I've been a big fan of Vimeo for many years. I've had a paid account with them for quite some time and upgraded to the $200/year option when I wanted to start using the service to host my courses.
It was perfect... Or so I thought, but new information has come to light recently about problems the creator community have been having that has seen some of them lose their accounts entirely.
March 18 - Vimeo made an announcement. They are shifting their bandwidth threshold from a percentage to a flat 2TB.
(See The Post Here)
They say that will only impact 1% of their users... Vimeo has 200 million users, so it is likely to hit 2,000,000 people. That's not an insignificant amount and is likely to hit product creators quicker than anyone else.
For example, my new product (front end) is 40gb. That means 50 people watching the whole thing will use my bandwidth up for that month... even if I don't have any other bandwidth the following month, that still puts me in with those 2,000,000.
And that's not including OTO1 or OTO3... or any other videos stored on the platform.
And, this has already started to impact people.
Popular creators on Patreon are already being told to pay thousands or leave the platform.
(The Verge: Vimeo Patreon Creators Price Increase)
These are already people paying the $900/year tariff and are now expected to have to pay $3,000/year.
Lois van Baarle, a digital artist based in the Netherlands was one of the people The Verge reported on:
“I was already paying $200 a year, which I think is pretty expensive,” van Baarle says. “But I thought, well, it’s a quality platform.” She’s uploaded 117 subscriber-only videos so far, and each one only gets around 150 views on average, van Baarle says. Her most viewed video has around 815 views.
So the notice Vimeo sent van Baarle on March 11th shocked her. Her bandwidth usage was within the top 1% of Vimeo users, the company said, and if she wanted to keep hosting her content on the site, she’d need to upgrade to a custom plan. Her quoted price: $3,500 a year. She was given a week to upgrade her content, decrease her bandwidth usage, or leave Vimeo.
And she's not alone. Channel 5 (a Patreon-funded documentary web channel) said their videos had disappeared from the Patreon feed, resulting in hundreds of angry messages and the loss of “500+” subscribers.
ToplessTopics on Reddit posted last year about these fees, even though they were paying $900 a year to use 480GB out of a 7TB storage plan. They were told they would have to pay for a higher level or Vimeo would delete their entire account.
One unfortunate, anonymous subscriber has said their fees would be increasing to $36,000/year... the equivalent of $3,000 a month.
That might sound like a lot, but it is fully in line with the viewing figures of some of the more popular YouTube creators.
Their March 18th statement is at least giving creators 30 days to 'pay up or ship out' and they have said that if people leave, they will be offered a pro-rated refund.
But, these were all paying customers, often already paying higher amounts than they would if they had used a competitor.
Ultimately, you need to be in control of your content and able to pivot quickly.
The question for product creators now is, where do you pivot to?
I'm going to be looking around at other platforms, to see what's available and will let you know as/when I find something.
Until then, stay tuned!
