So It Turns Out, You Can Build Your Own Patreon...
(ENTER – Vimeo Streaming)
Last week, I sent an email with the subject line What If You Could Build Your Own Patreon? It centered around comedian Daniel Kitson’s newly launched An Accumulation of Failure, a paywalled section of his website featuring high quality video and audio recordings of his live shows over the years, amongst a host of other bonus content.
I ended the email by asking what it might look like for other comedians to build their own version of this. A place that doesn’t rely on Patreon, or unpredictable digital ad revenue from YouTube and Facebook to survive.
Well, two days later, Max N. in Brooklyn sent me this article:
The gist: Vimeo has launched something called ‘Vimeo Streaming’, an OTT service that lets creators build their own subscription video platforms.
Not just a Desktop video player, but fully branded streaming apps made available on iOS, Android, Apple TV, Roku, the whole thing.
They even handle payments, analytics, subtitles, and piracy protection.
It’s meant to be plug-and-play, no coding or dev team required.
Here are two relevant quotes from the article:
“Vimeo is proud to serve the professional creator. With our new Vimeo Streaming release, we are giving creators more ways to connect with and gain a deeper understanding of their audiences, more ways to monetize their content, and higher grade security,” said Philip Moyer, CEO of Vimeo.
And:
Dropout, the comedy platform (previously known as CollegeHumor) has used Vimeo’s products to build its own subscription business.
“Vimeo Streaming allows us to concentrate on our core competency—producing content—and leave the technical aspects to Vimeo,” said Dropout CEO Sam Reich. “Our subscription business is far and away our biggest revenue driver, and Vimeo’s comprehensive suite of tools means we’re delivering it to our audience stylishly and reliably.”
Current customers include The Try Guys’ 2nd Try, Martha Stewart TV, and Dropout.
Here’s a customer testimonial from Vimeo’s website for Dropout, who have been using Vimeo Streaming (prev. Vimeo OTT) since 2020. Worth the read.
Now if you’re like me, you might be thinking, if only Daniel Kitson knew this feature existed before launching his website! Vimeo Streaming would be perfect for someone like him. He’s got a massive back catalog, a loyal fanbase willing to pay, no presence on social media, and likely would have an aversion to any platform that might tell him how to present his work.
Except I went back and re-read the email he sent out on February 5th, where he first announced An Accumulation of Failure. Here's what he had to say about Vimeo:
Kitson: As you may know, for a few years I’ve had videos of a few old shows available to rent (and sometimes buy) through my Vimeo account and whilst Vimeo was very useful for the various livestreams I started doing during the pandemic, the awful truth is that It’s become increasingly fiddly and frustrating to work with for the Video on Demand stuff. Various features which I found useful have been discontinued and at times the experience of trying to get in touch with them has made me want to smash my laptop with a big spoon.
Not only that but it kept getting more expensive and nudging me towards further upgrades in my (already upgraded, thank you) account.
Anyway, this all came to a head late last year when, after I made my Halloween show free to view for 48 hours my account was suspended due to a bandwidth violation. I was slightly flummoxed by this as I’d only just paid for one of the aforementioned upgrades to upgrade my storage. It turns out, though, that storage and bandwidth are two different things and there is a hard limit on monthly bandwidth (and by extension the number of people who can stream stuff).
Since then, I’ve had a few mildly infuriating interactions with two different men from Compliance in which I explained that for the vast majority of the year my bandwith usage was, frankly, pitifully small for an artist of my stature and if these occasional spikes put me over the limit then, I didn’t really understand how to proceed. One of the men kindly explained that my only option was to upgrade to the enterprise plan for $12,000.00. I told him that, actually, I’d rather not and declared my intention to pay whatever I owed, remove my videos from the platform, stick them on a hard drive and work out what I wanted to do next.
He did then miraculously unearth another, hitherto unavailable, special deal for “businesses” like mine which would only cost me a trifling $6,000.00 but this special deal needed to be agreed by the next day and by this stage, if I’m really honest, i’d got quite grumpy. I told him that I hate this sort of stealth negotiation, that I just want to be told how much a thing costs and then make a decision about whether I wanted to pay for that thing and that the whole experience with Vimeo had been a bit frustrating and I was going to do something else with my videos instead.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
It’s unclear if those payment amounts were one-time or recurring, and maybe Daniel Kitson doesn’t meet the platform’s definition of a “Professional Creator.” To Vimeo, that phrase likely means someone who can expense $6,000 to a brand deal. Or write it off with merch revenue.
But to use Dropout as an example of a success story for this launch is disingenuous.
Dropout has a full team behind it, Kitson is one guy with an external hard drive of video files.
The overarching idea is still good. Maybe even great.
But if the ideal use case walked away — and walked away grumpy — it’s worth asking who this was actually built for.
Because when you strip away the customer success stories and software comparisons and free product demos, the question isn’t whether the tools exist.
It’s whether the people they’re supposedly built for can actually afford to use them.
another interesting article. right when I started it I was thinking about what Kitson put in the email about the 12k 6k situation.