Vimeo is holding our Patreon catalogue hostage (an explanation) (Patreon)

Hey guys -- so long story short, Vimeo is essentially holding our Patreon catalog hostage and unless we pay $16,200 to them, our account will be deactivated and the majority of the videos on this page will disappear. 

Let me explain ... 

Some of you may noticed that two days ago, nearly every single video disappeared from our Patreon feed. Because we were out shooting a documentary in the mountains of California, we didn’t even realize this had happened until we logged back into our computers 24 hours later, which was yesterday morning.

This was a true nightmare morning. Not only would none of our videos open, but we received over 200+ pissesd off messages and lost 500+ patrons as a result of this. Some people even canceled their lifetime memberships. A few people thought that our plan was to rack up as many Patreon subs as possible, then ditch the platform entirely to start up a subscription elsewhere, like on MembersOnly or OnlyFans.

This is the furthest thing from the truth. We are extremely grateful for your support and have been on the road, working overtime to create a bunch of new documentaries that I'm really stoked to announce, as well as putting the finishing touches on our movie with Abso Lately. 

Anyways, back to the morning I noticed everything was gone —

In a panic, I first called my contact at the Patreon support team, who was extremely helpful at breaking this all down. My contact explained that the issue was not directly with Patreon, but with Patreon’s embedded beta video uploader, which for some reason, had been using Vimeo as its hosting platform.

My Patreon contact told me that in order to truly get to the bottom of this, I'd have to get through to someone at Vimeo. I tried to log into my Vimeo account, but I was locked out, so I reached out to Vimeo's automated support line and sent out a bunch of SOS's to my limited rolodex of connections in the tech world, and finally, was able to make a contact with Vimeo's Senior Account Executive. 

My Vimeo contact told me that all of my videos had been removed from Patreon because I’d exceeded Vimeo’s ‘bandwidth limit’ (image 1). Bear in mind, 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. Not to mention, the Patreon-exclusive videos we release through only get a couple thousand views per video, which is nothing compared to our view counts on larger platforms like YouTube and Instagram. 

In 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. So far, combining every channel 5 video, we have yet to exceed 250GB, even a quarter of the storage limit that we pay for. 

We were asked to send our company info (Image 2), then after contesting with Vimeo for a while, I was referred to a ‘compliance team,’ who gave me an ultimatum (image 3):

Pay Vimeo between $8,000-$9000 a year, or our account will be deactivated and all videos hosted through Vimeo will be gone. Their figure for a 2 year plan is $16,500…

Vimeo is a big company. I'm sure there's something in the terms of service fine print that covers this type of shady business practice, but we were completely blindsided by it. It's not creator friendly, and we think Vimeo is making a huge mistake by what feels like retroactively demanding massive sums of money with absolutely no end in sight.

This is a really shitty situation. While on one hand, I obviously want to boss up and just move on, I’m scared all of the videos on this page will be gone and more patrons will think we’re somehow scamming them. I still have all the high-quality video files from all my Patreon/Vimeo uploads, but I'd rather not have to re-upload anything as well. The best part of posting a video on Patreon has always been reading your guys' comments, and deleting and re-uploading the videos would not only erase them, but also spam your inboxes with content you've already seen.

Realistically, we're probably going to have to pay Vimeo's ransom next week. 

Just wanted to fill you guys in on this current situation regarding Vimeo and explain things to any Patrons who may have thought we were running a racket. 

Love Y'all,

Andrew, Nic and Evan