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Comment by KaoruAoiShiho | Hacker News Reader

She makes around $25k a month from her videos, so paying $3.1k for hosting doesn't seem like an unusual cost. However, it's obvious that she derives no benefit from being able to control her own branding or whatever value-add that vimeo provides over youtube so putting it on an ad-supported platform like youtube probably just makes more sense for her.

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$3500 for hosting on top of what they already paid for hosting for the current length of their plan, with 7 days notice to vacate otherwise. And then how much next week? The week after that?

How could anyone trust Vimeo as a provider for their business after this?

To add, this is why people serious about their business generally will enter into contracts with other businesses to ensure either side can't screw each other over. And it provides a clear transition plan if one party wants to leave.

For something thats $200/yr no one would be offering that.

No but you would expect price changes like this to be given advanced notice and implemented only after a current contract ends

Then you'd pay more to use service that would if the corner stone of your business can crumble overnight.

What? Of course they would. Send salespeople over to your office to negotiate terms, probably not. Standard contract with clear statement of fees, durations, renewals, etc? Pretty much any subscription service will have that. VPS on an annual plan, for example.

That 3500 is for a whole year. The per month cost is $300. That's 1.5% of the income that she gets from the videos.

Revenue, not income*

The amount almost doesn't matter (it's definitely on the high side compared to alternatives). They can definitely afford it if they have a reasonable budget. However, how Vimeo has treated them as a paying customer is terrible.

What alternatives have you looked at? It's fair priced imo.

Hvae you heard of Youtube?

They'll even pay for the videos instead.

Youtube is ad-supported. You can't upload videos more than 15 minutes long without letting Youtube put preroll and mid-roll ads all over them, and the only access-control method it supports is "unlisted", where anybody with the URL can see it.

Creators don't want to force their paying Patreon supporters to watch ads for content that they paid for, and that can be leaked to the whole world if somebody merely ctrl-vs a bit of text.

> the only access-control method it supports is "unlisted", where anybody with the URL can see it.

Google Workspace supports videos which are private to an organization, but it's annoying to use (you have to switch your active account to the Workspace one) and much, much more expensive than Vimeo's new pricing scheme if you used it just for private videos.

In the use case of this context, where the business (patreon creator) publishes a video, none of the viewers will be in a Workspace organisation, unfortunately.

They could invite every patron to a Workspace org. It'd just be a terrible (and expensive) way to do it.

I have many videos on YouTube, several over an hour long, and have only monetized one video with ads as an experiment. What do you mean you can’t upload videos without ads being put on them?

Since 2020, Youtube can put ads on all videos, even those that are not "monetized" by the uploader (in which case Youtube just keeps the revenue for itself). https://www.searchenginejournal.com/youtube-is-showing-ads-o...

It's an ad supported video platform that will give data to google, advertise your competitors to your customers, distract your customers from your product by being an entertainment social network site, have relatively poor analytics, etc. It's a non-starter for many businesses.

But of course not using it only makes sense if you can monetize your videos yourself by selling it or another product.

When you upload on YT you are the product, YT sells you and your data and they profit. What vimeo is selling is hosting, saas, and bandwidth. They dont' profit at all except for what you pay them. vimeo comparatively to CDNs and SaaS hosting providers have a decent price. If you don't think so then hire someone to set up cloudflare stream and your own website.

A single provider deciding to charge you 16% of your revenue is kind of unusual.

Apple’s App Store charges much more than that for a service that includes only very basic hosting of an application package.

That is also egregious, but Apple and Google are getting away with it because they have a duopoly over mobile phone app stores. Not so with video hosting.

Isn't it so though? What viable alternatives exist?

Definitely educate me, but: what is Vimeo doing for a B2B solution that Youtube can't provide? You can provide unlisted videos (and that is something a few pareon users have done).

It's odd because Vimeo was most known to me for hosting art portfolios, so seeing it denounce it's "indie" status is bewildering. I assume the advantage comes from providing uncompressed videos with extremely high bitrate. Which is an admittedly extremely niche market.

an alternative is Amazon Video Direct where content providers receive 50% of net revenue. seems like a worse deal than Apple & Google.

https://videodirect.amazon.com/home/help?topicId=G202037410&...

I have never understood how pointing out another unethical policy justifies the first unethical policy

It seems we as a society have lost the axiom of "2 wrongs do not make a right" as it is not just this area were I see people attempting to justify their wrongs based on the wrongs of others...

> includes only very basic hosting of an application package

Only basic hosting if you ignore all of the other services. You might consider the App Store's revenue share high but don't pretend the App Store is just a dumb file host.

What else do they do besides provide a payments gateway ( that they force you to use)? As seen with Android, you don't need to use the official app store to use the official SDKs and platform APIs.

Developing 3rd party frameworks is a meaningful expense. AOSP means Google made a business decision to incur that expense and sign away rights to it, but Apple hasn't.

And that is a bad thing.

1%, the 3500 is yearly.

It’s 1% of revenue. You mixed up monthly and annual.

It's $3500 per year so costs more like 16%/12. Intentionally deceptive and also a very reasonable cost

Not with a week to decide on such a massive hike

Consumer electronics.

Make a device for $5, it'll sell on store shelves for $30, you may get $3-$5 of that.

Everyone is super spoiled by the finances behind digital distribution methods.

Try running an IHOP or the like. You’ll be keeping a dollar or two on that $15 entree.

Or a gas station.

Their margins are outrageous but only if they can get you to come inside - they're only making a cent or two off each gallon of gas they sell.

And yet: there are gas stations hundred feet away from each other that have gas prices tens of cents apart.

Which makes sense. They've found the best locations to sell gas from, and also the best places to receive large gas shipments and store enough gas to sell safely

Here in Europe, some brands (that I consistently stay away from) like BP have consistently higher prices than rest of the market. We talk about competition of Eni, Shell, Total, Agip etc. Not meaning no-name questionable shops.

I don't think they are that ineffective in manufacturing, renting/buying land, building infrastructure or paying much more. Some locations ask for higher prices just because they don't have any competition in area.

And yes they charge easily 3x for stuff they know you will buy like redbulls, chocolate and so on.

But that $14 went to 50 different suppliers. Your dairy supplier didn't suddenly decide they are worth $5 all by themselves.

Well that’s a distinction without a difference to the IHOP owner.

Incorrect.

Tell that to Google ads.

More like 1.2% of her revenue.

Where did you find the $25k/mo figure? TFA says that her most popular video has less than a thousand views.

From her patreon. She has 5600 patrons and her only subscription option is $5/mo.

Her videos have only 4-digit views, but they are all multiple hours long Vimeo is asking for around $7/hour of video/year.

You actually can give lower amounts than the minimum on Patreon if you go into the setting iirc.

"Less than 1000" is 3 digits rather than 4. What does the $7/hour mean? If it's $7/hour of viewing time, that is completely nuts. How many videos are there? If there is 1 video/week at 2 hours each and 1000 views each (this sounds like an overestimate), that's ~ 100k viewing hours, or 30 cents per hour, which seems like a lot, and it is a lower bound. At 1 mbit/second (this will vary but figure lots of mobile device clients) it's 45TB transferred or 7 cents per GB. Less crazy than AWS, but still pretty steep. Maybe this is an opportunity for someone. I'd like to know the actual numbers.

Added: is there really even such a thing as B2B video on any scale? I would almost never think of watching video as a good use of company time. Any idea how much of previous Vimeo content could be reasonably described that way?

EDIT: fixed math error.

> is there really even such a thing as B2B video on any scale?

All I can come up with are training videos.

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