Vimeo Has Fallen: Video Giant Eviscerated by Bending Spoons

The latest round of job losses and massive cuts at video platform Vimeo implemented by serial asset stripper Bending Spoons leave it a shadow of its former self.

Hard to believe that Vimeo was once considered a serious contender to YouTube. And even when that dream faded as Google money flooded in to its rival, it was still considered a credible alternative by the creative community that offered something different. Now in the latest round of job cuts it has been absolutely filleted by Italian private equity firm Bending Spoons.

Sundance 2026 is in full swing at the moment. Once upon a time this would have been a central part of the Vimeo business. Indeed, it was the official sponsor of the Short Film Program. This year, nothing. The company might state on its front page that it is "Trusted by 287+ million creatives, marketers, and businesses", but you can bet that is a cumulative total based on its storied past, not its recent one with Bending Spoons.

Modus Operandi

Bending Spoons acquired Vimeo for $1.38bn in September 2025, and has been following its usual modus operandi of cutting costs and maximising revenue ever since. That typically means mass layoffs, pivots to increased subscription prices, lack of meaningful updates, and more. It did the same with Filmic, is doing the same with WeTransfer, and has the process well underway at web-clipping service Evernote. Last year it also bought Eventbrite and AOL.

Last week's round of redundancies at Vimeo though seem to have been particularly brutal. This is now the second round of layoffs. 10% were immediately ejected in September, and sifting through the various LinkedIn posts from what are now ex-staff members it seems that the majority of the remaining workforce has now been let go. Words like 'gigantic' are being used to describe the number of redundancies. It seems, for instance, that the entire video team is now looking for new roles.

Accelerated Demise

In an emailed statement to Gizmodo, Bending Spoons says it "remains committed to growing Vimeo to meet the needs of its diverse user base.” We'll see if that happens, but we'd venture that probably just means just adding more generic AI content creation tools at high cost.

The sad thing is that if Vimeo had made a few different decisions in the past few years it would never have become a weakened target for acquisition in the first place.

The masters thesis on all this is Matt Johnson's excellent recent video essay The Rise and Fall Of Vimeo: How It Lost The Filmmakers Who Built It. You can watch it below (and it certainly is worth 25 minutes of your time), but the basic thrust is that the company made a series of missteps that snowballed in latter years. 

In 2017, Vimeo gave up competing with YouTube and moved towards a SaaS model focused on hosting, review tools, and creator services. At the same time, stricter copyright enforcement initiated by the music industry retroactively targeted old videos, resulting in mass account deletions and the loss of long-standing users. Increased hosting limits and higher costs further pushed creators away.

And although Vimeo briefly benefited from pandemic-era growth and went public in 2021, bandwidth caps, layoffs, the removal of TV apps, and mounting reliability issues accelerated its decline. Then along came Bending Spoons.

"This is how it ends," concludes Johnson. "Not with a sudden shutdown of the website, but with a slow stutter of playback, failing to buffer before it pauses forever.

 “This is the death of Vimeo.”

It's becoming increasingly hard to disagree.