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.
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.