A huge portion of the internet is video. In fact, whenever you search for something, a part of the search results turn out to be videos. Not to forget, every time you scroll any social media platform, you are bound to come across a lot of videos and snippets and even cute dog video.
With videos ruling the world of the internet, YouTube vs Vimeo stand as two of the strongest pillars of the video community, without a doubt. If you are someone who’d like to make a mark on the interwebs, these two platforms would be worth your time, effort and money. Till date, they stand as the largest video-only communities on the internet.
Youtube Vs Vimeo:
For the basics, both the platforms serve the same purpose. You have a video, upload it on either of these platforms and these platforms will host it for the audience to watch. No rocket science.
With over 1 billion users, YouTube proves to be the largest web community. Not to forget, YouTube has the second-highest traffic from any given search engine. Think of anything you can, and it’d be already there on YouTube. Content-wise, there is no scarcity on YouTube.
Coming to Vimeo, it doesn’t get that massive traffic as YouTube. But they do have a community that is tightly knit. The website has a vibe on it and the sleek and stylish layout makes it all the more professional. With that being said, it has been proven that the user experience of Vimeo is smoother than YouTube.
The basic differences between Youtube and Vimeo:
While YouTube can be for the masses, Vimeo is still for the more focused ones. But before we jump to conclusions, let’s take a detailed look at what all differs in both platforms.
1. Communities
Though the community of YouTube is massive, a massive community doesn’t always mean qualitative content. However, when Vimeo is considered, approximately 42 million out of its 170 million viewers are from the United States.
It must be noted that the community of Vimeo is elite and the feedback they leave at Vimeo turns out to be constructive. Hence, there are higher production values at Vimeo.
2. Pricing
Guess what, YouTube is free! No matter if you are a viewer or a content producer, it is just totally free. All you got to do is to create an account and start uploading videos. None of your storage is charged. From live-streaming to all access options, everything is free.
Vimeo, on the other hand, has a bit of traditional pricing. While you can always sign-up and use the free tier, it does come with limitations. You will get a restricted upload space of 500 MB per week which goes up to 25 GB per year. No wonder you will get access to the basic stats and comments. For more add-ons, you’ll have to pay and choose from a plan of your choice.
3. Monetisation
For YouTube, you’ll have to get 10,000 views on your channel to get paid. You can also get mid-roll ads, and pre-roll ads, sponsorships and paid videos. Vimeo is ad-free. They aim at user-friendly layout and ads are never user-friendly.
4. Privacy Control
There can be times when you don’t wish to make your video visible to the whole world. It can be a training video, a vlog, a concept, or something under process which still isn’t too ready to hit off the screen. Well sadly, both the kings of video communities do not have strong privacy controls.
5. SEO
What we see on the internet is massively ruled by Google. Like it or not, the content we watch or read on the internet is at the mercy of Google’s algorithms. This is the reason why YouTube’s videos are given a preference in search results over the videos from Vimeo. Though it somewhat looks unfair, this is a fact. So in case you are someone who is looking to generate traffic from organic search, YouTube should probably be your pick.
Whereas, if you are looking for more refined, directed traffic, Vimeo would be the best for you. Since they have a video-on-demand structure, Vimeo turns out to be a better player. For people who have an established base of audience, Vimeo works magic. You can see more organic traffic than YouTube, on Vimeo.
The verdict
It’s all about your goals. Everything depends on the fact that who is going to consume your content and the type of it. Like whether it is a live shoot video, a screencast video, an animated explainer video, a slideshow or something else. At one front Youtube will steal the show for you while on other Vimeo will deliver you what you want. So make the goals clear, get the differences and analyse them, and then you are ready to shoot.
