These days, making online videos has become a way for clever creators to make a full-time living—or at least some extra cash. And now they have another way to get paid.
Vimeo, the IAC-owned online company best known for hosting ad-free user-generated videos, today said it's arming creators with the tools to charge fans a monthly subscription fee for unlimited viewing. The subscription tools are rolling out as an update to Vimeo on Demand, the platform Vimeo creators use to sell video content directly to viewers.
“Online video is entering an exciting new stage where creators don’t have to rely on pre-roll advertising alone to earn money,” Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor said in a press release, a not-so-subtle dig at the ubiquitous ads that show up before videos on YouTube.
Vimeo on Demand, which launched two years ago, currently boasts a library of more than 20,000 titles that customers can buy a la carte, the way you would on iTunes. Since its introduction, original content on the platform has enjoyed some notable successes, including the critically-acclaimed Web comedy series “High Maintenance,” which was recently picked up by HBO for distribution on its own online services.
In Vimeo’s original scheme, episodes for shows like High Maintenance had to be bought piecemeal. Now, with subscriptions, Vimeo is giving creators a way to let their audience access an archive of content for a steady monthly fee. It's also a way to signal to an audience that new content can be expected at regular intervals.
Vimeo is rolling its subscription offerings out in phases, perhaps to give itself some time to figure out where it sits in the ecosystem of online video services. YouTube, the unparalleled leader in online video, has users uploading three hundred hours of video every minute. It has over a billion users worldwide, many of whom are die-hard fans, and has made celebrities of its video creators. Now, it’s even working with its stars to launch series and release feature films. But even though rumors around YouTube’s ad-free subscription service are heating up, the video behemoth has yet to announce an initiative.
Meanwhile, a host of other players, both niche and mainstream, all appear to be jostling for a piece of the video pie. Vessel, created by former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, recently launched a platform for video creators to sell early-access video content on a subscription basis. Then there’s competition from Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Periscope, and even Reddit. On other end of the spectrum, HBO, Netflix, and Amazon are creating polished original content with mainstream celebrity directors and actors.
With all of these different forces at play, Vimeo faces the difficult challenge of distinguishing itself from the pack. The bet they seem to be taking, as Vimeo manager of audience networks Greg Clayman puts it, is to give creators granular control over their own content. “[Vimeo] allows individual creators to create their own services and target their own marketplace using their own content,” Clayman says. In other words, creators can use Vimeo to sell directly to their own audiences.
That approach has worked well for certain kinds of content, such as indie films and longform video pieces—the kinds of "quality" content Vimeo has long sought to showcase to establish itself as a premium brand. Avengers director Joss Whedon once picked Vimeo to host one of his own original films, for instance. Astrologer-to-the-stars Susan Miller uses Vimeo to publish video horoscopes for the upcoming month.
The approach seems to be to take hold of the space between the grassroots content of YouTube's internet-native stars and the professional-grade studio content from the video streaming giants. But to hold onto this niche, Vimeo needs to keep its video creators happy. Its biggest challenge—as High Maintenance demonstrates—could simply be that it has no way to keep its homegrown series from graduating from the platform. In a way, losing its stars just shows Vimeo is a victim of its own success. By giving those stars a new way to make money, perhaps it can keep more of that success for itself.
