Vimeo and Youtube are both video-sharing websites, but there is a key difference between them: who pays the bill.
Video costs a lot of money to host compared to images or text. The website must make revenue somehow to pay for this cost.
On Youtube, the cost is paid with ads. Youtubers, content creators, random users, etc., can upload as many videos as they want, for free, and Youtube will make it available worldwide permanently, but it will place ads on them. The uploader can earn money from these ads. The viewers must view the ads, or they must pay for a Youtube subscription to get rid of the ads.
On Vimeo, the cost is paid by the uploaders. There are no ads on Vimeo, but you can only upload one gigabyte of video for free. Although this isn't much for professional use, you could upload a dozen videos to Vimeo and not go over the quota if they are short, low resolution videos with good compression. If you go above this limit, you must pay for a subscription. Currently, the minimum subscription is 20 dollars per month and gets you 100 gigabytes of video storage. The next tier, at $41 per month, twice the price, gets you 10 times more storage.
Although both websites function as platforms where you can discover videos, there are different incentives for users who upload videos.
On Youtube, uploaders can earn money from ads. This means that the more you upload, the more money you earn. On Vimeo, the more you upload, the more money you have to pay.
Naturally, you can earn money from Vimeo if you can monetize your videos somehow, e.g. you have a sponsor so you add an ad inside the video yourself, or your video generates leads, you sell merch, etc. But you can't just earn money from Vimeo because there are no ads there to monetize viewers. Consequently, there are many kinds of videos that can only be published on Youtube, and never on Vimeo, because uploaders wouldn't be able to monetize the videos themselves, and they depend on Youtube's ads to cover the cost.
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