I think the issue here is that they appear to misrepresent the sitution on their pricing page [0].

For example the Premium tier which is required for live streaming is £70 per month, billed annually.

For that they claim "Unlimited live streaming".

If you click on "View all features" to see the hidden detail, you can read:

"Unlimited bandwidth (subject to fair use)" and if you then hover over the question mark, you can see more hidden text describing the 99 percentile blurb.

Nowhere do they state any numbers defining what overuse is.

So people are sucked into what appears on the surface to be a great service, at a great price relative to the competition (DaCast etc), and as soon as Vimeo has you dependent on their service, the "you're in the top 1%" email comes.

I don't think this is a great business model. They should be upfront and honest from the get go.

[0] - https://vimeo.com/upgrade

That's not what people are saying at all actually. What they're annoyed about is finding out their bill is jumping from $120 a year to $7,000 a year with only a weeks notice to do anything about it.

Vimeo changed what they want to focus on (they want to be a big enterprise focused organization) and are jacking up the prices for the customers they don't want to support anymore. Due to lock in many of them will be stuck around paying the higher bills for a bit, but in the end most people will end up moving.

Yes. But haven't we've seen this before? When the foundation of your biz model is built on what amounts to a single outlier, there is always risk. Or actually more risk. The expectation that this would go one forever simply - in the context of history - isn't reasonable.

Agreed. More notice would have been helpful, but again this isn't some radical new slip. None of these platforms are too big to fail. We've all been warned. We need to stop forgetting about these warnings.

Switch from a $200 cost to thousands, with very little notice, is going to hurt users regardless of how "fair" the new system is.

Maybe companies should be upfront and consistent with their pricing? Running at a loss to gain market share, followed by jacking up prices once users are commited to your platform, does not make for a pleasant business partnership.

>I'm starting to think people here don't like the idea of paying for things, period.

Not accurate at all. This is a very destructive attitude to hold on to.

Creators create the content that makes platforms worth while. They ARE the main product that platforms rely upon. Popular platforms make billions of dollars on advertising integration, but the average creator makes pennies. The balance is dramatically skewed.

The platforms make profit from sponsors that they don't share with creators after paying overhead... This is a problem, especially when employees and investors get overpaid (relatively to creators) for their contributions to a platform's success.

It's pretty crazy that musicians that publish music to Spotify are asked to pay for subscriptions to the service and promotion on the platform. It's like spending $20 to earn $4.

These platforms know it too, but they hire marketing companies and influencers to promote false hope to creators. It's exactly the reason why ponzi schemes are so rampant everywhere online.

That's only true for platforms that make money from users, eg ad based platforms, not platforms that loses money from users, like vimeo. You have an opportunity to be on a platform where you are the customer and not the product, but i think it's pretty obvious that people would rather be the product.

Vimeo is losing money because they are not innovating anything beyond youtube. They also run a fairly closed off community from the rest of the Internet. People don't upload because YouTube is much more far-reaching and free to use.

The "kickstarter culture" move is usually always a bad idea for running and growing a business, companies that go the route of being subscriber funded eventually fail in highly competitive markets.

SoundCloud is doing the same thing and that is why they've lost most of their relevance to creators.

The future is in platforms that find ways to not tax and undervalue their creators, that's what the best creators will move to.

Yes, platforms that sell their creators as the product, I get it.

> The platforms make profit from sponsors that they don't share with creators after paying overhead... This is a problem, especially when employees and investors get overpaid (relatively to creators) for their contributions to a platform's success.

> It's pretty crazy that musicians that publish music to Spotify are asked to pay for subscriptions to the service and promotion on the platform. It's like spending $20 to earn $4.

YouTube keeps 45% of the advertising revenue according to [1]. So creators keep a narrow majority of the revenue, which doesn't feel wholly unfair since YouTube is paying all the costs. Doing the math on a billion hours of viewed video per day at an average 11.7 minute video and $28B in revenue gives me an average revenue per view of $0.015 for YouTube.

I also think you're over-valuing creators a little bit. YouTube needs creators, but the creators are largely replaceable. Creators need somewhere to host their videos, and there's pretty much only YouTube. I don't think I've ever seen a creator successfully get off YouTube without switching to another format entirely. Meanwhile I've seen lots of creators rise, fall, and get replaced by someone else.

Spotify is basically the same way. Musicians don't like it, but people don't buy music anymore, so you either put up with the streaming services or you go do something else for a living. Spotify will likely be fine if you leave, but you won't be fine if Spotify cuts you off.

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-money-youtube-creat...

There is also definitely strong anchoring effect at free price point. I think another effect going on here is how simple uploading a video and sharing a link is. Storage and bandwidth costs are completely non-obvious to an unsophisticated user. So it feels unjust when they are asked to pay for them.

I don't think the suggestion from _users_ suffering from subscription fatigue is usage based billing, as it still has the psychological worry of having to keep paying money or have something taken away. Usually they're complaining that e.g. the chess app on their phone wants a subscription.

I actually agree that commercial video hosting should have some form of ongoing payment, they have real costs associated with extra usage, in a way that the aforementioned chess app doesn't.

But simplifying different users with different concerns complaining into different users as "all users complain about everything" is an over simplificiation in my mind

That's because all of this shit used to be free... Capitalism sucks

Publishing video available for the whole world to see, was free? When? While YouTube were bleeding money trying to find a business model?