Staff Blog / Deep Reflections and Personal Horn-Tooting for 2011

by Blake Whitman
December 26th, 2011

Here at the sprawling Vimeo office park, we have an end-of-the-year tradition. As we draw near the final page of our LOLCats LOL-A-Day calendar, we always take a few moments to stand in front of a large mirror and say to ourselves, somewhat accusatorily, "So, what did you accomplish this year?"

While we're reluctant to blow our own trumpets, we will shyly admit that we accomplished kind of sort of a lot in 2011. And so here is how we plan to reply to ourselves, not even remotely defensively, even though that would be completely warranted considering the tone of the question:

We made the Vimeo community way huger
That's not just a vaguely hyperbolic statement – we have numbers to back it up. Since last year at around this time, our unique visitors have increased by 48%, from 44 million to 64 million (Nov 2010 vs Nov 2011), which seems pretty impressive until you compare it to the growth in our membership, which went up a whopping 82%, from 5 million to 9.1 million (again Nov 2010 vs Nov 2011). And we're slaving over our keyboards to make sure this trend continues.

We launched the daylights out of Vimeo PRO
Earlier this year we pulled the wraps off Vimeo PRO, a professional-grade video hosting platform. Built for small businesses and commercial use, Vimeo PRO is an enterprise-level platform that gives companies full control over their videos. We kept the price ridiculously low, so companies can spend money on more important things, like upgrading their staplers.

We made Music Store
Adding music to videos became a lot easier this past September when we launched Music Store, a one-stop shop for finding and licensing high-quality music. It's overflowing with 45,000 tracks in diverse categories such as "Partying" and "Breaking Up." We worked hard to make it really affordable, and thousands of tracks are available for exactly zero dollars.

We gave people Perks
In November, we introduced Vimeo Perks – product discounts exclusively for PRO and Plus members. We feel that if people give us money, we should help them save money, so we're using our special connections to arrange sweet deals on cameras, accessories, and more.

We announced the next Vimeo Festival + Awards
Yup, we're doing it again. The 2012 Festival + Awards, taking place next June in New York City, will feature new judges, more categories, and bigger prizes. Submissions are now open, and we can't wait to see what you've shot.

We finally figured out how to accept Paypal
But we still prefer cash left in a briefcase on our doorstep.

We invented new ways to watch Vimeo
People still watch Vimeo primarily on computers, but this year saw a so-called "major uptick" in TV and mobile use. Vimeo is now compatible with a wild array of devices from Apple, Google, Samsung, Roku, Western Digital, and more. If all goes according to plan, you'll be able to watch Vimeo on the insides of your eyeballs by this time next year.

We welcomed videos up to 5GB
Sometimes a really amazing video can take up an amazingly large amount of hard drive space, so we gave Vimeo Plus members the ability to upload videos up to 5GB.

We published our 100th Video School Lesson
And considering we published the very first lesson just over a year ago, that's a lot of lessons in one year – 0.273972 per day, approximately. We covered topics such as storyboarding, scary special effects, crop factor, and something that might come in handy right about now, capturing great holiday videos. We've got lots more lessons coming down the pike, and hopefully at some point we'll show you how to recreate that rad scene from The Matrix.

We grew our team whole bunch
Twelve months ago, Vimeo had just 32 people trotting along in human-sized hamster wheels. Now we've got 60. That's a 94% growth rate! If we keep up this torrid pace, we should overtake India by 2019. If you want to get involved in this population explosion, check out our current job openings.

We planned a bunch of new stuff that we can't tell you about yet
Like REALLY BIG STUFF. You'll know about some of it really soon, and other things a little later. Sorry to be cryptic. We like keeping you on the edge of your armchair.

Okay, now that we've talked about ourselves way too much, let's talk about the reason we've been able to do all this fancy accomplishin' – you. We've been able to achieve all of these things because of your unshakeable commitment, incisive feedback, crazy out-of-the blue ideas, undying enthusiasm, major willingness to share, and of course magical ability to make beautiful, hilarious, truthful videos that we simply can't tear our eyes away from. Thanks for everything you've done for us this year. See you in 2012.