Vimeo Takes the Wise Guy Approach

I like to make home movies. My family travels around full-time, and I want to capture some of that in a fun way that they can possibly watch later in their lives, to help them remember all of this stuff we’re seeing while they’re still really young.

I like to use Vimeo, because I think their player just looks nicer. Sometimes I make more videos than I’m allowed to upload in one week there, so every few years I’ll buy a Vimeo Plus membership for a couple of months while I’m making and uploading videos.

The membership more or less allows you to upload more videos / more data per week than their free accounts. There are other features too, like stats, blah blah blah but that’s why I buy it.

I cancelled my membership this month as I haven’t uploaded any videos, let alone a bunch, in over two months. I received this email from Vimeo today, emphasis mine:

Dear Nathan,

Oh no, your Vimeo Plus membership expires on March 02, 2015!

If you don’t renew, you could be in danger of losing some of your videos, along with all your amazing Plus benefits. Things don’t have to end this way — take action now to renew your membership and keep enjoying Vimeo Plus.

That “you could be in danger…” part is a link, so I clicked it. It takes me to a page with the content shown in the screenshot below:

Here’s the issue, and the reason I’m bothering to write this: Why is Vimeo using some strong arm tactic to try and make me afraid that I’ll lose my videos if I don’t continue my membership?

There is nothing on that page about which videos I may or may not lose. All of my videos are still in my account as of today. I get that they need to make money to stay in business, but it feels like they’re trying to trick me into doing something I don’t need to do, and threatening to remove my videos but not really telling me why.

I find it all quite dodgy. Remember when we all invented the web together and most everything was largely free? Or at least freemium? Is this the new direction we’ll see things headed – if you don’t pay up, that thing that used to be free but then you paid us some money for will now be taken away from you!

If they do indeed remove some of my videos, it’s like they’re essentially rewarding people who’ve never had a paid account and then punishing those of us who did but chose to take a break from it for awhile.

I just hope Vimeo doesn’t move into the sauce business, because it would no doubt be of the variety weak.

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