Vimeo has recently been telling some heavy users to pay as much as thousands of dollars more a year or be kicked off the platform, a report from The Verge said.
The report begins with the story of Lois van Baarle, a digital artist based in the Netherlands.
She says she began making subscriber-only Patreon content in 2020 and hosting it on Vimeo. Then came the notice from Vimeo on March 11 that van Baarle’s bandwidth usage was in the top 1% of Vimeo’s users. So if she wanted to keep hosting her content on the site, she’d need to upgrade to a custom plan that could run her as much as $3,500 a year, given a week to make changes or leave the site.
The Verge noted that her experience was just one of many — numerous Patreon creators received the notice, which has resulted in “confusion and panic.”
The report noted that Vimeo bandwidth usage is calculated using several factors like video plays, resolution, loading the player and thumbnail image, downloading and livestreaming, according to the website.
Talking to The Verge, Matt Anchin, Vimeo head of communications, said that when a user reaches the threshold for bandwidth, the company tries to work with them.
In an email to PYMNTS on Monday (March 21), Vimeo said it is taking steps “to address the issue,” and stressed that “Vimeo is not raising rates across the board for users.”
The company said in a blog post, “We generally try not to limit or impose additional fees for bandwidth consumption, and the vast majority of our users — over 99% — don’t reach the threshold that would require us to charge them extra. For those who consistently or significantly exceed these thresholds, our goal is to charge them rates they can afford and that are lower than what they would be charged for ad-free delivery elsewhere.”
Vimeo in the last several years has gotten away from being a YouTube alternative that several creators were signing up for, and CEO Anjali Sud said the goal was to be a software company for various types of businesses.
Read more: Seamless UX, Payments Sets Streaming Services Apart in Hot Latam Market
PYMNTS wrote that Latin America is one of the fastest growing markets for virtual streaming and subscription markets, with even big players like Netflix fighting to attain dominance there.
The report notes that a smooth user experience can set services apart, including onboarding new subscribers and processing payments.
Streaming video-on-demand subscriptions are forecast to hit 116 million by 2025 in the Latin America region, according to PYMNTS data.
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