14 DAY TRIAL // There's not much in terms of competition or diversity in the online video world. There's is YouTube, there is Netflix, there is maybe Hulu and Amazon's download and rental service. And that's pretty much it.
The only one standing out a bit is Vimeo, which, despite the fact that it's a generalist video site just like YouTube, has managed to find its niche and is catering to the more artsy crowd which find YouTube too full of commoners and riffraff.
But the site is not doing too bad for itself, the site's mother company IAC revealed during its conference call after revealing its quarterly financial results.
The site now has 150,000 paying subscribers, who pay to access Vimeo Plus, which offers more upload bandwidth and other perks that regular Vimeo users, who don't pay a dime, don't have access to.
"The one area that I think, one unit of ours, which is Video, is one that we think can have considerable growth. And it continues to grow subscribers. It continues to grow," IAC chairman Barry Diller said, according to GigaOm.
"I think we’re up to now — we’re up to 150,000 subscribers. when you think of that, for a subscriber business, that’s not bad. I mean, that speaks to the fact that this is a service that people like and will pay for," he said.
What's equally interesting is that the company boasted about Vimeo's 50 million unique users. However, that number must be for the entire quarter, as the site has less 20 million unique visitors per month, according to comScore data.
It's certainly no YouTube, but it does manage to bring in a steady stream of people and the video site is one of the few ones that have survived this long, at least in the US.