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Comment by nhoughto | Hacker News Reader

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..

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> 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.

Not sure how much Vimeo cares to keep their most expensive loss leaders. The algorithm seems like it would work well though if there's some retention. You lose 0.75% off the top. Then again, and again a few times, but after a few iterations you've identified a top 1% that's willing to pay, and still have the other 99% for word of mouth advertising.

interesting idea, expect vimeo would be paying for bandwidth as a flat rate per GB/sec not per GB transferred. So their costs vs what they are charging would be quite different, also if their bandwidth costs are roughly flat (not based on transfer) then culling/causing churn in the 1% reduces the utilisation of their fixed cost.. or maybe they are running a very high utilisation and culling the top 1% every month gives them more headroom =)

That was the beginning of what I came here to say (to be followed by some other stuff that already got said).

step 2 of any analysis: project forward

You did this well.

Maybe they read HN =)

https://vimeo.com/blog/post/improving-policy-on-video-bandwi...

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