[ad name=”postsqrRight”]After YouTube launched its redesigned website at the beginning of December, Vimeo has now followed suit to take the battle to its famous rival.
The Google-owned YouTube site has been designed to encourage users to stay on the site for longer by promoting ‘channels’, a series of videos and clips chosen by a celebrity or user. The new site will also encourage users to share their ‘likes’ or ‘dislikes’ with their social network by integrating closely with Facebook.
Vimeo aims to take on its rival by improving the ‘discoverability’ on its site. Vimeo’s redesign, its first since 2007, has invested heavily in improving how users can find content. An enhanced newsfeed will also allow visitors to track specific words, or themes, similar to Facebook.
A key feature of the new Vimeo site is that it does not feature adverts on the video, unlike YouTube. Instead, Vimeo aims to put videos at the heart of its site reaffirming the sites original mission: ‘Vimeo was created by filmmakers and video creators who wanted to share their creative work, along with intimate personal moments of their everyday life.’
The site took Vimeo over a year to build and new employees were recruited specifically into web design jobs to help with the redesign. Marketwatch explains, ‘Vimeo rebuilt the site from the ground up using current programming languages and open web standards to deliver optimized site performance and easier, faster browsing. The cleaner code base allows for more rapid development so the team can release site updates and new features in less time’.
The website will have a battle on its hands, however, if it is going to seriously take on YouTube. The success of YouTube goes from strength to strength. Launched just 7 years ago this month, 60 hours of video is uploaded every minute to YouTube with a phenomenal four billion videos being watched every day worldwide.
Many businesses are keen to piggy back on the success of YouTube and engage its audience. From recruitment companies advertising IT jobs, to the launch of new makeup products, YouTube videos are key to many marketing campaigns.
Vimeo, however, is keen to stress its credentials as the ‘Freemium’ video sharing site and it is reluctant to being as commercial as YouTube. It remains to be seen if its more romantic approach does increase its number of views and achieve its Chief Executive’s aim of ‘meeting the needs of users both today and tomorrow’.
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