Initial growth from CollegeHumor (2004–2009)[edit]

Vimeo was founded in November 2004 by Connected Ventures, the parent company of the humor-based website CollegeHumor, as a side project of web developers Jake Lodwick and Zach Klein to share and tag short videos with their friends. The idea for a video-sharing site was inspired after CollegeHumor received a large number of views from a posted video clip of the October 2004 Saturday Night Live show that included Ashlee Simpson‘s infamous lip-syncing incident. The name Vimeo was created by Lodwick as a play on the words video and me. As CollegeHumor was drawing in audiences, Vimeo was put to the side while Lodwick and Klein focused on supporting the main CollegeHumor site. Vimeo’s user base grew only by a small amount during the next few years principally by word-of-mouth.

IAC, owned by Barry Diller, acquired a majority ownership of Connected Ventures in August 2006, as they were drawn by the success of CollegeHumor which was bringing around 6 million visitors a month at the time. In reviewing the assets of Connected Ventures, IAC discovered the Vimeo property; this came at the same time that Google had purchased YouTube for US$1.65 billion in October 2006. By the start of 2007, IAC had directed Lodwick, Klein, and Andrew Pile to work on Vimeo full time and expand its capabilities. To differentiate themselves from YouTube and other video sharing sites that had appeared since Google’s purchase, Vimeo was focused on the content creator with better upload tools, and better curation of content on the site rather than on popularity. By October 2007, Vimeo was the first video sharing site to offer high-definition content to users via Flash-based high-definition video playback. While IAC’s acquisition of Connected Ventures helped to target Vimeo’s direction, the corporate nature of IAC created issues with many of the original staff of CollegeHumor and Vimeo. Lodwick was planning to leave the company near the end of 2007, as he said that IAC’s incorporation of business processes hampered their creativity, but was fired a few weeks before that point. Klein left the company in early 2008.

Developing high-definition content delivery (2009–2017)[edit]

Vimeo began rolling out a major redesign of its site in 2009 aimed to put the user’s focus on the video, which ultimately was completed by January 2012. The new version was aimed to feature the video playback as the central focus of the design, contrasting with the numerous user interface elements that YouTube had within its layout at the time. From 2008 to 2014, Vimeo had blocked the hosting of video game-related videos as they typically were longer than their normal content and took much of the site’s resources. Vimeo did allow machinima videos with a narrative structure. The ban was lifted by October 2014.

In December 2014, Vimeo introduced 4K support, though it would only allow downloading due to the low market penetration of 4K displays at the time. Streaming of 4K content launched the following year, along with adaptive bitrate streaming support. In March 2017, Vimeo introduced 360-degree video support, including support for virtual reality platforms and smartphones, stereoscopic video, and an online video series providing guidance on filming and producing 360-degree videos.

Support for high-dynamic-range video up to 8k was added in 2017, and AV1 encoding in June 2019.

Transition to a software provider (2016–2019)[edit]

Vimeo acquired VHX, a platform for premium over-the-top subscription video channels, in May 2016, subsequently offering this as a service to its sites customers.

Vimeo acquired the existing service Livestream in September 2017 to bolster its associated staff and technology, eventually integrated its streaming technology as Vimeo Live, another service offering for its service subscribers as Vimeo OTT.

Around 2016, Vimeo had expressed its intentions to enter into the subscription video-on-demand market with its own original programming, with the intent of spending “tens of millions” on content to populate the service as to compete with services like Netflix. According to IAC CEO Joey Levin, some of the original programming would have been from content creators already on Vimeo, paid for their material to be used on the service, thus reducing their own costs in producing content in comparison to Netflix. However, by June 2017, Vimeo had scrapped this plan, recognizing that not only that they were far behind Netflix and others in this area but that they also had generally had far fewer potential viewers and that their ultimate goal, converting those viewers into customers of the site, would be difficult. To support this change of approach, Vimeo named Anjali Sud, a general manager and senior vice president who joined Vimeo in 2014, as its new CEO in July 2017.Sud knew they did not have the financial resources to compete with Netflix in terms of creating original content.

On this move, Vimeo decided to focus more heavily on supporting its content creators and customers, transitioning itself away from being simply a content-hosting or video-sharing website and move into the software as a service model. According to Sud, Vimeo saw that the demand for online video services had shifted away from Hollywood productions and media producers and was gaining more traction by large businesses, and just as Vimeo had originally drawn attention from indie filmmakers at its start, they saw an opportunity to help with smaller businesses needed video sharing capabilities but lacking the resources to develop those internally. The company introduced a number of tiers and services aimed for business use atop their existing services. Vimeo no longer considered itself a competitor to YouTube or other video-sharing sites, and instead called itself “the Switzerland for creators”, according to Sud. Creators were allowed to copy and share their videos to any other video-sharing site as long as they continued to use Vimeo’s video editing tools for preparing their creations. In early 2017, Vimeo released collaborative review tools for its users, allowing them to privately share to other users to get feedback tied to individual frames of the video, thus keeping the video creation workflow entirely within the Vimeo service.

Vimeo acquired Magisto, an artificial intelligence (AI)-backed video creation service with over 100 million users, in April 2019. While the deal’s terms were not disclosed, the purchase was reportedly valued at $200 million. Through the acquisition, Magisto’s staff were brought into Vimeo, and their existing userbase gained access to Vimeo’s toolset. For Vimeo, they saw Magisto’s technology helpful for smaller businesses that may not have the funds or skills to product professional videos and could be aided by Magisto’s technology. By February 2020, Vimeo launched Vimeo Create, the integration of Magisto’s tools into the Vimeo platform to let its users easy create videos guided by AI agents from stock video footage offered by Vimeo and the users’ own sources.

Transition to a standalone public company (2020–present)[edit]

In November 2020, spurred by growth in Vimeo’s services due to the COVID-19 pandemic, IAC raised US$150 million for Vimeo in anticipation of spinning off the subsidiary as its own company, giving Vimeo a US$2.75 billion valuation. IAC formally announced plans to spin off Vimeo as a public-owned company in December 2020, with the process expected to close by the second quarter of 2021. Vimeo would become the 11th company spun-out from IAC following this. Another round of investment in January 2021 brought an additional US$300 million, raising its total valuation to an estimated US$5 billion. Vimeo’s shareholders agreed to going public on May 14, 2021.^[36] The company was fully spun out as its own entity on May 25, 2021, and started trading on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol VMEO.

In November 2021, Vimeo acquired Wirewax, a suite of interactive video tools, and Wibbitz, an AI-based video creation platform. Vimeo demonstrated the incorporation of Wirewax’s interactive tools through a new monthly “Video Matters” video series showing the best videos on the platform.That same November, the company also brought Vimeo Events which allowed users to schedule webinar-type experiences alongside other video content.

In March 2022, Vimeo announced that it would begin limiting bandwidth to all users to 2 terabytes per month, a rate they estimate would affect only 1% of all its users. Just prior to this change, users of Vimeo had reported they had been approached to purchase higher tier accounts, but Vimeo apologized for this approach, and felt it was better to set the flat bandwidth rate. Going over this rate would not affect any videos the user had on the service, and they would work with users to offer tiered options or to help transition off Vimeo to other services if that was their choice. In 2020 Vimeo also launched video chapters.

In January 2023, Vimeo laid off 11% of its employees. On 27 June 2023, Vimeo ended support for its smart TV apps on Apple TV, Android TV, Fire TV, and Roku TV. Vimeo encourages Android and iOS viewers to cast the Vimeo app to a smart TV instead. Paid Vimeo subscribers with an eligible plan can continue to create and update custom-branded Fire TV and Roku TV apps.

Vimeo added a new suite of AI powered tools to its software in June 2023, including a script generator, on-camera teleprompter, and an editing option to automatically remove pauses and filler-words