Popular Patreon creators are being hit with Vimeo price hikes
theverge.com
theverge.com
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.
Which is really sad, as they've generally been the only nominally-competitive youtube alternative.
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.
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.
The storage costs have to be astronomical as well. The latest stat I can find is that 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (~720k hours per day). Even assuming it's all standard definition, that's ~260MB per hour of video, which comes out to ~130GB of data uploaded per minute or roughly 187.2 TB per day. Full HD is roughly 5 times the size, so nearly a petabyte per day.
People were estimating YouTube uses an exabyte of storage about 6 years ago.
There are very few companies with the economies of scale to support running YouTube the way it currently is.
- Vimeo is very wrong about how they calculate their bandwidth costs per user
- Vimeo doesn't have the scale necessary for peering and is thus getting a raw deal on bandwidth that you've managed to avoid somehow
- Vimeo is actually correct and you're about to become the next niche online creator subsidy vehicle
I'm not sure Vimeo is miscalculating, at least in the specific case listed in the article. If the creator in question were to self-host their own video on AWS or Fastly, they'd be paying about what Vimeo wants to charge them. If you're uploading very long videos (multiple hours) and have a use case (art tutorials) that demands watching at 1080p or 4K, then even a few hundred views will breach 10TB+ of bandwidth per video.
I have no idea how you guys would be even breaking even, at $59/mo plus $1 for every 1k views over 50k. I don't know what your bandwidth arrangements are, and I suspect you are not at liberty to explain them. But Vimeo is almost certainly larger than you, so they almost certainly have better bandwidth deals than you.
Of course, this one case could also just be an outlier, and perhaps Vimeo is hosing everyone else with high-margin custom plans. But I doubt this is the case.
[0] IP transit is typically charged by bytes sent, and peering costs are typically some large fixed cost to get a pipe of a specific capacity to a given network. A "view" can be anywhere from 1 to 50 Mbps depending on quality, and if you're paying for transit then your costs are also proportional to the length of that view.
The answer as to how is "deep tech" which we have been very protective of given how game changing it is. Not a satisfying answer I am guessing since it leaves out any hint of the how. Unfortunately necessary while we took care of protecting the intellectual property we created. Good news is that it looks like we will be able to share more in the near future.
If that's what's happening then this will wind up hurting vimeo's most loyal users.
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.
What counts as a view? If someone watches 10 minutes of a 2 hour long video, does that count as "1 view of the entire video" for billing purposes?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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/
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.
it's probably using less than 10% of CPU or bandwidth most of the time
multiply it by 1000x and you can imagine how much leftover bandwidth there's left for the heavier users (beside they're not selling unlimited, you have a generous tier included and you pay extra for overages)
There's plenty of providers that can match the pricing
I've also worked for a company heavily relying on vultr and they have no problems handing high volume bandwidth (they're not as cheap as Hetzner!)
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.
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
(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.)
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.
- they're unlikely to use public cloud providers (prohibitively expensive for high bandwidth use cases)
- they have more customers with similar needs to you
- its still a managed service, let them take care of it
the other comment already mentions Cloudflare, you could also consider https://bunny.net?ref=6akqfap0uq which is a small CDN provider focusing on cost effective solution (10x cheaper than AWS/GCP easily)
This seems incorrect. Azure changes at least 8 cent per gigabyte https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/bandwidth/
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
Depending on what your application is, this may never be an issue, or, if you're pushing heavy file and content traffic, it could form a huge chunk of variable costs that you need to figure out cost recovery for in your business model.
(All this gets upended if you're on something like SFDC or Dynamics, though, where costs looks nice and forecastable until you get to disk storage, where their pricing models appear to be put together by the kind of guys who usually present their invoices alongside a menacingly-brandished lead pipe.)
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..
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.
step 2 of any analysis: project forward
You did this well.
https://vimeo.com/blog/post/improving-policy-on-video-bandwi...
This is extremely expensive compared to cloudflare stream. They price it by viewing time instead of by counting bandwidth and quotes ~$500 to serve 72,000 minutes of viewing time.
Or if you're on budget you can convert your video to HLS with ffmpeg and host it on your own server from providers with cheap bandwidth like hetzner or ovh to save on cdn cost.
So HillRat's $0.05/GB figure isn't the most expensive out there :)
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ [2] https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ [3] https://www.keycdn.com/pricing
That is a ridiculous cost for bandwidth. It can only be meant for "low-volume" users or those that just don't care for some reason.
A platform like Vimeo should either negotiate a better deal, or start engineering their own CDN. After all content delivery is the main challenge for video platforms - everything else is boring and can be whipped together by a fund-less bored 15 year old on a weekend. If you're contracting content delivery out that's already kind of weird and pretty much guarantees everyone but yourself will make money with your platform.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
YouTube keeps 45% of the advertising revenue according to [1]. So creators keep a narrow majority of the revenue, which doesn't feel wholly unfair since YouTube is paying all the costs. Doing the math on a billion hours of viewed video per day at an average 11.7 minute video and $28B in revenue gives me an average revenue per view of $0.015 for YouTube.
I also think you're over-valuing creators a little bit. YouTube needs creators, but the creators are largely replaceable. Creators need somewhere to host their videos, and there's pretty much only YouTube. I don't think I've ever seen a creator successfully get off YouTube without switching to another format entirely. Meanwhile I've seen lots of creators rise, fall, and get replaced by someone else.
Spotify is basically the same way. Musicians don't like it, but people don't buy music anymore, so you either put up with the streaming services or you go do something else for a living. Spotify will likely be fine if you leave, but you won't be fine if Spotify cuts you off.
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-money-youtube-creat...
For example the Premium tier which is required for live streaming is £70 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.
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.
Pay for your own 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?
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".
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.
Not to mention that you need to deal with payment (or at least gating) and subscription management if you're not using other platforms.
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft or AWS could compete here if they chose.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Any idea why creative professionals gravitated towards vimeo?
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.
Being able to contact someone to resolve issues is so critical to the film industry that even IMDb has added an option.
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.
$3500 sounds a lot, but her income from Patreon alone is $240k, and if she's running her business reasonably, that $3.5k comes out pre-tax.
Therefore, the number of subscribers isn't gonna indicate video bandwidth, because it's easy to unsubscribe patreon, but still retain access to the vimeo access. May be it is different now - i haven't kept up for a long time in this segment of the world.
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...
You can choose to ignore that, but to say that it was all the evil american evangelists boogeyman is just non sense. It's a tired trope that you often see coming from some europeans that have a very weird and misinformed view of American society. And ignoring the insane amounts of documented abuse in the porn industry.
Visa and Mastercard were also concerned by the potential for prostitution that onlyfans could have, and after what happened to backpage they did not need any outside pressure. Payment processors have always been hostile to porn.
This is all so widely documented that I just really fail to see how you got to that conclusion.
I won't say PornHub isn't without issues. But: Facebook, Twitter and Reddit have also been accused of the very same things and yet no one is calling for their ban.
> NYT isn't exactly known to be a source of evangelical propaganda/zeal
The particular author - Nick Kristof - is [1].
> And ignoring the insane amounts of documented abuse in the porn industry.
No one is ignoring that. The answer isn't to ban porn sites or prostitution, the answer is to go after the abusers directly, to establish a culture of holding people accountable.
> Visa and Mastercard were also concerned by the potential for prostitution that onlyfans could have, and after what happened to backpage they did not need any outside pressure. Payment processors have always been hostile to porn.
Yeah, and why is that? Because again of a campaign driven by anti-sex-work activists and politicians and AGs wanting an easy target for political gain [2], timed together with the passing of FOSTA/SESTA, yet another campaign by the same groups [3]. To this day, the government wasn't able to hold trial against the people behind Backpage, further giving evidence to the fact that the situation isn't as clear as the abolitionists painted it.
> Payment processors have always been hostile to porn.
Because online porn (in contrast to physical media) has incredibly high fraud rates - from legitimately stolen credit cards that have been used to buy premium accounts over men having their purchases found out by their wives and attempting to deflect by saying their card details got stole to clear cases of "post-nut regret" aka chargeback fraud.
> It's a tired trope that you often see coming from some europeans that have a very weird and misinformed view of American society.
You correctly identified me being an European. And you can hardly blaming us for our beliefs when you managed to elect an Evangelical nutcase to Vice President and the GQP is has been running efforts wherever they can to screw over sex workers, transgender and non-heterosexual people wherever the fuck they can.
[1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/160488/nick-kristof-holy-war...
[2]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/backpage-is-bad-banning-it-wou...
[3]: https://whyy.org/segments/fosta-sesta-was-supposed-to-thwart...
By the way I'm not American, but please it's hilarious to see europeans giving lessons about transgender rights, homophobia or racism. Let's ignore the fact that in most of Europe, trans people have way less rights/recognition, there are still debates around gay marriage and gay adoption, abortion laws are usually more draconian than even in Texas & the German state literally has a religious tax. Racism is also so ingrained that you get countries like France with 20-40% voting for a literal neo nazi party for decades now, and hatred against Roma peoples is so accepted and "natural" that it's basically a national sport.
The only difference is that in the US, there's actually a public debate around those issues, while in Europe it's much more accepted. So while I don't want to bash on europe your last paragraph does not reflect reality.
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.
I doubt OnlyFans can pivot - they'd just be competing with patreon, which i dont think they will win if so. The OnlyFan niche is quite strong, and they would be stupid to pivot now. Case in point - the words "onlyfan" has become a verbage like google has.
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.
[0]https://www.inputmag.com/features/rise-and-ruin-of-couchsurf...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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?
Supposing the movie was 5GB what do you think it would cost per download?
[0]: https://nebula.app [1]: https://standard.tv
Yeah, it sounds like the preview thumb is counted in the bandwidth, and that could very well impact them.
Heck, it's probably saving money being on the 10€/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.
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.
52-wk high 58.00
52-wk low 9.20
Today 10.47The 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.
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.
One example is their "white label" streaming provider backend (Netflix as a service): https://vimeo.com/ott
If usage from Patreon takes off, PeerTube will either collapse under the load or go mainstream.
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...
> “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!
Edit: I'm paying for the "pro" vimeo option currently.
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.]
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.
- 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).
Those users are already paying on the order of one grand per year.