Vimeo is a video sharing site created in 2004 by Jake Lodwick and Zach Klein. It was originally made as a side project from CollegeHumor, and took direct inspiration from the photo sharing site Flickr, before it spun off into its own property. It is best known for being YouTube's primary competitor as a high-definition video-sharing service, specializing in increased privacy controls and customization paid for by its subscription services, as opposed to YouTube being free and getting most of its revenue from ads.
In 2007, it rose to fame by becoming the first ever video sharing site to support High Definition video without third-party plugins, beating YouTube by a year. In 2014, it would become one of the first sites to support 4K playback. For these reasons, Vimeo is generally considered a platform used more by professionals who focus on quality regardless of popularity, compared to YouTube's focus on virality subject to the whims of algorithms. While still subject to the DCMA (And thus obligated to remove videos that violate copyright), Vimeo generally does not proactively scan for copyright violations in its hosted videos in the same way as YouTube, meaning that some videos that have been long stricken off the former site for copyright infringement can sometimes still be found there, provided they have not been directly reported. As a result, many YouTubers have used the site as a backup service in case they fall afoul of copyright checks.
While initially owned by Connected Ventures, College Humor's parent company, followed by IAC, as of 2026, it is currently privately owned by Bending Spoons, an Italian conglomerate.
Works hosted on Vimeo