Rippers Weekly Recap 11/4

Hey everyone, it’s @StockMKTNewz Evan!

I spend 70 hours every week looking for news so you don't have to. That causes me to tweet a lot which can be hard to keep up with. Having somewhere to put all the major stories in 1 easy to view place is really valuable, and that's why I make this newsletter!

How The Stock Market Performed This Past Week

All images in this section are sourced from finviz.com 

Heat Map of the S&P 500

How The Largest Stocks Performed

Best Performing Large Cap Stocks

Worst Performing Large Cap Stocks

This Week's Major Headlines

The Story Of Vimeo: From College Humor to Cutting-Edge Video Tech 📈💳

In the early 2000s, CollegeHumor was exploding onto college campuses across the country. The site, filled with comedic sketches, articles, and images, was gaining traction among university students and internet surfers. It was amidst this environment in 2004 that Vimeo $VMEO was conceived by Jake Lodwick and Zach Klein, two of CollegeHumor's co-founders.

Initially, Vimeo was imagined as a personal video sharing service, a space where users could share short clips without the constraints of mainstream platforms. While most credit YouTube for allowing consumers to view and share videos seamlessly on the internet, Vimeo was actually the first platform to offer embedded videos.

However, as time progressed, the potential of Vimeo being a social video sharing site stalled, and YouTube was acquired by Google in 2006, making it hard to penetrate the market further without a large backer or access to capital.

This sparked a shift at Vimeo in terms of the business model and how consumers interacted with the platform. Vimeo distinguished itself from competitors with an ad-free model, emphasis on quality, and tools that catered to video professionals creating and hosting content.

This distinct positioning attracted a different kind of audience—filmmakers, artists, and content creators seeking a more curated environment to showcase and host their work.

Soon after, Connected Ventures, the company behind CollegeHumor and Vimeo, was acquired by online media giant InterActiveCorp $IAC for an undisclosed amount. Vimeo now had the financial backing, recruiting power and prestige to expand its software to the masses.

Beyond product, Vimeo nurtured a strong sense of community. The site became a haven for indie filmmakers, animators, and artists, launching features like "Staff Picks" which highlighted the best short films on the internet and offered creators a coveted spotlight.

Vimeo also launched a paid subscription tier and began to offer additional weekly uploads, unlimited HD videos, and priority encoding, among other features to entice power users to begin paying for the platform.

Over the next decade, YouTube continued to eat market share in the video sharing space from Vimeo, prompting another shift to the business model and the company.

Shifting away from acting as just a video discovery platform, Vimeo launched Vimeo On Demand in 2013, allowing creators to sell their works directly to their audiences. This direct-to-fan distribution model further empowered creators, providing them with more control over their content and monetization methods. The company also gave filmmakers a $10,000 advance to make and sell movies on the platform.

The plan was to drum up support from the Vimeo community to create content for the platform and operate the site as a Netflix-like independent content studio, driven by their most loyal fans. In just four years though, the company realized that Netflix had a first-mover advantage and access to seemingly unlimited capital.

They cut their losses and continued to go deeper with creators and independent filmmakers by launching a business tier subscription in 2016 followed by an enterprise tier soon after.

The model transformed Vimeo from a content studio and subscription revenue mix to a pure SaaS business serving independent content creators all the way up to Fortune 500 brands (and even the White House) to edit, stream, host, and share video content.

Want the full story? Follow @TickerHistory for more on Vimeo and other stock stories!

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