it'll auto-enqueue music to play next that's similar to what I'm listening to now.

You idea (I think) is really interesting - it's been a while since the web has worked that way and it's interesting to think about how combined hosting+discovery has changed it from the 'early days'

I could imagine an extension that scrapes video metadata (if not actual video frames) and runs some FLoC-like P2P discovery mechanism for similar video content.

The main problem with this would be spam; Google has a lock on web search entirely because building a search index that is not immediately besieged by adversarial content is very difficult.

Alternatively we could bring back RSS readers and aggregation. We'd need some way to scrape/feed YouTube metadata into it. Feeds could advertise related creators that way (with the caveat that this would almost certainly become a sponsorship/advertising mechanism, something something RAID Shadow Legends).

See for example DDG video search (which I believe proxies for Bing video search).

If I bang-search "!video <search expression>" on DDG, I'll be returned hits for the search across a range of video hosting sites. Principally YouTube and Vimeo, though also others. I don't believe Peertube sites presently appear, which is a shame.

> I do enjoy listening to music on YouTube and I actually like that it'll auto-enqueue music to play next that's similar to what I'm listening to now.

I'm like the post your responsed to, I really hate that (and all sorts of automated recommandation systems, I just can't stand Spotify for instance). Computers are here for me to tell them what to do, not to take non-repeatable decisions (and this makes it more and more painful to use the web over the years frankly, everything is becoming an inconsistent mess)

As someone who enjoys watching recommended videos I'm glad your views are not shared by the majority.

Yeah people shit on recommended videos a lot but I’ve found a couple real interesting gems in there. The most recent one is finding the video channel for the Battleship New Jersey museum ship. Their curator climbs all over the ship making videos about the engineering, construction and history of the ship. Admittedly I t’s often a lot of videos I’ve rewatched multiple times but I do enjoy them so it’s not wrong that I might like to watch them again.

A trick I’ve found is being careful about not ‘poisoning’ your recommended videos. There are some topics that are really bad about taking over your recommendations (though liberal use of the “show me less like this” and “don’t recommend channel” options have pruned some of that out) so sometimes watching a video in incognito helps.

Huh? I didn't say you can't have recommendations. I said you can choose your recommendation engine.

Apologies, I misread.

I don't need an algorithm, just have channels and a client-side subscription list. But on Vimeo everything is basically link-only and their front page wants you to sign up as a creator. It's just not a competition to YouTube, it's a video hoster.

if all you have are channels and client-side subscription list (sync across devices?), how do you find anything new?

....by searching for it??

Searching and recommendation have two different use cases that might overlap but most often don’t

There was a time when youtube wasn't around to shove "related" content in your face and videos still got shared, talked about and discovered. This would be by word-of-mouth (either real life or fora) and (as an another poster commented) searching.

This. Vimeo feels like these noname pic sharing services. You may land on it from somewhere, but if you try to explore, it’s just a “see plans” homepage and the search knows almost none of my interests.

You can have a feed but they’ve actually made it worse recently.

They also don't have a dark mode in their app, which is a showstopper for me

Can't binge videos at night with what feels like a friggin flashlight shining in my face

We say as we are binging hackernews at night …

https://github.com/UserStyles/hacker-news-solarized-dark

That github page links to the dodgy extension "Stylish".

The better one is called Stylus. The main difference being "Any and all analytics, telemetry, and data-collection have been removed completely. We'd rather not know what you're up to."

https://github.com/openstyles/stylus

No Safari, though.

thanks for the reminder. I just use the css.

I don't know if they still do, but Vimeo actively rejected lots of content that they felt didn't fit the goal of their platform. IMO If it wasn't basically art, they didn't want it. Most of the stuff I watch on Youtube wouldn't be allowed there.

Under that direction, of course they'd have fewer content creators and viewers, and they obviously wanted it that way.

We used to pay for Vimeo and were happy about it, but then the service got slower and the UI more cluttered and we were constantly nagged to move to a higher plan. Also, even with the paid plan there was a quite low weekly upload quota (5 GB IIRC). It made no sense.

Is there any competing service that has a model similar to YouTube? I know there's Facebook video, but AFAIK you need a Facebook account to view the videos, which stops a lot of traffic and makes the platform not searchable from Google.

Facebook also publishes famously misleading engagement metrics to producers. It's lead to a lot of business issues where content creators have gone too heavy into the platform and ended up running out of revenue.

>Is there any competing service that has a model similar to YouTube?

No.

Rumble is making some big waves right now, actually paying uploaders for ads run on their videos and such. It’s still a small fraction of YouTube in terms of viewership though.

It's also a den of right-wing disinformation and propaganda. Not something the average content creator wants to be associated with

You might be thinking of BitChute or Brighteon (which literally has QAnon on the front page).

The right-wingers on Rumble are fairly mainstream (and monetizable), like Stephen Crowder, Ben Shapiro, or Donald Trump himself.

I can't tell if this is a joke reply or not

What about the parent comment would indicate a joke?

None of the people mentioned are mainstream.

Regardless of one's opinion of him, it's pretty hard to say that a former president of the United States is outside the mainstream.

And Ben Shapiro's podcast is currently the 7th most downloaded podcast in the US[1]. That also qualifies as pretty mainstream.

[1] https://www.podcastinsights.com/top-us-podcasts/

Their positions are not mainstream. His positions are not mainstream.

I can say plenty of negative things about all of those people, including the disingenuous ways all of them argue their points. But all mainstream means is that they have a large audience. Which all of them do.

I don't know this Crowder person, but Shapiro and Trump are absolutely mainstream. Enough that I, a guy who's not from the US and has no interest in its domestic politics, can get Shapiro memes.

The grandparent mentioned that Rumble was "a den of right-wing disinformation and propaganda. Not something the average content creator wants to be associated with."

The parent then replied, seemingly to disagree, but then listed several examples of right-wing disinformationists and propagandists, not something the average content creator wants to be associated with, who inhabit Rumble

That's the tactic, if you ban a group of people from your platform. They search for a competitor, then they can say oh that competitor is full of XYZ undesirable people, you don't want to use them.

YouTube itself use to be the fringe.

https://odysee.com/ is a site I have seen a lot of mainstream people promote.

The problem is actually discovery, it doesn't really matter who sends you bytes it's about users discovering your content, which YouTube has the monopoly.

A lot of Twitch and YouTube personalities I know of are moving over to Nebula and partnering with CuriosityStream.

I wonder if that will make enough money to be successful or if it’s just going to keep burning VC cash to attract creators like Uber does.

Nebula is content creator and Standard owned company with minority stake of CuriosityStream and no VC funding as far as I know.

Ah that’s encouraging.

None of that pricing would seem all that unreasonable of Youtube weren't operated as a loss leader.

Any source to back that up? A quick Google only got me their revenue, which is a cool 20 billion. Though their costs are undoubtedly high, I'd guess they're making a nice profit.

It was run as a loss leader for years, when there were still numerous viable competitors.

I thought YouTube made money now?

YouTube is not a loss leader. It uses your content to insert its ads; you don't pay because you're helping their advertisers sell stuff.

Also, there's already more on youtube than anyone could ever watch, and many people struggle with youtube addiction. Adding further platforms doesn't make things better, it makes things worse.

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