I was in a similar situation and I can totally relate to Vimeo's decision. Gamer population has two funny properties that can drive any service provider nuts:
(a) Gamers don't have money
(b) Gamers stress *the hell* out of the service once it becomes popular with them
There are certainly adult gamers, but your average gamer is a teen with no money of his own and who is also very accustomed to a freeloading. This means that it's virtually impossible to convert gamers to paying customers. Nor does their existence in a user base add much to the company valuation, because of a non-existent cross-sale potential. Nor do their ad clicks have much value.
For all practical intents and purposes, the gaming crowd is interesting almost exclusively to the gaming-related companies. If you are not in that segment, the chances are that your service would fare better without gamers.
I wonder if Vimeo was losing money hosting these videos. Losing money + legal liability = "we want to encourage creative expression (by deleting your videos)"?
I remember the first time I visited Vimeo - compared to other video sites at the time, it left a strong impression that they focused on creative videos. Losing money + legal liability + an idea of what sort of community they want to create = harsh measures.
From the comments, it sounds like Vimeo should think about opening a sister site dedicated to _only_ game-based videos. The masses love their quality and usability. Why not?
The three reasons the article gave for dropping gaming videos were that they were outside the main focus of the site, exposed the company to unwanted liability, and were consistently larger and more resource intensive than other videos. Hosting a separate site for game videos would only address the first concern, and doesn't really do much for the others.
It could help the third as well if they would either slightly lower the quality to improve transcoding times and/or simply make it OK to have longer transcoding times.
Agreed on the liability end though, if that's the main driver here there's not much they can do.
I think the problem that Vimeo has been having is that users have to wait (sometimes HOURS) for their videos to be encoded. I think that this is a step towards fixing that.
Some of the better ones they are deleting are in the most watched videos of their site. It doesn't make much sense to me, I think the founders would rather think of themselves of artists than business men. That is all fine, but there is a reason youTube is the market leader despite Vimeo starting first. If I were an investor in the company I would be pissed - they went about it in entirely the wrong way with their condescension and will invariably piss off a large group of potential audience.
>there is a reason youTube is the market leader despite Vimeo starting first
Huh, learn something new every day. I had no idea Vimeo is older than YouTube, I've only really seen it around since they started offering HD.
I agree that it seems like a somewhat strange decision. It introduces an arbitrary judgement call - "this is a gaming video, this is machinima, this is somewhere in between but we'll remove it anyway", bitterness from their users, and lots of "this video was removed" links which will lead people to conclude that Vimeo is quite broken.
I can only conclude that the legal component of the issue is a lot more significant than it seems, or that the hardware costs are too high (in which case, how much revenue do "regular" videos bring?)
No, it makes sense. Customers cost money. If you have customers that cost more money than they generate that's bad.
It's totally conceivable to me that people uploading and watching these gaming video cost more than they brought in for Vimeo.
It's part of the web mindset that more customers == more eyeballs == better. It's not always the case, especially if you're working with limited resources.
Yes, but being the market leader is meaningless unless your site actually generates revenue. YouTube's founders are in a nice position now, but as I recall, Google is still saying that they have no idea how to make money with YouTube.
If cutting out the gamer videos helps Vimeo make money serving the niche they feel passionate about, more power to 'em.
The gaming market is enormous, and I'm frankly surprised they'd take this stance. Maybe it'd be wise for them to have a social video uploading sub-site similar to YouTube with equal quality to YT.
Turning away users is never a great solution, but maybe this will be a temporary one.
Where is this "one of it's biggest user bases" thing coming from? Vimeo has been just doing fine for the last 4 years without a bunch of video game videos.
It's all relative. They have always made it really obvious they never wanted or attempted to be YouTube. Personally, I know I would have never bothered to create any of the videos on my Vimeo had I not had a Vimeo.
Not everything is about numbers. Connected Ventures already has huge successful cash cows like Busted Tees and College Humor. Vimeo is just about enabling people to communicate, not record themselves playing a videogame for an hour every day.
For all practical intents and purposes, the gaming crowd is interesting almost exclusively to the gaming-related companies. If you are not in that segment, the chances are that your service would fare better without gamers.