Why I Love Vimeo (And Tolerate YouTube)

I’ve been doing online videos for years – the first video on my YouTube channel was uploaded in June of 2007, and I’ve made many more than show up on my personal YouTube channel. I hosted a weekly video podcast that ran for nearly 2 years, and even today, with my job at RadioShack, I make several videos per month. Pretty much all of these videos are uploaded to YouTube, but when I want to browse and find videos for personal entertainment, I nearly always go to Vimeo to find things to watch.

YouTube is awesome, especially for getting eyeballs. It’s kind of a non-negotiable that you put your content there if you want people to see it. Unfortunately, it’s kind of a non-negotiable that you put your content there – that means it’s overloaded with all sorts of junk videos. 115 different versions of the same news clip where the announcer slips up, 20 different ‘versions’ of a band’s music video (half of them are just uploads of the music with a slideshow of photos as the ‘video’), and anything a 12-year-old could get the webcam on their computer to record. There is pretty much zero curation taking place on YouTube, and there’s pretty much zero tools to make better quality videos there (aside from 3rd party editing tools like Final Cut and such). Even Jason Toff, product manager at YouTube, acknowledged this to Mashable recently when YouTube announced a few small editing capabilities: “We noticed that a lot of people were uploading videos to YouTube that we can say are somewhat unpolished.” Somewhat unpolished is a gross understatement.

Vimeo, on the other hand, seems to be the upload destination of choice for real videographers – people making really awesome videos. People who are making the types of videos that I want to kick back with a beer and watch on the iPad (even though the iPad experience leaves much to be desired). It’s real artistic stuff, and I’m glad to have it.

Here’s a few examples of videos that I love on Vimeo: