Decoder with Nilay Patel
Vimeo CEO Philip Moyer is betting on the human touch — and AI
Mon, 24 Feb 2025
Vimeo started many years ago as something of an artsier, more creative competitor to YouTube. Its last CEO, Anjali Sud, took the company through a pretty huge transformation into an enterprise software company, and we had her on the show to talk about that transformation a couple years ago. Now, her successor, new CEO Philip Moyer, not only has to decide what parts of that strategy are working, but also how to navigate the addition of AI to the mix, and deal with the basic math of the creator economy: The amount of video in the world is exploding, but the total amount of time a person can spend watching any of it is pretty fixed. So with AI adding to the volume, how is anyone going to be able to make any money at all? Links: How Anjali Sud reinvented Vimeo | Decoder (2021) How Dropout is taking control with Vimeo OTT | Vimeo Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena on making a website in 2023 | Decoder Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami on why the web isn’t dying | Decoder NBCU’s streaming chief isn’t worried about you canceling cable | Decoder Vimeo names new CMO as it focuses on business video | WSJ The truth about Vimeo and YouTube SEO | Vimeo Google’s counteroffer to a breakup is unbundling Android apps | Verge China opens Google antitrust probe in retaliation to tariffs | Verge Vimeo’s position on AI | Vimeo Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/616820 Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Vimeo CEO Philip Moyer. You probably know Vimeo from its beginnings as an artier, more creative competitor to YouTube.
Chapter 2: How has Vimeo transformed from its early days?
But over the last few years, and especially after it went public in 2021, Vimeo has really turned itself into an enterprise software company, selling video hosting services to companies of all sizes. I gotta tell you, I was pretty excited to talk to Philip, because this episode is a particularly fun full-circle decoder moment.
I interviewed Philip's predecessor, Anjali Sood, both when she was CEO of Vimeo, and again more recently in her new gig as CEO of Tubi. So I had a sense of how Anjali ran Vimeo, what strategies she took to Tubi, and then it was fascinating to close the loop and see how Philip wanted to change Vimeo after taking over himself.
Especially because the entire ecosystem of online video is itself changing incredibly rapidly. You'll hear Philip be very complimentary of what Anjali accomplished at Vimeo, but now he's pushing to make Vimeo grow into a very different kind of YouTube competitor, one that can support everything from independent creators to huge corporations.
It's a shift from the strategy that Anjali used to reset the company and take it public, and there's a lot of interesting nuance to it. It turns out everyone wants to put videos on the internet, but only some of those people want them to be ingested by YouTube's advertising and recommendation systems. What's interesting about this is that Philip has experience at Google.
He worked at Google Cloud. In fact, he has experience at a lot of places. He's worked at Amazon and Microsoft as well. And he's deep in the weeds on both the tech and the business. You'll hear us talk about Google and YouTube in particular quite a bit in this one.
But we also get into TikTok and what it means that the incentives of algorithmic video platforms have drastically influenced both creators worldwide and the culture we all consume. Of course, we also talked about AI, which is upending every platform in different ways. Vimeo markets itself now as an AI-powered video platform.
So I wanted to know how Philip is thinking about Vimeo's history as a creator-focused platform, its present as an alternative to the YouTube algorithms, and how all of that collides with the pitfalls of AI-generated video.
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Chapter 3: What is Philip Moyer's vision for Vimeo?
A lot of creators and a lot of consumers do not like AI-generated content, but there's still a place for these tools to make some parts of the video process easier, and Philip and I talked a lot about where those lines might be.
I also asked Philip about a pretty simple supply and demand math problem I've been wrestling with recently, one that seems like it will change the creator economy drastically in the years to come.
If the total amount of video on the internet explodes because of AI, while the total amount of time we can spend watching that video remains relatively fixed, well, how is anyone going to make any money at all? This is a fun one. You can tell that Philip and I could have kept going for a long time. Okay, Vimeo CEO Philip Moyer, here we go. Philip Moyer, you are the CEO of Vimeo.
Welcome to Decoder.
Thank you, Neil. Hey, it's great to be here.
I am very excited to talk to you. I got to tell you, just structurally, this is one of the very first truly full circle decoder episodes because we had your predecessor, Anjali, on as CEO of Vimeo. And then we had her on in her new job as CEO of Tubi. And now we have you on as her replacement. It's full circle.
It's full circle for a show that's about structure and decision making and organizational culture. This is as good as it gets for me. So thank you so much for joining us.
That's fantastic. I have a lot of respect for Anjali and have to say a big thank you to her for all she built here. So it's wonderful to hear.
Yeah, I'm very curious. Anjali, when we talked about Vimeo, when she was there, she was in the middle of executing a big pivot, right? People know Vimeo is what it started as, a consumer video service, kind of the artier competitor to YouTube. She pivoted it to a SaaS business. She was very open. This is now a SaaS company. We're doing a lot of enterprise work.
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Chapter 4: How is Vimeo addressing AI and video creation?
In some cases, some of these filmmakers that come to us, they have audiences that are bigger that they might get on one of those platforms. And so we're finding people want to go direct. Our streaming businesses like that, you know, when you post on some of these big platforms, I really encourage people to look at the terms of service of the big major consumer-based video platforms.
It says in their terms of service, they're able to monetize your content any way they want to. They can reuse your content. You know, they can serve the content. And quite frankly, they're capturing 45 cents for every dollar, you know, in that process. And so a lot of these organizations want to be able to bypass that, those kind of economics and those kind of that IP.
So is that you building a consumer interface? You're saying it's only a small percentage that's coming to Vimeo.com. Where are they finding audience? Is it all on their own websites? Is it in other people's platforms? Where is that audience actually going?
You know, it's been interesting because there is just this trend among streamers in particular, where they'll go to the large platforms, they'll get some following, and then when they want to be able to serve premium content,
That's where they'll come over and say, you know, we want to put a spot, we want to be able to put a gate in front of this, this content, or they might may want to go live or, and they may want to go asynchronous. And so they'll come to us and say, look, you know, we want to be able to have a common library so that people can see past live events. Plus they want to be able to serve new content.
In some cases, we're getting some organizations that want to do more interactive. So like clickable videos, as an example. And so it's a whole variety of creators that are kind of saying, look, we might not want to adhere to the requirements or the, let's call it the compliance requirements or the economic requirements or the IP requirements of the big platforms.
Give us an environment that we can control ourself. And that environment lives on their websites. Exactly. Look, I'll give you an example. Sidemen is a great example of a group. They're one of the biggest followerships over in the UK. They sold out Wembley Stadium in like two hours.
And they famously played a soccer match where when a yellow card was shown, one of the Sidemen held up an Uno Reversi card to the ref and it blew up the internet over in the UK. They serve on Vimeo. They have both content that they put on a YouTube or they put on Instagram, but then some of their more extended content they actually put on Vimeo.
And then that library lives on us as well, you know, for a lot of things. Dropouts is a great example of that. Try Guys is a great example of that. Zeus Networks, Martha Stewart, where they want a little bit more control, you know, over the content and they want control over the monetization more so than what the traditional platforms give you.
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Chapter 5: Why is Vimeo focusing on professional creators?
And so I would tell you, that's probably the thing that we're seeing spike the most in terms of like consumption, like the traditional mobile stuff is going to be there and it's going to be constant. I think it's kind of almost like growing at the speed of, you know, just I'll call them mobile phones basically.
But like, I'm actually surprised about how many people are coming to us asking us for 4k.
What do you think that is? I look at the broader industry and you see the big streamers are pushing everybody to basically 1080p with ads. That's sort of the default for Macs or Netflix. And then you've got to pay extra for 4K. Are you seeing that demand in the same way they do, which is people will pay extra for it? Or are you seeing that demand as this is now the understood industry norm?
It may be the place that we sit in the industry. you know, as I mentioned at the top of our talk was that people have always come to us for quality, you know, and so it may just be that because we actually are, you know, we've been known for quality, we've been known for the quality of our transcoding, the quality of our stream, the quality of the serve that we do.
It may just be that people are not finding that kind of support elsewhere and coming to us for it. But I would just say, I think that people are experimenting with those formats. I've been
pleasantly surprised with the sheer number of people that have come to us since we've launched the Apple vision pro and are coming to us with really interesting film projects to do 8k per eye, you know, stitching all the camera work together. So there's also some like really interesting stuff. And you'll see us talk a lot about this at South by Southwest about what we think.
I'm seeing some good excitement in those 8K formats as well, is all I'll say. But it might just be the position that we sit in the industry.
It's so interesting to see the rest of the industry basically insist that consumers don't care about 4K. You and I are talking... two days before the Super Bowl, and for all of Fox's talk about 4K, they're still producing that in 1080p and then upscaling it.
And it's kind of fascinating to see the consumer side of the market land at one sort of standard quality level, while you're saying the enterprise of the market, the more discerning part of the market, is now not just assuming that 4K will exist, but that you will support 8K per eye, 36 frames per second in the Vision Pro.
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Chapter 6: What structural changes has Philip Moyer implemented at Vimeo?
And so that self-service leader is really now single threaded leader. And we just, you know, we had as well a single-threaded leader around our streaming business. And we really started seeing, you know, some of the results from that internally inside of the company. So giving single-threaded leadership, I will tell you, it is talked about a lot.
But, oh, my God, it's beautiful to actually be able to call up somebody that owns the number, that owns the resources, that worries about it as much as you do, like every single day.
Single-threaded leadership is an Amazon concept. You've worked at all the companies, so I can pick out where the concepts come from. It's pretty fun for me. That's a classic Amazon concept. You need to have a pretty small team that owns a thing, and there's a leader who's responsible for the whole stack. That is how you get silos.
You can look at Amazon's product and say, oh, there's a bunch of single-threaded leaders here. This is not necessarily cohesive. Everything is running as fast as it can, but the holistic vision of the Amazon product suffers for it. right at scale at the end of that. You started out talking about having too many silos and we're talking about single-threaded leaders.
How are you managing that tension?
I was asked one time to give a talk on what it was like to work because, you know, at Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, you know, I got an opportunity to work directly with Gates and Vollmer, directly with Jassy, and then certainly with Thomas Curry and Sundar.
One of the most important lessons I learned very early on, you know, at Microsoft was around having, like really establishing a strong single sentence vision for the entire company. about what we're trying to do in the future. And, you know, you wake up every single morning and I mean, I was there in the early days when the vision was a PC on every desktop in every home.
Now that was like extraordinary at the time. Now we have a PC in every pocket at this point, but we all knew that what we were trying to do was unlock information for the world by putting this powerful computing device in someone's hands. And so regardless of the divisions or otherwise, it all feathered into a common vision.
And it was a lot of what I had to do when I was, when I got here was I owed, you know, the company a strong agreement among everybody in the company of what we're trying to build. You know, are we trying to build the best live stream product? Are we trying to build the best marketing platform? Are we trying to build just a product for filmmakers?
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