Vimeo, an online video service that is part of New York-based IAC, has about 150,000 paying members, according to IAC chairman Barry Diller. He revealed the numbers during a conference call with Wall Street analysts following company’s earnings for the quarter ending September 30, 2011.
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. 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.
IAC chief executive officer Gregory R. Blatt noted that Vimeo had 50 million unique users. I am guessing he meant 50 million unique users for the entire quarter, for according to comScore data, Vimeo had about 17.35 million unique viewers who watched 44.3 million videos. In comparison, YouTube had 160 million unique viewers during the month of September 2011 who watched 18.54 million videos.The gulf between the two companies is pretty huge and Vimeo doesn’t register amongst the top ten video destinations, currently ranked at the number 13 spot by comScore. However, that gap didn’t stop Diller from taking a swipe at YouTube. He remarked:
We grow with unique users. We grow with the fact that this is a protected, high-quality service for video. There is no other on the Internet. I mean, YouTube does a fine job and has a huge audience, but has a grab bag of a whole lot of things. This is a place where you can protect your video, when you can expose it to either family and friends, or to millions and millions of people. It’s got great opportunities. And so I kind of call that one out. I don’t know if any of my colleagues have anything else to say in this area.
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