Vimeo’s New Global Stock Footage Marketplace Aims to Help Brands ‘Make Better Video’

Creators, brands and agencies now have another hub for stock footage content: Vimeo. The company, as part of its year-long transition from a viewing destination to a technology platform, one that gives creators all the tools they need to make great video, under the leadership of CEO Anjali Sud, has added the resource with the goal of “setting a new standard” for stock footage.

Vimeo is looking to help “businesses, brands and agencies make better video at scale” while “actually raising the quality of that video,” explained Sud.

“We have never used stock footage before, but that was before we saw the quality on Vimeo,” said Huy Vu, vp of creative at Casper, one of the few brands to get an early taste of Vimeo’s stock footage offering.

The footage is highly-curated and comes from Vimeo’s community of creators, with many of them licensing their content for the first time. Vimeo is looking to differentiate its stock footage offering with a quality over quantity approach.

“There are a lot of platforms out there that have large libraries of footage but the reality is that actually only a small percentage get purchased,” said Sud. “Another issue is the quality of the footage itself. No one wants to make a video and put their brand on it and have it feel like it’s just another stock clip.”

Another point of differentiation? Vimeo is bringing “disruptive economics for both sides of the marketplace,” said Sud. “If you’re a contributor providing footage you’ll keep 60 to 70 percent of the revenue versus the average industry cut of 35 percent. … [Members will save] 20 percent on your stock purchases.”

Sud continued: “The [stock footage] industry hasn’t innovated or changed in a long time. We think we can take a totally different approach because our model is about constantly building new tools for our consumers.”

The stock footage marketplace is the latest tool for creators the company has added in the last year; others include livestreaming, publishing videos to platforms outside of Vimeo and deeper analytics tools.

The focus on tools and technology is a radical shift for the company, which was had previously focused on “competing with Netflix and making Vimeo a place where consumers would come to watch entertainment,” said Sud, adding the original content marketplace has evolved over the last two years, with platforms spending billions—making it hard for Vimeo to differentiate itself.

In building out the company’s tools for creators Sud believes Vimeo will fill a void in the marketplace. “We have over a million paying subscribers to our creator tools,” said Sud. “The feedback was very clear, which is that every platform is becoming a destination or a walled garden to keep content on [that] platform.”

Sud continued: “‘I’m a filmmaker, I’m a small business, I’m a marketer and I want to get distribution and eyeballs everywhere. I want to make sure all the effort I put into making a video will get a return on that investment and I don’t know how to do that. It’s really, really hard. There’s no platform focused on that.’ For us, it was a function of listening to what our community was asking for and looking at the landscape. This is a real problem and no one else is solving it.”

Kristina Monllos

@KristinaMonllos

Kristina Monllos is a senior editor for Adweek.