

Vimeo says "no" to one of its biggest userbases - joshwa
http://vimeo.com/blog:140

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huhtenberg
I was in a similar situation and I can totally relate to Vimeo's decision.
Gamer population has two funny properties that can drive any service provider
nuts:

    
    
      (a) Gamers don't have money
      (b) Gamers stress *the hell* out of the service once it becomes popular with them
    

There are certainly adult gamers, but your average gamer is a teen with no
money of his own and who is also _very_ accustomed to a freeloading. This
means that it's virtually impossible to convert gamers to paying customers.
Nor does their existence in a user base add much to the company valuation,
because of a non-existent cross-sale potential. Nor do their ad clicks have
much value.

For all practical intents and purposes, the gaming crowd is interesting almost
exclusively to the gaming-related companies. If you are not in that segment,
the chances are that your service would fare better without gamers.

------
wmf
I wonder if Vimeo was losing money hosting these videos. Losing money + legal
liability = "we want to encourage creative expression (by deleting your
videos)"?

~~~
DougBTX
I remember the first time I visited Vimeo - compared to other video sites at
the time, it left a strong impression that they focused on creative videos.
Losing money + legal liability + an idea of what sort of community they want
to create = harsh measures.

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mileszs
From the comments, it sounds like Vimeo should think about opening a sister
site dedicated to _only_ game-based videos. The masses love their quality and
usability. Why not?

~~~
ricree
The three reasons the article gave for dropping gaming videos were that they
were outside the main focus of the site, exposed the company to unwanted
liability, and were consistently larger and more resource intensive than other
videos. Hosting a separate site for game videos would only address the first
concern, and doesn't really do much for the others.

~~~
llimllib
It could help the third as well if they would either slightly lower the
quality to improve transcoding times and/or simply make it OK to have longer
transcoding times.

Agreed on the liability end though, if that's the main driver here there's not
much they can do.

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tialys
I think the problem that Vimeo has been having is that users have to wait
(sometimes HOURS) for their videos to be encoded. I think that this is a step
towards fixing that.

~~~
akd
Of course, making money and using that money for more hardware is a better
step towards fixing that.

~~~
tialys
Yes, but is anyone watching these videos of kids playing Halo 3 with their
buddies? I doubt it...

~~~
krschultz
Some of the better ones they are deleting are in the most watched videos of
their site. It doesn't make much sense to me, I think the founders would
rather think of themselves of artists than business men. That is all fine, but
there is a reason youTube is the market leader despite Vimeo starting first.
If I were an investor in the company I would be pissed - they went about it in
entirely the wrong way with their condescension and will invariably piss off a
large group of potential audience.

~~~
alex_c
>there is a reason youTube is the market leader despite Vimeo starting first

Huh, learn something new every day. I had no idea Vimeo is older than YouTube,
I've only really seen it around since they started offering HD.

I agree that it seems like a somewhat strange decision. It introduces an
arbitrary judgement call - "this is a gaming video, this is machinima, this is
somewhere in between but we'll remove it anyway", bitterness from their users,
and lots of "this video was removed" links which will lead people to conclude
that Vimeo is quite broken.

I can only conclude that the legal component of the issue is a lot more
significant than it seems, or that the hardware costs are too high (in which
case, how much revenue do "regular" videos bring?)

~~~
jfarmer
No, it makes sense. Customers cost money. If you have customers that cost more
money than they generate that's bad.

It's totally conceivable to me that people uploading and watching these gaming
video cost more than they brought in for Vimeo.

It's part of the web mindset that more customers == more eyeballs == better.
It's not always the case, especially if you're working with limited resources.

------
invisible
The gaming market is enormous, and I'm frankly surprised they'd take this
stance. Maybe it'd be wise for them to have a social video uploading sub-site
similar to YouTube with equal quality to YT.

Turning away users is never a great solution, but maybe this will be a
temporary one.

------
joshwa
Came across this today:

<http://wegame.com/>

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jacobbijani
Where is this "one of it's biggest user bases" thing coming from? Vimeo has
been just doing fine for the last _4 years_ without a bunch of video game
videos.

~~~
akd
If by "doing fine" you mean "almost dead," yes they're still healthy.

~~~
jacobbijani
It's all relative. They have always made it really obvious they never wanted
or attempted to be YouTube. Personally, I know I would have never bothered to
create any of the videos on my Vimeo had I not had a Vimeo.

Not everything is about numbers. Connected Ventures already has huge
successful cash cows like Busted Tees and College Humor. Vimeo is just about
enabling people to communicate, not record themselves playing a videogame for
an hour every day.

