Youtube vs Vimeo – What is better for Video Creators?

If you are a video creator or planning on making videos consistently, it is important to know which platform to choose when you want to upload your content. Where can you reach out to more people suitable for your niche?

Youtube and Vimeo are the two most common places to upload videos these days. But before doing anything, one must know, which is more competitive, pays better, has a more engaging community, and the possibility for rapid growth.

Introduction to Video Platforms

Video content is steadily conquering search engines and social media. Online video consumption shows no signs of slowing down in the next few years and will take over the top of search queries of blogs and articles.

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Vimeo stats

Vimeo originally started out in 2004 by filmmakers who wanted to share their videos with the world. Over the years, several like-minded people discovered Vimeo, adding to a growing community of video content creators.

Today, Vimeo is the world’s largest ad-free open video platform to share and sell videos in high quality. The number of Vimeo users in the US are around 42 million, with another 200 million and 35 million registered users worldwide in 150 countries. Fortunately, there is less competition to rank on the first page than on YouTube, but your traffic is significantly less. There are 710,000 premium users, 70% of those located outside of the US. Vimeo is free, but to really use its advantages you need to purchase one of their plans.

Youtube stats

Youtube is the second largest search engine and visited website in the world with over 1 billion hours of content watched every day and is used by 2 billion people. Every minute, about 500 hours of content is uploaded on this platform.

Youtube compared to Vimeo is absolutely free and anyone can sign up with a Google account. Suffice to say, Youtube is massive and still growing, so it needs little introduction. But we must assess, which platform deserves more of your time to grow and make money.

Youtube vs Vimeo – Which is better?

Let’s break it down the comparison to seven different factors:

1. Outreach
2. Money
3. Video quality
4. Ads
5. Community
6. Data storage
7. Video player options

Where can you reach out to more people?

This one is obvious and needs no debate. But not because Youtube has more than a billion users but because of search queries. If you’re planning to create a video tailored to a specific search query, your video should be on YouTube.  Not only will it appear in search results directly on YouTube, but Google also seems to favor videos from YouTube over those posted on other platforms.

If you’d like to learn more about Youtube and how to optimize your content, we have a free Ebook to help you out.

Where can you make more money?

With Youtube, you get your money based on views and CTR (Click-through-rate.) You can calculate your estimated return on Youtube here or in the image below. On top of that, you can display affiliate links, do promotional videos, sign up to Patreon, or start selling your product or service by promoting it to your audience.

With Vimeo, it’s a little different.

According to Mashable, Vimeo will allow Vimeo Plus and Vimeo Pro members to enable Tip Jar. Tip Jar is sort of like charity or Patreon, rather than bombing viewers with ads. Viewers are able to show their appreciation for a video or clicking through a “Tip this video” link. Video creators can receive anywhere from $0.99 – $500 for their content. Payments can be done via PayPal or a credit card.

On top of that, video creators will be able to upload their content behind a paywall to control their own pricing. This means that if you were to have your own videos on Vimeo and want to use or release them, they can offer access to users for whatever price they want. In conclusion, it seems, that quality content will make more money on Vimeo if it finds the right audience. Youtube would require a massive number of views to turn a profit.

Video quality

Both Vimeo and YouTube support up to 8k resolution, but Vimeo generally serves videos at a higher bit rate when compared. Even though if your camera quality exceeds the 8K resolution, when you upload it, YouTube has to compress your video to save space.

Since YouTube has hundreds of hours of video uploaded each hour they compress their content to save space and handle it better. This is why Vimeo takes the win for video quality.

However, on a mobile phone, this will look identical. And since 70% of YouTube views come from a mobile device, this will not affect the users that much.

Pre-roll ads and Ad campaigns

Pre-roll ads are the ones you see when you click on a Youtube video and you cannot click away for about 6 seconds. It can be pretty annoying. But from a marketing perspective, it can be great to carry out a message to your audience.

When it comes to running your own ads, nobody can beat Youtube. YouTube offers a better, user-friendly platform to run ads. You can filter and specify where you want your videos to show up, what language or specific location you wish to target. You can also get a “YouTube Advertising Expert” to lend support when you spend $10 a day on ads.

With Vimeo, its different in a way that you cannot purchase ad space.

However, this is where Vimeo is much better. Since Vimeo makes money through its paid users, it doesn’t allow ads. So viewers don’t get annoyed or leave when 2 or 3 unskippable ads pop-up.

Is Youtube’s or Vimeo’s Community better?

While the Youtube community is huge and has more big names attached to it, Vimeo still maintains a stronger connection with its members. A Youtube vs Vimeo community comparison is actually very different. With such a massive audience on YouTube, the environment has become more competitive and antagonistic between people of the same niche. You don’t have to be a Youtuber to see how much drama goes through the platform and the hunt for views.

Vimeo is a much smaller more community-driven platform to tap into an existing niche and to grow.

Data storage limits

With YouTube, you can get unlimited, free storage for all your accounts. So you can upload an endless number of videos. The longest Youtube video is actually 571 hours, 1 minute and 41 seconds long.

Vimeo on the other hand charges for storage. The basic, free Vimeo account option gives you 500MB of storage per week, meanwhile their highest tier will cost you $50/month. With this package, you can store 5TB of data with no weekly limits.

Youtube vs Vimeo – Player Options

YouTube’s embed options are very limited. One is able to change a few parameters such as size, looping, and autoplay. But you’d need third-party applications to remedy this limitation.

With Vimeo Plus and Premium, you can basically change every visual aspect of your video. You can customize the branding specific to your niche. You can even create presets for different embed types. This is great if you have different types of videos. With YouTubers, they are usually stuck with the default player and have to resort to other video editing tools.

The conclusion to Youtube vs Vimeo

Youtube opens doors to more opportunities, more money, and a bigger audience. But it is also extremely competitive. But we’d still recommend using Youtube as a start because of its simple interface and user-friendly abilities. If you have business goals that revolve heavily around search optimization and ads, YouTube is your best bet.

Final say

But for a creative community, where you can connect with other video creators and gain some exposure in a specific niche, Vimeo is your long-term choice. Since the audience is smaller and built into a community mindset, Vimeo tends to be more constructive and less aggressive in terms of outreach for views.

The best option for serious content creators who want to make a living is to go for both platforms. But you should start uploading on Youtube, and in addition, when your channel grows, you can sign up to Vimeo’s Pro Plan.

If you’re interested, we’d also covered another topic on “The life of a Youtuber.” Since many Youtubers feel disheartened and faced countless obstacles, we’d like to share them with you to help you make a decision whether you’d choose Youtube or Vimeo at the end.