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Vimeo Inc. benefited during the pandemic as more companies turned to its video-software offerings as a way to keep their businesses running smoothly, and its chief executive sees opportunities for continued momentum even as the world reopens.
Whereas the COVID-19 crisis also drove greater demand for technology like video-conferencing software, Vimeo
VMEO,
Chief Executive Anjali Sud said that Vimeo’s situation is different because the company’s suite of services offers something new and distinct.
“You had markets that were already there,” Sud said at Barron’s “Investing in Tech” conference Wednesday. “We’re looking to create a market that was never there.”
Vimeo, which has spent about three weeks as a stand-alone public company after spinning out of IAC/InterActiveCorp.
IAC,
in late May, makes tools aimed at businesses looking to create, store, share, and manage video content. The company’s technology includes live-streaming capabilities, as well as a mobile app that lets businesses make videos in a few minutes while taking advantage of artificial intelligence and a library of stock footage.
See also: How Vimeo dropped its fight with YouTube and turned ad-free videos into a real business
“Every business that has a website or social-media account… should be using video, and most don’t,” Sud said. Vimeo is targeting both large businesses that could employ video across marketing, human-resources, and other teams, as well as smaller operations like mom-and-pop laundromats that could leverage video for increased customer engagement.
“I’m excited to have multiple growth levers in this market,” Sud said. With enterprise businesses, Vimeo is focused on growing its average revenue per user, while with small- and medium-sized businesses, the company sees a volume play as this group is “where you have the vast majority of businesses in the world who are not using video.”
The company expects faster growth on the enterprise side in the near term, according to Sud, since the pandemic “significantly accelerated a lot of the demand we always expected would come.” Looking farther out, she sees broader potential: “We believe it should be any business of any size regardless of budget or expertise.”
Engagement with the Vimeo platform has “settled at an elevated new normal,” Sud continued.
Asked about competition from Adobe Systems Inc. and others, Sud said that the company doesn’t have a “one-on-one” direct competitor ,”that has the full suite we offer,” calling out Vimeo’s video-creation app, livestreaming functions, embeddable browser, and other functions. Other tools may help people create music videos or documentaries, she noted, but Vimeo is “helping you make a 15-second Instagram Story for your business, and then do that every day going forward.”
Still, Sud expects competition in this area to heat up given that video remains “way, way, way too hard” but said that Vimeo is working to “take the lead we have and increase the distance through innovation.”
The company recently disclosed that its May revenue rose 42% from a year earlier while the subscriber base and average revenue per user each increased 18%.
