Marco.org

(via tapenoisediary, dalas verdugo)

The Vimeo staff has decided that we are no longer going to allow gaming videos on Vimeo. Specifically, we are no longer going to allow game walk-throughs, game strategy videos, depictions of player vs player battles, raids, fraps, or any other video gaming videos that simply depict individuals playing a video game. Videos falling into this category will be subject to deletion as of September 1st; new videos of this type will be removed.”

Excellent move. Nearly every other major video site (except YouTube, I believe) has made the same decision, and none have regretted it.

Not every user and not all content has value to a service. It’s perfectly OK — and, in fact, recommended — to turn away users whose presence will be an overall problem.

This is the same question we faced last summer when a few thousand organized affiliate marketers realized that Tumblr ranked well in Google and was easy to use: they all created spammy accounts linking to paid ebooks and affiliate junk, then they spammed Reddit, d.el…ic.i.ou.s, and Digg with their Tumblr links. We decided very quickly (it was even a Saturday) that we did not want this sort of use on Tumblr, and we banned this sort of use.

This greatly angered the organized affiliate-marketing community, who said things very similar to what I’m seeing in this Vimeo comment thread:

What your basically saying is that you dont want Vimeo to expand.

your upsetting, and officialy losing about 40% of users.

“Tumblr is turning away 50,000 users!”

(They thought they were bigger than they were and we were smaller than we were. They represented about 3,500 accounts.)

It’s as if vimeo are completely trying to alienate anyone who is interested in sharing computer game videos.

“Tumblr should thank us for bringing them so many users! They need us!”

The only reason i joined this site was to share my game videos.

“I only use Tumblr to tell people how to become a wedding planner by buying these ebooks!”

One of your reasons for not having game footage is to stop copyright issues from the game makers, yet you are still allowing Machinima films to be uploaded which contain footage from the very same games!?! Ban all game videos or allow them all.

“You allow AdSense! What’s the difference between someone putting ads on their tumblelog and my 16 accounts about various types of diet childhood ADHD smoking remedies, each of which links to my other helpful pages on Clickbank, Hubpages, and Squidoo full of paid ebooks and MLM schemes?”

i have a 14 minute skate video that i made with some friends… it took us MONTHS to get it done.

“I spent all day writing valuable content on how to find erectile dysfunction in your ex-girlfriend’s mystery shopper! I want my content back!”

It’s the same game.

Keeping affiliate marketers would have strongly hurt Tumblr’s PageRank and reputation, and any *.tumblr.com domain would likely be blocked by every social news tool. It was a no-brainer: we had to prohibit a small subset of use to avoid hurting _everyone_ else.

Similarly, keeping the gamer videos on Vimeo clutters up the site and puts an unfair burden on the infrastructure, contributing to longer transcode times and slower download speeds for the more desirable or “correct” users.

The affiliate marketers were only loud for a few days, then they moved elsewhere. (Blogspot, I think.) We had absolutely no long-term negative effects.

Vimeo absolutely made the right decision here, and I suspect any flak from gamers will die down quickly.