Vimeo Founder: Browbeating and the Quest for Quality

Zachary Klein (College Humor, Busted Tees and Vimeo co-founder)

Zachary Klein is a start-up genius. I’m not exaggerating. I’m simply stating a fact.

Zach is one of the founders behind College Humor, Vimeo and BustedTees, and he’s been extremely successful with all three companies. I had the opportunity to chat with him about how he’s championed the creation of new media channels by focusing on the generation of quality content.

If you’re building a new media channel today, you really need to focus on nurturing the kind of content you expect will make the channel successful. That’s exactly what Zach’s done and it works.

The market opportunity

Zach noticed an opportunity early on in YouTube’s evolution.

“YouTube trained a massive population of people to record, upload and then consume video online. So with Vimeo, we wanted to take it to the next step. We wanted people to realize that they are inherently creative and that there is more to online video than ripping an episode of Mad Men from your DVR and putting it on YouTube.”

YouTube is full of copyright-infringed video. But Zach also noticed that YouTube users tended to be aggressive and negative. They were skeptical and sometimes downright mean. For Zach, and millions of today’s Vimeo users, that’s not a great environment for being creative or sharing personal videos.

Zach also felt that the extreme lack of an “uplifting” design on YouTube didn’t help matters much.

YouTube & The Vandalized Car

Vandalized Car (Courtesy of Flickr Urbanwide)

Zach points to a now famous sociology experiment often referenced by former New York Chief of Police William Bratton. In the experiment, originally published in 1982 in an Atlantic Monthly article, a Harvard sociology professor put an abandoned car on a Palo Alto, California street. For days, nothing happened to the car. After a few days the professor broke one of the vehicle’s windows.

“Almost instantly, vandals stripped the car down to its frame.” (Boston Globe, June 16, 1996).

This sociology experiment is not unlike what happened on YouTube. Put up one illegal video and before you know it there are thousands of them. Trash talk, swear, or denigrate a video in the comments section and suddenly everyone else is doing the same thing. In effect, YouTube has become a vandalized car — stripped down to its frame by hundreds of thousands of aggressive vandals. Before you know it, the whole neighborhood is affected.

Quality matters on Vimeo

Even on their website, Vimeo makes it clear from the outset that quality and community are the core principles:

“Allow your videos to shine with the best video quality and the most versatile player on the web … Vimeo’s respectful atmosphere lets your creativity thrive as you connect with people from all over the world.” — Vimeo.com Homepage

Zach and his team have worked tirelessly to ensure that the user community understands that there is no room for negative commenting. They’ve pushed hard to ensure that only legal, high-quality content is uploaded and that their user base should help police the ‘neighborhood.’ In essence, if you see a vandalized car, call the Vimeo police. We’ll take care of it before it’s stripped down to the frame.

As Zach says, “we’ve beat our users over the head with blunt objects consistently. We remove content that doesn’t meet our principles of being original content.”

As far as production values go, very few (if any) other communities of Vimeo’s size can claim an aggregate quality standard that’s as high as you’ll find on Vimeo. Zach says he can’t take much of the credit for that. “Today’s generation of producers has access to ubiquitous, affordable, high-quality video production equipment, and HD video that’s exceptionally beautiful is becoming the norm. We’ve seen that with our user base on Vimeo.”

Today, Vimeo’s new users learn by example. According to Mr. Klein, “that conditioning has taken place over years and years, and it’s now so embedded in our DNA that I think new users quickly grab it and follow suit.”

What can a start-up learn from Zach?

If you’re building a new media channel, make sure you’re policing your community like Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton. If you see even a broken car window, tow the car and make an example of it in the community. You’ll foster a higher-quality, self-policing community that takes pride in its neighborhood.

If you focus just on driving traffic and eyeballs, you let your community turn into a hotbed for vandals and illegal content. You’ll have millions of users and no loyal fan base. Traffic volume isn’t the end-all-be-all of a valuable start-up.

In the future, investors and suitors who want to acquire new companies will be looking for communities where the member base is loyal, active, and committed. So while you’re building your audience, make sure you focus on monitoring its quality. Help shape your community — just like Zach Klein. You’ll be glad you did.

About the author

Andrew Davis -

In 2002, Andrew founded Tippingpoint Labs with journalist James Cosco. Since then, he's spent countless hours exploring the online universe and building a methodological approach to developing digital strategies that drive revenue or reduce costs.

Andrew's always asking big questions and analyzing data to understand markets, online forces and even business models. Andrew's research has resulted in the creation of innovative online metrics including Online Brand Value and Category Brand Value, eye-opening graphical representations of website evolution through the New Media Life Cycle and even using online data to predict offline revenue.

When he's not surfing the web, Andrew's traveling the globe speaking to a wide-variety of audiences about everything from social media to the future of print. Andrew is a frequent contributor to the Tippingpoint Labs website and has been creating valuable content since the early 1990s for The Jim Henson Company, CNN, The Today Show and MTV.

He's contributed to a book of short stories, called The Way Things Were and produced and co-wrote Roadside Ambition a documentary film about one small town with two huge balls.

"In a world where content is consumed as rapidly as it's created, companies need to develop a sound strategy to creating valuable online experiences that can, and should, be leveraged enterprise-wide. There is a content solution to every business challenge."