>From now on I will stay 100% with Vimeo but, as we know, they have a fraction of the viewership of You Tube – primarily because so few people know they even exist.
Websurfer awareness is not the primary reason Vimeo has less viewership.
The cause & effect before the buildup of awareness is the incentives that prevent content creators to upload videos to Vimeo in the first place:
- platform membership fees: Youtube is $0 to upload and host, Vimeo used to be $240 and now has some new pricing plans[1] with a low-use free tier (too limited for high-res 4k uploads)
- no advertising partners : Youtube enables monetization without content creators asking audiences to pay for subscriptions. This financial model covers a wide variety of videos especially for unknown creators.
The financial model of Vimeo is fine but its inherent costs will keep it smaller than Youtube because both the uploaders and the viewers don't want to pay.
The biggest of all being that Vimeo has essentially no discovery system?
To a viewer, Vimeo is just a crude way to host a video.
They also don't have a dark mode in their app, which is a showstopper for me
Can't binge videos at night with what feels like a friggin flashlight shining in my face
We say as we are binging hackernews at night …
The better one is called Stylus. The main difference being "Any and all analytics, telemetry, and data-collection have been removed completely. We'd rather not know what you're up to."