Vimeo's B2B Pivot Has Hit Patreon Users Particularly Hard

Vimeo, the video sharing platform once considered a YouTube alternative, has been surprising top Patreon creators with unexpected price hikes as the company shifts to a purely B2B corporate strategy. Several Patreon creators told The Verge they've been quoted thousands of dollars to upgrade to a custom plan, decrease bandwidth usage, or leave Vimeo. "Over the past four to five years, Vimeo has made a hard pivot away from being the YouTube alternative that [Patreon video creators] originally signed up for," reports The Verge. "In a letter to shareholders in February, [Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud] spells the shift out in black and white: 'Today we are a technology platform, not a viewing destination. We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.'" From the report: The change in strategy has hit Patreon users particularly hard: Patreon has encouraged the use of Vimeo as a hosting platform, with Vimeo even offering a small discount for Patreon creators. Patreon also has a Vimeo integration that allows creators to upload gated content directly. [...] Vimeo says it offers users ways to track their bandwidth usage, and that the company has been in touch with Patreon throughout the partnership. Some creators have jumped ship from Vimeo in the face of increasing hosting fees. Van Baarle says she plans to manually re-upload her video content to YouTube, where she can host it for free instead of paying for a custom plan on Vimeo. [Channel 5, a popular account doing man-on-the-street-style interviews] eventually was able to recover their content with Patreon's help, according to a brief update in early February. With no paid upgrade, their Vimeo account was "wiped from the face of the earth," they say in the post. The next Channel 5 video would instead be hosted on Patreon directly -- the service has started developing its own video platform, though for now it's only available to select users. One of the Patreon creators says the site "has a responsibility to notify creators that their content could be at risk if they're hit with a Vimeo notice of excessive bandwidth usage," reports The Verge. "And he worries that even new Patreon creators who gain traction quickly could leap into Vimeo's top user base and get the same email he and others did, with few options." Patreon declined to comment on whether it would continue to recommend Vimeo as a hosting platform.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.