Difference between Youtube and Vimeo
YouTube and Vimeo are two online video based social networking hubs where you can watch, upload (store) and share the videos. Only the registered users are authorized to perform the latter two actions. In addition to these actions, you can also embed videos to your own website or blog. These websites also feature comment walls dedicated to each video where users can articulate their thoughts regarding the video content and read the reviews by other members, and also rate the videos. Besides all these utilities, Youtube and Vimeo also provide the basic social networking framework with features such as user profile pages and ‘add friends’ utility.
Foundation
Vimeo was founded by Zach Klein and Jakob Lodwick and published on the Internet in November, 2004. The website is owned by the InterActiveCorp. It is about a year older than YouTube.
The YouTube was officially launched in November, 2005: six months after its beta release in May, 2005 and 9 months after the domain activation (which happened to be on the Valentine’s Day of the same year!). The website was created by 3 ex-PayPal employees – Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. However after a period of a dozen months, the Google Inc. bought YouTube in exchange of $1.65 billion USD.
Popularity
The number of videos being hosted by Vimeo exceeds the 1 million mark and so does the number of visits per day on the website.
On the other hand, YouTube is by far the most popular video centric website with over 64 million videos and more than 1.2 billion visits everyday! These figures outnumber even its closest competitor – Dailymotion, by a huge margin!
Policies
Vimeo is known for its strong policy for the prevention of copyrights violation. It allows its users to upload only those videos which they've created on their own. Vimeo does not even allow any gaming and commercial videos to be hosted on its servers.
On the contrary, YouTube efforts to prevent the copyrights violation have always dragged YouTube in to the controversies. YouTube has faced a few law suits under allegations that the measures taken by YouTube have been too few to avert the copyrights violation. YouTube is infamous for not reviewing the videos before actually hosting them.
In March 2006, YouTube came up with a policy to prevent unauthorized video uploads. According to the policy, standard account holders could no longer upload videos with a running time of greater than 10 minutes.
Similarities and Differences
YouTube
- It is the most popular video sharing website with over 1.2 billion visits every day.
- Owned by Google Inc and is being currently run as a Google Subsidiary.
- Has remained controversial for its copyrights prevention policies.
Vimeo
- It is one of the earlier video centric websites owned by IAC.
- It does not allow any gaming, commercial or porn stuff to be hosted on its servers. The website also discourages its users from uploading any video content which is not created by them.
