I remember going to daily motion spcifically to watch stuff that got DMCA'd out of youtube, the problem being I had no reason to stay there, the content was too sparse, even considering the amount of illegitimate content published

Vimeo decided awhile ago that they weren’t going to be a “shareable video” platform. That, combined with their pretty user-hostile UI, has limited their growth.

My guess is that they looked at the costs of hosting trillions of hours of video and decided that only a corporate giant like Google would ultimately be able to afford it.

Their software experience was terrible as well. Real player type stuff. You only went there when you had no other option.