Item: Vimeo
Rating: 10
Author: Jonah Dempcy

Overall Satisfaction with Vimeo

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have used Vimeo for 11 years in both a personal and professional capacity, primarily for the hosting of product demo videos and screencasts. I first began using Vimeo to host short instructional videos on a jazz lessons blog that I made. I preferred Vimeo to its competitors then because there was such a great community of artists and creators, and Vimeo seemed much more sophisticated and high-brow. I felt I was in good company among other content creators and the user interface was sleek and elegant. Later, when I worked at Surefield, a real estate company started by a cofounder of Redfin, we used Vimeo exclusively for our customer-facing product demos. Now at Bluefire, we use Vimeo whenever we need to demonstrate a particular feature to a client through a screencast, or put together short instructional videos. Vimeo allows us to deliver video content in a sleek package that gives the appearance of being more professional and sophisticated than its competitors, in my opinion.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Image and Branding - Vimeo has always had an edge on design and branding versus its competitors like YouTube. Using Vimeo as a content delivery platform gives the appearance of being luxurious and having a high-end product.
Video Configuration - I've used YouTube through multiple iterations of their video management and configuration options, and Vimeo has continued to beat it hands down, both in ease of use and robustness. I can easily organize my Vimeo videos into tags and playlists while I still struggle with YouTube, where it is quite laborious.
User Interaction - Vimeo allows you to capture user email addresses for email lists with ease, something its competitors have not figured out yet. You can easily split your video into chapters and hyperlink from within the video to other areas, features which competitors like YouTube have in some form but not nearly as easy to use or well-implemented as Vimeo.
Video Analytics - Vimeo has a full-featured analytics suite that helps content creators understand user interaction and engagement with their videos.
Versioning and Collaboration - Vimeo has workflows for video history and for collaboration where you can have a content creator upload a video which enters a pipeline for an editor to approve. I have not used these workflows, but it's pretty cool that they have implemented features like this.
Custom Micro-Sites - I have only ever embedded Vimeo videos in websites that I've created, or sent them as links to clients, but I have seen well-designed micro-sites for content creators built using Vimeo. Overall, Vimeo does design and branding very well. Their micro-sites look much better, visually speaking, than competitors like YouTube whose equivalent feature, the YouTube Channel, just seems dry in comparison.

Cons

Price - For the full featureset of Vimeo, you will be paying $900 a year as of 2020, and this is expected to only go up over time. Thankfully, Vimeo offers lower tiers with less functionality, and most people will not need the unlimited streaming viewers or whopping 7 TB of storage that you get for the highest level of membership. But it is still a premium price for a premium service.
"Suggested" Algorithm - The equivalent of YouTube's suggested videos feature is the Vimeo Staff Picks, which recommends curated content from their team of editors. While this content generally has a high level of production, it is not especially relevant to the video you are watching, or to your watch history as a user. I rarely watch suggested videos in Vimeo.
Search - The Vimeo search page is beautiful, having huge thumbnails of videos with a clean, visually-appealing layout. However, the results themselves leave much to be desired. When I search for "jung" to try to find videos on Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung, of the first 18 results, not a single result is actually about C. G. Jung. On Youtube, the first 14 results are all about Jung. When I search for "c. g. jung" on Vimeo I find a number of relevant results, so it's not that the videos are not available in Vimeo. Rather, the search algorithm is not returning relevant results.

Return on Investment

Positive - Our use of Vimeo to deliver video content to clients has garnered compliments, theoretically improving brand image in the eyes of clients.
Positive - Vimeo's excellent user interface has allowed stellar organization of videos without much fuss.
Negative - Vimeo has cost more than some of its competitors for a similar featureset.

Alternatives Considered

Dailymotion Video Player Solution

For our business applications, the primary competitor to Vimeo is YouTube, although Dailymotion is arguably a competitor for some of our business applications, though not others. The most complete full-featured competitor for our business use cases is YouTube, and I think Vimeo stacks up very favorably against YouTube. Vimeo has much better UI and design, and overall a much higher production quality of videos. YouTube became notorious for having a low quality of user comments, although their filtering has gotten much better in recent years. Still, Vimeo gives the appearance of being a luxury, premium, boutique video delivery service. Whether it is for screencasting, product demos, instructional videos, or other content related to our business, Vimeo is preferred every time for its sleek elegance and above-average UI design.

However, there are some areas where Vimeo fails. One is search, and another is discovery. For consumer-facing videos aimed at garnering a wide audience, YouTube may be the better choice, as there are more chances for people to find your videos on there. Vimeo simply does not have good search and recommendation features for connecting videos to each other.

Support Rating

I have never contacted Vimeo customer support, but the forums and web support available, and tutorials for advanced features of Vimeo, are all quite excellent. Given the company's image of being a premium video content delivery service, I imagine that Vimeo's support is excellent. So, I am ranking Vimeo 10 even though I have never had the need to contact customer support, because of the excellent support available online through forums and videos, and because of the image they have cultivated of being a smart, responsive company.

Key Insights

Do you think Vimeo delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Vimeo's feature set?

Yes

Did Vimeo live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Vimeo go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Vimeo again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Sound Forge, Adobe Premiere Pro, iMovie, Ableton Live

Likelihood to Recommend

Vimeo is perfect for content delivery from a business to a user where branding, design, and image is of the utmost importance. Vimeo is a boutique premium video delivery platform that puts a lot of care and attention to detail into their features, so choosing them as a service to deliver videos to customers shows that same care and concern. The brand has a luxury bespoke feel. It is suitable for small companies and content creators who are design-conscious, as well as larger companies for whom the branding fits. Vimeo has always had an artsy vibe, for lack of a better term, being the preferred video delivery platform for artists, musicians and videographers, compared to YouTube which is often joked about because of its notorious comments section, although this has gotten much better in recent years. There are other competitors to Vimeo as well, but none of them have the high-end, boutique branding that Vimeo has.

I would say Vimeo is less suitable for certain verticals like gaming (where Twitch and YouTube are more appropriate), or utilitarian purposes like instructional videos on how to fix your car, say. Vimeo is also not as suitable for applications where branding is not a concern.

Vimeo Feature Ratings

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Boutique Video Service Evokes Artsy Sophistication