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Vimeo preps first UK ad drive for High Maintenance series as it looks to own space between Netflix and YouTube

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By Natalie Mortimer, N/A

February 5, 2015 | 3 min read

Vimeo will kick off its first UK marketing drive for its original web series High Maintenance next week as it looks to dominate the space between “the mass of YouTube and the high-walled garden of Hollywood studio content”.

A series of poster ads will appear in five London Tube stations to promote the remaining three episodes of High Maintenance which go live on Vimeo today (5 February). The series, which launched last November marked the first time the video-sharing site had invested in original content. It has since begun investing in a string of strategic video partnerships announced at the start of 2015, as part of plans to ramp up its original content output.

Speaking to The Drum Vimeo's general manager of audience networks Greg Clayman said the next few months will see it roll out more content.

“Content is a big part of what we have been developing. At one end of the spectrum you’ve got Netflix and iTunes, and that’s Hollywood content, and then at the other end of the spectrum you’ve got YouTube, which is everything under the sun.

“There’s high quality videos and then there’s also the proverbial dogs on skateboards. In the middle, between the mass of YouTube and between the high-walled garden of Hollywood studio content, there is a tremendous amount of high quality premium video and that’s where we play,” he said.

In January Vimeo launched the Vimeo On Demand Publisher Network with distribution partners including CBS, The Atlantic and Metacritic, to allow viewers to rent or buy titles directly on a partner’s site.

It has also teamed with Indiegogo to invest up to a million US dollars into funding films on the crowdfunding site and the deal designates Vimeo as a preferred distribution platform for films funded on Indiegogo.

Meanwhile Vimeo is snapping at heels of YouTube after cutting a deal with Disney-owned Maker Studios to provide tools to Maker’s network of 55,000 YouTube creators for distributing their content on Vimeo’s paid video-on-demand platform.

Clayman said the deal allows content creators to monetise work in addition to the ad-supported model on YouTube.

“The thing about YouTube and Facebook is that it’s still very much a broad scaled ad- supported model, which is great and there is need for that, [but] for us it’s more about premium content and paid content and our ability to distribute that store front on line.”

“There are a lot of people who have a huge amount of YouTube subscribers or Twitter followers and would like to make content that they need budget for, so we are working with the Maker team to co-fund and create original series.”

The posters for High Maintenance will appear at Covent Garden, Leicester Square, Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus and Tottenham Court Road stations.

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