Vimeo offers four membership options: Plus, PRO, and Business, Premium, ranging in price from $7 – $75 (as of January 2021). Each has different levels of storage and support. Vimeo also offers a basic, free membership, but it limits you to 500MB maximum storage per week.

Alternately, you can create a YouTube channel for free and create and upload a YouTube video with unlimited storage without charge. YouTube focuses on making money with their advertising, not monthly or yearly payment plans like Vimeo.

But here’s the thing: your video (if viewed on YouTube) will be surrounded by ads and suggested videos at the end, both on the website and within the video player. Vimeo is ad free as they make their money through membership. So you won’t see one playing before, during, or after your video.

YouTube tends to compress the videos you upload to the site for easier storage and access which tends to slightly diminish the quality of the video. While this has a negligible effect to most viewers, it is still a factor to be considered when uploading to YouTube. However, YouTube’s algorithms and codecs generally do a great job of providing the best quality possible within a certain size.

Since Vimeo has restrictions on their upload quantity and size, their Plus, Pro, and Business subscribers will enjoy videos with apparently higher quality. The same video uploaded to both YouTube and Vimeo will be higher quality on Vimeo.

It is important to emphasise that there are plenty of examples of high end art dealers and galleries who choose YouTube for its other advantages and whose videos still look great.

According to recent research, 70% of YouTube videos are watched on mobile devices (smart phones and tablets) anyway, making the quality difference negligible.

If you need to change your video after you have uploaded it, Vimeo allows you to replace a video without losing that video’s stats. However, YouTube does not allow you to do this, forcing you to delete your video (and the associated statistics) and rue-load it as a new video.

Both YouTube and Vimeo offer useful analytics for your video that can be extremely helpful when determining who is watching your video and how they are viewing it.

If you are uploading a video for a select audience, privacy may be important to you. Vimeo offers password protection, allowing you to share the video with a select group of collectors or other individuals and don’t want anyone else to find it while surfing the net.

YouTube, on the other hand, allows three options; public, unlisted and private. Unlisted means only those with the link can view it, while private means only those you invite with an active YouTube account can view it.

The first question you should ask yourself is who is your audience? This is important because YouTube and Vimeo have different communities of users.

YouTube’s community is large, with over 1 billion users who watch hundreds of millions of hours of content every day.

Vimeo has a much smaller community, with about 200 million users.

Vimeo’s community is generally very supportive, and has many users that offer more constructive feedback than you may find on YouTube.

Opinions vary on the advantages and disadvantages of each platform and I hope that this post will clarify that the differences are subtle and possibly not terribly relevant for what you are trying to achieve.

If you are one of those people who isn’t a fan of Google, I totally understand and you may wish to shy away from YouTube (which is owned by Google) and try Vimeo.

However, I would suggest that having made a significant investment in your time as well as the cost of producing the beautiful film that you have made, you want as many people to find it and view it as possible, not just to win awards for presentation and cinematography (although you no doubt deserve both).

By making it easy to be found, you are succeeding at communicating your passion for and knowledge of your subject and hopefully finding new homes for some of your artworks as well.  Because YouTube is owned by Google, your video is more likely to be found by people wishing to find out more about (insert the subject of your video here) if it is on YouTube as opposed to Vimeo (or any off the other video sharing platforms of which YouTube and Vimeo are just two of many).

Some people feel that there is a privacy issue in getting found in the Google search engine results, but unless you want to go off grid altogether, this is inevitable – just search for “the name of your gallery or business” in Google, and you will see what I mean.

However, you are certainly not jeopardising the privacy of your audience by presenting your video on YouTube. Viewers don’t even have to sign in if they don’t want to.

In my view there is a big difference between allowing yourself to be found easily (which is what marketing / optimising for Google and YouTube and even the design of your website is all about) and “aggressive marketing” or hard selling which suggests spamming with unsolicited ads and email etc.

You can even normally switch off suggested videos at the end of your video, removing one of the biggest objections that may people have.

From a quality perspective, although some people would argue that the quality of Vimeo is higher than YouTube, I would argue that any quality benefits are marginal, especially when given that most people view videos on their mobile phone or tablet and certainly not on a professional grade, colour-balanced monitor (as might be the case for advertising agencies, for instance).