If you're an indie producer, you don't necessarily have the money to keep paying for hosting indefinitely. Instead you want to upload your work somewhere where it will always be available, for free. Vimeo charges producers instead of consumers and they are struggling — if you have a commercial website that has to serve content from somewhere, then sure, it's a great deal, but not if you're a hobbyist.
By charging producers such services are basically shooting themselves in the foot — because if you don't attract producers, you won't get an audience either. Plus the ongoing costs (bandwidth and processing capacity) are generated by visitors and not producers.
This partially explains YouTube's success — as a producer you can just upload to YouTube, it doesn't cost you anything and YouTube brings you the audience ;-)
> If you're an indie producer, you don't necessarily have the money to keep paying for hosting indefinitely
You don't have to pay for SoundCloud just "for storage". You can throw some MP3s up on S3 and call it a day. Paying the nominal $12/month for SoundCloud pro is storage, distribution, collections, analytics, embedding... on and on.
> This partially explains the success behind YouTube
I thought the success of YouTube was largely due to their low bars for quality of content. Put simply, they allow all kinds of crap as long as it generates views.
Vimeo's model is quality content from indie producers, actually they are similar to SoundCloud in some ways.
Think about this: for example NASA has plenty of quality audio and video materials, where should they upload it? SoundCloud and Vimeo would be the best choice and it's what they do. It's quality content not exactly "publishable" via music labels or television, and yet it's pretty good.
Not everyone wants to be on the Internet's sewage system that's YouTube, and not everyone wants to go the costly publishing route. There has to be a niche for this type of media. I'm sure monetization can be figured out when there's clearly a market for it.
I think YouTube's success is mainly that they were first, there were always free to use so there was no reason for anybody to look elsewhere. It's hard to compete against free and established services. You basically have to find a killer feature (and hope that the established service will be slow to copy it) or pay people to do the switch.
>Not everyone wants to be on the Internet's sewage system that's YouTube.
Yet basically everyone is. Content producers want to reach their audience, viewers want to find the content they care about.
It doesn't work well and for obvious reasons.
If you're an indie producer, you don't necessarily have the money to keep paying for hosting indefinitely. Instead you want to upload your work somewhere where it will always be available, for free. Vimeo charges producers instead of consumers and they are struggling — if you have a commercial website that has to serve content from somewhere, then sure, it's a great deal, but not if you're a hobbyist.
By charging producers such services are basically shooting themselves in the foot — because if you don't attract producers, you won't get an audience either. Plus the ongoing costs (bandwidth and processing capacity) are generated by visitors and not producers.
This partially explains YouTube's success — as a producer you can just upload to YouTube, it doesn't cost you anything and YouTube brings you the audience ;-)