Vimeo vs YouTube

With my monthly bandwidth pulling in at over 20gb a few months ago I decided to host all of my sound clips offsite in an effort to reduce costs. Originally I was going to opt for YouTube… until I discovered Vimeo. The immediate attraction for me was the cleaner look and style of its video player, the Vimeo site is also a lot nicer looking than YouTube – and it doesn’t suffer from some of the idiots you’ll find on YouTube too: post a video on YouTube and more often than not you’ll get some moron leaving unfriendly and often offensive comments. Vimeo however seems to want to nurture a more friendly and constructive community, in-game video footage is disallowed and the content on the site tends to be of a more artistic nature.

So what are the cons? well unless you choose to upgrade to Vimeo Plus then you’ll be restricted to uploading only 500mb a month (not a problem in my case but might be a problem for others) standard members videos also get put into a “processing queue” that can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours+ (depending on the site traffic at the time of upload) however it’s worth noting that in my experience I’ve often found my videos are ready before the time given, maybe that’s because mine are so short? Unlike YouTube you can’t batch upload either.

Another con for iPhone and iPod Touch owners is that to date there is no app that plays Vimeo videos, though it’s something that Vimeo staff say they are keen to remedy in the future.

Overall I much prefer using Vimeo, it’s true that my sound clips won’t get the exposure and viewers they will on YouTube… but I’m not doing this to be popular, I post to this site because I want to.

Although Vimeo has been running for a couple of years now I suppose there is always that concern that its running on a finite amount of resources, it’s well known that YouTube with its billions of visitors and videos doesn’t make a profit, indeed Credit Suisse estimate that it makes an annual loss of $500m – though recent reports suggest that figure might be much less.

Hopefully Vimeo will survive, it has built up a nice community and the content on offer there is very good, the Plus package should help bolster running costs… but just incase I’ve also uploaded all of my sound clips to YouTube too!