Patreon dumps vids on Vimeo, passes fees through to unsuspecting users

20 points by RNCTX 4 years ago | 6 comments

It seems that unbeknownst to most of its users, since Patreon has allowed creators to post videos they have been dumping those videos on 'pro' level Vimeo accounts rather than hosting the content themselves (as any self-respecting publisher would do).

When Vimeo came calling to look for the payment for excess bandwidth that particularly popular creators used, Patreon just passed the invoice right on through to the content creators, some of whom have been notified that they have a week to pay Vimeo thousands of dollars or have all of their content deleted.

https://twitter.com/hate5six/status/1481500463317012482?s=21

https://www.patreon.com/posts/vimeo-is-holding-61514364

detaro 4 years ago |

Your first link has nothing to do with Patreon.

The second one also doesn't support the "unbeknownst to most of its users", given that they got a vimeo subscription so they could use the feature to upload to Vimeo through Patreon. Patreons documentation is quite clear on that, and you can't use it without setting up and linking a Vimeo account... It's not really surprising Patreon isn't footing the bill for a "upload your videos to vimeo" feature.

So this seems to be basically entirely on Vimeo, except for Patreon not offering their own video solution.

RNCTX 4 years ago | |

Thanks for the detail, as we know people exaggerate on social media and it wasn't clear from the few posts I could find about it whether this was an opt-in or not.

The first post has a mention further down in the tweet thread about that particular creator also getting a ~$3000.00 invoice from Vimeo.

https://twitter.com/hate5six/status/1481511608979533826?s=21

Patreon needs to be a publisher or be a payment processor, but don't charge people for both while only actually doing one or the other.

I suspect a lot of content people have paid for is going to start disappearing next week, it seems that these guys got one-week notices to pay up to Vimeo.

It will be interesting to see what Patreon does then, because your analysis is mistaken in that their hands are not clean here. All the EULAs in the world don't absolve them from charging for a service and then failing to deliver it. By refusing to publish the videos themselves, if Vimeo pulls any of the content down Patreon has opened themselves up for a class action, I would think. The end user subscriber does not have a reason to care about Patreon's subcontracting status, all they would need to know is they paid for content and it did not arrive.

detaro 4 years ago | | |

Patreon isn't subcontracting hosting, the hosting customer of vimeo is clearly the creators and not Patreon. Patreon is as far as I can tell still doing their obligations: collect money, host feeds of posts. That these posts contain references to videos that creators uploaded to vimeo and that have now been taken down is not (legally) their problem.

If Patreon had used Vimeo as a video backend and didn't pay them, that would a problem. But Patreon has very clearly not done that, but merely made it easier for creators to use vimeo videos from the creators accounts in posts. Patreon has no obligation to the subscribers to still provide content that the creator has failed to still make available. That the end-users didn't know how videos end of on the platform doesn't magically create an obligation for Patreon.

Creators might have a better shot if Patreon in any way misled or provided bad information, but from what little I've publicly seen even that seems unlikely. Overall situation sucks quite a bit.

treis 4 years ago |

>we haven’t uploaded a single Channel 5 video directly to Vimeo, we've only uploaded through Patreon’s built-in video feature, so I was confused.

>n addition to that, we actually purchased a ‘Vimeo Pro’ plan in advance, which costs $250/year and supposedly allows us 1 Terabyte of annual storage.

Somethings not adding up here. Why would they purchase a Vimeo Pro plan if they were confused about where their videos were hosted?

RNCTX 4 years ago | |

Indeed. I can deduce from that statement that Patreon probably allows content creators to post to the Vimeo upload API, but all of this is smells incredibly sketchy.