For the longest time, Vimeo was one of YouTube’s most conspicuous alternatives. It was where you posted your indie production if you weren’t a fan of YouTube’s approach and it even created original material in a bid to stand out. The company has always lived in the shadow of its Google-owned rival, however, and now it’s backing away from that obvious rivalry. In an Axios interview, company chief Anjali Sud said Vimeo was shifting away from its emphais on indie filmmaking (not that it’s completely giving that up) and will instead focus on selling a creative tool, Vimeo Stock. It’ll center around access to a large stock video collection, and will offer tools to optimize and post footage across a slew of social networks.
The solution will sound familiar if you’ve ever used a service like Shutterstock, but Vimeo is betting that it can attract stock video creators by giving them a much higher cut of revenue when customers use their footage (at least 60 percent versus the usual 35 percent). Sud also characterized Vimeo as an “agnostic and independent home” where creators could offer their video to various services, rather than a YouTube or Facebook that has a vested interest in locking you in.
You see a lot of this coming. Vimeo has been increasingly centered on creative tools, and its marketing has emphasized pros in recent months (just ask anyone who has seen its endless wave of ads on YouTube). Even so, this move toward stock content marks the end of an era for Vimeo. It’s an acknowledgment not just that YouTube may be difficult to stop, but that video is virtually ubiquitous. People don’t need to go to a site like Vimeo when the videos they want to watch are on Facebook and Twitter, but pros still need places to buy and sell the footage they’ll use inside those videos.
Source: Axios
