Vimeo is still getting a ton of feedback over their snotty decision to pull video game videos from the service because of “resource issues.” The original post on the Vimeo blog is now up to over a thousand comments… Here’s a snip from one I found particularly poignant:
And though Vimeo may have sprung on the scene a whole four months earlier than YouTube, there’s no doubt that it’s not the intention of Connected Ventures, ultimately, to make that “YouTube money,” rather than
“[Provide] a place to share video with friends and family.”
as illustrated by this decision. You’re essentially shooing away a fairly significant market of your users, rather than attempting to work out some kind of compromise with them (game videos can’t be more than 5 mins long, can’t be viewed in HD, etc).
You may claim not to impose restrictions on the majority of your users due a minority faction, but this is the catalyst, and showing your disregard for an entire group of your users will just be moved onto the next highest resource hogging niche.
It’s only a matter of time before cat videos, lip syncs, etc., are viewed as not creative enough or too resource-intensive to stay on the site.
One thing that hasn’t been answered is how is something merely being on the site so resource intensive that it hurts the site for others? We’ll never know because people like Dalas Verdugo and Blake Whitman are way more interested in just saying “it is what it is, deal with it.”
I did deal with it.
I moved on.