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CREATOR ECONOMY

Vimeo leaves indie creators out to dry

If you aren’t a video creator, you probably know Vimeo as something of an off-brand YouTube. But if you are a video creator, then you are no doubt aware of the Vimeo drama going down over the past week.

In mid-March, Vimeo began sending out notices telling creators to upgrade to a more expensive plan or leave the platform. One particularly egregious example saw an indie creator’s plan jump from $200/year to $3,500/year based on her bandwidth usage—she had uploaded 117 videos averaging around 115 views each. 

• Over the weekend, Vimeo’s CEO wrote a letter apologizing for the way the company communicated the price increase and announced changes to make its policy more transparent—but she stopped short of actually rolling back the new bandwidth caps and price increases. 

Vimeo is ditching indie creators

Although Vimeo apologized for how it handled the price hikes, the increases are still happening. Many independent creators will actually butt up against that 2TB limit (even with limited views, streaming video uses up a lot of data), which means many of them will be priced out. It’s clear that Vimeo is okay with that. 

• In its 2022 shareholder letter, Vimeo said, “Today we are a technology platform, not a viewing destination. We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”

Vimeo is all in on reshaping its image from indie YouTube → B2B enterprise solution, but it’s ditching one of its core user bases in the process.

Zoom out: Founder, there are certainly lessons to be learned here about pivoting and price increases. Namely, if you are going to change your price, be very transparent about why you are doing it and how it will affect existing users. This pivot may be what is best for the business, but the goodwill Vimeo lost over the past week will be hard to recapture.

PHILANTHROPY

This is crypto’s charitable moment

The Russia-Ukraine conflict has put crypto’s charitable chops squarely in the spotlight. From the official Ukraine Twitter account soliciting donations in crypto to Ukraine DAO popping up to support the war effort, crypto is increasingly becoming an attractive solution for supporting global philanthropic causes. 

Tax benefits certainly play a major role

Instead of selling your crypto and potentially taking up to a 37% capital gains tax hit, if you instead donate your crypto directly you don’t have to pay a capital gains tax at all. 

• “If you are someone who wants to do something charitable, and you have crypto that has appreciated, that appreciated crypto is your most tax-incentivized way to give,” James Duffy, cofounder and CEO of The Giving Block, told TechCrunch. 

NFTs are also becoming powerful mediums for charitable wealth transfer. For example, if a creator includes in a project that 2% of secondary sales go towards a charitable goal of their choosing, then a huge recurring charitable channel has been unlocked. In other words, smart contracts allow for perpetual giving. 

Zoom out: As always, context is needed. Crypto still makes up a tiny portion of the $450 billion philanthropy market and most non-profits still convert the crypto they receive to fiat. Still, the charitable innovations around the Ukraine-Russia war show what the crypto community is capable of when galvanized by a shared goal.

QUICK HITS

Seed round

Stat: Someone found a way to game the ApeCoin airdrop last week to the tune of a cool $1.1 million. Since the airdrop was claimable by anyone who owned an Ape when the airdrop went live, someone took out a flash loan to acquire 5 BAYC just before the airdrop occurred which made them eligible to claim a fat stack of ApeCoin. They then sold the ApeCoin on Uniswap to pay back the loan while walking away with a nice chunk of change in the process. 

Startup: Genome sequencing has changed from a multimillion dollar feat of science to a mundane proces achievable in an afternoon by a single scientist. But one part of the process has been neglected in the race for faster and cheaper sequencing: sample prep. Enter Volta Labs, a startup spun out of MIT’s media lab focusing on creating a programmable approach to DNA sample prep. (More here) 

Rabbit hole: Why aren’t there more dogs at the doctor’s office? (JSTOR)

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON

• Disney announced that it will temporarily close its Shanghai theme park amid a record-breaking COVID-19 surge in the city.

• Porsche’s CEO revealed that the car manufacturer has been discussing a potential collaboration with Apple.

• Fornite developer Epic Games announced that the company will donate two weeks’ worth of the game's proceeds to Ukraine relief efforts.

• Epic made the news again: Fortnite’s new update will remove the battle royale’s signature building feature and add a Doctor Strange tie-in.

• Saudi Aramco announced that it will boost energy production after doubling its profits in 2021.

TRIVIA

Formula 1 kicked off its season on Sunday with the Bahrain Grand Prix. Which team has notched the most race wins in Formula 1 history?

A. McLaren

B. Mercedes

C. Williams

D. Ferrari

MONDAY MUSING

The collapse of college

Do you agree with Sam? Is the US higher education system on the verge of collapse?

Let us know here. 

TIDBITS

🥧 A better way to divide pie. 

🥚 Easter eggs in Google hangout. 

🎸 The photographer who has 3,200 undeveloped film rolls that hold the history of Rock n' Roll

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TRIVIA ANSWER

D - Ferrari. Mercedes has dominated Formula 1 for almost a decade, but Ferrari is the most successful team in the series’ history by a mile. The iconic red cars have racked up 239 race wins—including a victory by driver Charles Leclerc in Bahrain yesterday—since Ferrari entered F1 in 1950