Here are 5 reasons why YouTube is a superior platform for creatives to post their video content than Vimeo.

1. Unlimited uploading: YouTube carries no restriction on the amount of video content you can upload. Too often, I found myself having to compromise on my videos due to Vimeo’s arbitrary upload limits. Even with a Vimeo Plus membership, you’re locked down to 5gb of video uploads per week. Some of my longer form videos were 3-4gb each, meaning that if I wanted to upload more than 1 per week I’d have to severely compress them, compromising video quality.

2. Cost: YouTube doesn’t cost you anything in order to upload your content. Vimeo, on the other hand, has a free version but that access only gets you 500mb of space. The paid version of Vimeo, aka Vimeo Plus, gives you 5gb per week but that is going to set you back $59 for a year subscription.

3. Guidelines: Vimeo comes with, in my opinion, absurd community guidelines for the content they will and won’t allow. For example, if you want to post videos about ‘gaming’ you might as well forget it. They explicitly call out in their rules that you can’t post videos of playing video games. Pretty damned arbitrary. Also, their enforcement is very suspect, because one rule is not to post any compilation of television or movie content, but then you find this as one of their “featured videos” which is just that (link: The Apocamix). YouTube has rules of course, but much more open to different types of content that don’t include just boring student film reel projects.

4. Community: YouTube is one of the largest sites on the web, with millions of users. I honestly am not sure how large Vimeo is, but I am guessing their community is more in the thousands. If you want your video to be seen, better to host it on YouTube.

5. Support: You really need to look no further than Vimeo’s support forums to see the numerous reports of Vimeo Plus members not having their content uploaded. As a Vimeo Plus member I had nothing but issues, and while one of the promises of Vimeo Plus is that you cut to the front of the line for your video content to get encoded, I frequently had to wait 3-4 hours per video for the process of encoding to even START. On YouTube your video uploads and is processed almost immediately. What’s even better, as soon as it uploads it is visible to everyone – first at a lower level of quality, then higher as their system full encodes.

As an aside, I’ve had video content uploaded to YouTube which has been flagged for removal for various reasons (e.g. the music playing in the background of one video was from an EMI artist which doesn’t allow YouTube to play it). However, that content was never just “removed” and I was issued a warning and opportunity to remove the music. Vimeo seems to have a policy where if they don’t like your content they’ll just delete it. In my case, they deleted my PAID account and offered no refund.

This was so helpful for me in improving my StarCraft 2 game.

A great dinner at Benihana for my birthday. It was the first time i had lobster that wasnt in some sort of pasta. Was absolutely divine – fanastic. All in all, a lot of birthday wishes and free lunches.