Vimeo’s Long Goodbye

Remember Vimeo?

Not the shell of itself that exists today, hocking screen recording tools to marketing teams and HR departments. But the Vimeo that music video directors used to care about. The Vimeo where a single Staff Pick meant tens of thousands of views, a wave of positive comments, and a one-way ticket to getting signed (and a year later dropped) by Partizan.

But how did Vimeo go from the birthplace of Daniels, Mimi Cave, Isaac Ravishankara, and Hiro Murai to a mid-tier SaaS company that in over 20 years has never been profitable? That story can be pretty easily tracked by following the timeline of their CEOs and the top down decisions that led to their divestment from the filmmaker community that made them.

Vimeo was founded in 2004 by Connected Ventures, the parent company of Busted Tees and CollegeHumor. And while Vimeo technically beat YouTube to market, and to HD video, it was no match for YouTube’s popularity and social impact. As two of the founders, Jake Lodwick and Josh Abramson said to Wired:

In 2006, Connected Ventures was bought by IAC, a holding company owned by billionaire Barry Diller. A media executive since the 1960s, Diller has a deep resume that includes starting Fox with Rupert Murdoch in 1984. When IAC acquired Connected Ventures, the prize was CollegeHumor — Vimeo was a throw in much like Big Shocker, the giant novelty foam finger sex joke that Diller quickly killed.

Looking back on Vimeo’s early days, things were very cringe. They kept inaccurately claiming that they invented the “like” button. And for a while they were heavy contributors to the lip dub meme. An action that basically put them on the radar of the record labels and opened the lid to years of legal battles and DMCA takedowns.

Eventually, IAC saw enough value in Vimeo to instruct the founders plus their first official hire, Andrew Pile, to work on the site full time. Abramson exited almost immediately and started TeePublic, a direct ripoff of BustedTees. But Lodwick stuck around for a while until he was pretty publicly and dramatically fired. Luckily, Pile kept going, and the community trudged along thanks to product launches that legitimately centered their needs, building the foundation for what eventually became the Good Vimeo.

The creation of Staff Picks as a curatorial destination emerged from a product development. Vimeo was the first consumer platform to support HD video hosting. This launch drew professional filmmakers to the site, and led to the creation of the hand-curated Staff Picks channel and HD channel, which later merged into a single channel once HD video became the online standard.

But even though it was now owned by a billionaire, Vimeo never really outgrew its history as a side project, and cash was consistently an issue. They weren’t big enough to get real investment from Diller, but not small enough to kill off like the Big Shocker.

They also didn’t have a real CEO, which led to some suspect behavior. They banned gaming content in 2008, mostly because they couldn’t afford to host it. An early sign of their willingness to alienate rapidly growing communities on their platform to save a few bucks. In their blog post explaining the choice, the tone was weirdly defensive and antagonistic:

In January 2009, after unsuccessfully trying to sell Vimeo to Kodak for $10 million, IAC hired Dae Mellencamp as GM to run the site and determine its viability as a business. Finally Vimeo had an adult in the room. No more erratic blog posts dunking on gamers. Dae brought a sense of maturity and operational discipline to the company, and before the end of the year she was promoted to CEO.

While Vimeo’s whole deal was being “ad free,” that was always a little dishonest. It’s true Vimeo has never served video ads, but they’ve had display ads on the site from the beginning. And when Dae started, most of their revenue came from those ads. Vimeo Plus had already launched, but it mostly just subsidized hosting costs for power users. The margins were slim, and it was cheap by design to not scare the indie filmmaker hoes. But this made it more of a community-sustaining gesture than a growth engine.

So in 2011, we get Vimeo Pro, and for a moment it felt like she discovered the business model buried in the beloved side project. Pro was actually Vimeo’s first real attempt at entering the software as a service space. It had a community foundation, but technically it represented Vimeo’s earliest pivot into SaaS.

But IAC never really let Dae cook. Under her two years as CEO, Vimeo’s revenue grew from almost nothing to tens of millions of dollars, the monthly unique users from 9 million to 90 million, and the staff from 13 to 60. But for all its growth, Vimeo still wasn’t profitable.

By 2012, the whole internet was pivoting to video, and Vimeo aka “Hipster YouTube” was already there. It had a niche and voice in a market that everyone was rushing to, and all of the coolest new filmmakers on the internet were posting their videos there.

But the revenue growth wasn’t coming fast enough. YouTube was printing money under Google, and papa Barry wanted some of that cake. Enter Kerry Trainor, a former ad guy at AOL and Yahoo whose move to Vimeo was supposed to signal that they were serious about making “real revenue.” Would this finally be the CEO to turn this rowdy group of lip dubbers into a business?

But while Kerry had a proven understanding of content monetization, he didn’t have a filmmaking background. So in a somewhat ambiguous move, Dae stayed at Vimeo as President while Kerry became the CEO. As IAC put it at the time, “by uniting Kerry’s understanding of monetization and scale content businesses with Dae’s keen product and community sensibility, I’m confident Vimeo’s growth will accelerate.” It’s at the point that we enter into the era I like to call, “The Vimeo CEO Falloff.”

The first idea that emerged from Kerry and Dae’s co-leadership was Vimeo OnDemand in 2013. A transactional service (rather than a subscription model like Netflix), it marked Vimeo’s first serious attempt to monetize the viewer, not just the creator. A fundamental shift in strategy. But the vision and execution was clunky.

Vimeo had spent years cultivating an ad-free ethos, wearing it like a badge of honor. But that idealism came at a cost: no built-in revenue stream to share with creators. YouTube, by contrast, offered uploaders the option to monetize their videos with ads, or not. Most monetized, because the upside is real. Vimeo, refusing in-video ads entirely, had no equivalent engine. VOD was their attempt to fill that void.

VOD launched at SXSW with an exclusive rental of It's Such a Beautiful Day. It was a savvy, street cred driven move heavily rooted in the Vimeo community. But despite the Don Hertzfeldt co-sign, the product never clicked with Vimeo’s users.

While a better monetization option than the ill-conceived Tip Jar, the VOD catalog was fragmented, discovery was weak, and creators were expected to drive their own marketing. Without an engaged viewer base willing to pay for one-off short film rentals, very few creators saw success on the platform. It was a noble attempt to build an ethical business around independent film, but in practice, no one other than Naked Yoga was making any money off it, including Vimeo.

Vimeo’s refusal to adopt pre-roll ads — which was a proven, scalable monetization model for their market — not only made revenue a challenge. It also made it impossible to play ball with the record labels, which was becoming a bigger issue.

By 2014, Vimeo’s most important, high profile community was music video directors and production companies. These weren’t SVA students making their final thesis, these were working professionals that relied on Vimeo for their livelihood and were the lifeblood of the platform. And basically every single one of them got hung out to dry by Vimeo in a massive DMCA avalanche.

In March of 2014, directors including Daniels, David Wilson, Vincent Haycock, Diane Martel, Frank Borin, Isaiah Seret, Isaac Rentz, Josh Forbes, and Joseph Kahn all started tweeting that their videos had been removed by Vimeo due to DMCA claims. Production companies Somesuch and Good Company soon joined in. Some of these folks were given three strikes all at once, and had their entire account deleted overnight. It basically turned half the websites in the industry into one giant Vimeo error.

These were the actual directors and companies behind the videos, being treated like some common lip dubber.

Rather than having the music video director’s backs, Vimeo hid behind safe harbor laws. They complied with the takedown requests and put the responsibility on the directors to slug it out with the labels. Some of the higher profile directors got carve outs in their contract to allow for Vimeo posting, other directors filed counter notifications that went uncontested and led to reinstatement. But most of the videos were gone forever, and some of the strikes still linger on the director accounts. The writing was on the wall that music videos would soon go the way of gaming content on Vimeo.

Vimeo continued to bet on Transactional Vimeo OnDemand, while hinting at the potential of a subscription channel to compete with the big dogs like Netflix and Hulu. Although most of the homegrown Vimeo content wasn’t translating to VOD, they hoped something with more film and TV sensibilities could work. So Vimeo took an enormous bet on High Maintenance, a comedy web series originally posted to Vimeo. Vimeo funded a full season of the show, and heavily marketed it. They literally wrapped New York City busses with the Guy’s giant head. Making the show the literal poster child for Vimeo’s new product. Only to have the creators immediately abandon them and the TVOD model for HBO the first chance they got.

Eventually, Dae quietly left as Kerry continued to pursue the on demand strategy. While losing High Maintenance to HBO was embarrassing, it reinforced Vimeo’s talent for curation. Unfortunately, they never really attempted to utilize it for VOD. Rather than to try to find another High Maintenance, Vimeo started licensing content for VOD that they thought had a built in audience. There was Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, a Spike Lee joint with a 48% on Rotten Tomatoes. An extremely sexist Jake and Amir show called Lonely and Horny. And of course, everyone’s favorite, SMOSH: The Movie.

Everything flopped. Nothing was hitting. Vimeo’s revenue had ballooned to $75 million but it still wasn’t profitable. And IAC started to lose trust. Slowly, more senior level staff started leaving the company. After Dae came Pile. Then Head of Curation Jordan McGarry. Followed by SVP of Product Sox Hong. And finally, in June 2016, Kerry announced he was leaving, too.

IAC CEO Joey Levin directly took control of Vimeo and continued to chase the VOD dream. They laid off a chunk of staff, including most of the strongest cultural defenders of the Vimeo brand, like Head of Production Andrea Allen. Joey announced a plan to spend “tens of millions of dollars” on original content. A comically small amount of money to drive an SVOD channel, especially compared to Netflix’s content budget at the time. That wasn’t even enough for a single squid game.

Vimeo spent years fighting a losing battle with YouTube, only to pivot to Netflix and lose before the fight even started.

It was at this point Vimeo decided to get out of the filmmaker business entirely. Maybe video isn’t art after all, maybe it’s just a service they thought. While most of the company was caught up in the VOD hype cycle, Head of Marketing Anjali Sud had been focused on a skunkworks project called Vimeo Business. A subscription tier so expensive, it was no longer aimed at the filmmaking community, but instead the business community. Very few freelance filmmakers could afford the $600 price tag, but if that’s just a line on a marketing budget it doesn’t look so bad.

Right as Vimeo was about to go live with SVOD, Anjali proposed an alternative plan to IAC. Pivot hard to SaaS.

IAC was convinced. They made Anjali CEO, scrapped the SVOD plan completely, and did their second round of layoffs in a year.

But what did that mean, really? We all saw the homepage change. We all saw Staff Picks transform into a slop bucket full of commercials and branded content. But who is using Vimeo now and what are they using it for? Who is their market?

Training videos. Internal comms. Product demos. Sales enablement decks dressed up as product walkthroughs. Onboarding videos that autoplay in full-screen the moment a new hire logs into their corporate portal. Investor sizzle reels with royalty-free synth pop and drone shots of glass buildings. Virtual town halls for companies that wanted the illusion of culture without the overhead of interaction. All hidden behind white-labeled players or tucked into internal Slack threads. This wasn’t about building a community anymore, it was about charging companies to upload things their customers would never know were on Vimeo.

Like music video directors in 2013, filmmakers from all industries could tell they were being left behind. It wasn’t just that Vimeo pivoted, they did it while still co-opting the image of a filmmaker platform. Instead of clearly communicating the shift from creator platform to SaaS utility, Vimeo tried to wear both skins. They kept the Staff Picks going (barely), kept the filmmaker-friendly language on their homepage, and kept mining the glory days for PR.

Initially, this pivot was successful and Anjali got a ton of glowing press. The Forbes article quoted from above is called “How A Young Outsider Turned Failing Vimeo Into A Billion-Dollar Company.” They remained unprofitable, but revenue exploded. They raised a ton of investment money in preparation to spin out into their own publicly traded company. IAC’s 11th spinout to date.

Vimeo went public in 2021 and immediately started bleeding cash. The stock dropped 90% in 12 months. The press shifted from puff pieces to articles called “What Went Wrong With Vimeo?”

What went wrong is that the special sauce at Vimeo has always been the organic community that developed despite the erratic ownership and business decisions. And their Covid-era SaaS numbers were inflated by a temporary demand for employee onboarding videos.

In January 2023, Vimeo laid off 11% of its employees. In August 2023, Anjali Sud stepped down from the role of CEO. She is now the CEO of Tubi. Today, Vimeo is headed by Philip Moyer, a former Google Cloud exec with an AI background. Vimeo has pivoted again, this time to AI.

Currently, the AI tools are focused on supporting their SaaS business. Per Axios, “Vimeo has been experimenting with adding AI features that can learn and replicate a creator's storytelling and on-camera personas to generate everything from custom client-facing video messages to scenes in documentaries and films.”

So far, there’s been no official statement about a pivot to licensing data, but Vimeo isn’t going to regain its footing with AI productivity tools.

Most generative AI is trained on garbage. Stock footage. Public domain. Weird porn. Vimeo spent over 15 years building a richly human-curated archive of video content. Now that same archive is sitting there, perfectly labeled, ready to be scraped and fed into generative AI models.

Every Staff Pick has editorial metadata attached: title, description, genre, keywords, director names, the type of camera used, often even visual styles called out. Playlists, categories, all with hand-written, user entered blurbs, not machine-generated tags. It may be the most valuable dataset for generative AI video that exists online. If you still have your content on Vimeo right now you should just expect it to eventually end up in an LLM.

This is not just based on speculation either. Last year, Vimeo’s former parent company IAC closed a deal with OpenAI to license their content for AI training. Here’s Joey talking more about it.

While IAC no longer owns Vimeo, they set the course and the direction of the company from 2006 to 2021. It’s easy to imagine a not-so-distant future where Vimeo’s library — uploaded lovingly by indie creators — gets scraped, sorted, and sold to train some generative video model that will one day pump out fake Hiro Murai lookalikes on demand.

So back up your videos. Rip the embeds. Save the comments. Then nuke it all. Because at this point there isn’t much left to pivot to.