Vimeo has nearly doubled its share price — thanks to AI that actually protects human creativity

The internet is being swallowed by fake videos. Vimeo is doubling-down on real ones.

The video platform — known as YouTube’s ad-free, artist-friendly counterpart — is not playing the generative game. Rather, it’s leveraging artificial intelligence in the name of craftsmanship and creative control.

“We’re trying to make AI more useful to the creator and the viewer,” Philip Moyer, Vimeo’s CEO told NYNext. “Our goal is to cut through the noise, to be the platform of trust.”

The 60-year-old Moyer — who previously spent more than four years at Google, including a stint as the global vice president of artificial intelligence — joined Vimeo in April 2024. At the time, the stock was trading at less than $4 per share. 

Today, some 15 months later, the stock is trading at $7.85 per share.Moyer has the company, which is headquartered near Madison Square Garden, in line for an acquisition by Italian tech firm Bending Spoons.

“We think it’s recognition of a lot of hard work,” Moyer said of the impending deal and Vimeo’s $1.38 billion valuation. Much of the effort has been around AI.

At the company’s ‘Reframe’ event in October, when Moyer announced an industry redefining “ask the library” feature. 

The service allows creators or viewers to search through entire video collections with plain language search queries — “to sort through mountains of content,” Moyer explained. 

“[Previously], the only way to find out what’s inside a video was to watch it end-to-end,” he continued. “Now, the educator has the ability to summarize content quickly or bring up highlights; the marketer can find all old logos across videos; the ask could literally be ‘find me the moments of frowns.’” 

The premise may sound simple, but the backend engineering is not. 

Whereas text can be read line by line, its meaning inferred from words and syntax, video is a constantly shifting tapestry of images, sounds and emotions. Vimeo’s model was trained to process that multimodal interplay, across senses, simultaneously. 

“We have this really deep understanding of what’s going on inside the frames, the sounds, even the unspoken dialogue,” Moyer said. “That’s going to have wide applicability, whether you’re trying to enforce copyrights, to protect yourself or just create better.”

Even though Vimeo isn’t trying to develop a generative model to compete with Open AI’s Sora or Google’s Veo, it is actively advancing its compatibility with them.

Another new feature allows Vimeo users to connect their libraries directly to AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Claude. Users can then type a question into one of those tools — “Find me the 2023 demo video with the red car” — and the AI can instantaneously pull the exact clip from Vimeo’s library.

“What we’re doing is opening up everyone’s videos to an equal playing field,” Moyer said.

Until now, that kind of visibility was largely reserved for YouTube — owned by Google — whose dominance in search has long dictated what the world watches. Vimeo’s approach is the inverse.

Whereas uploading a video to YouTube means handing over a worldwide, royalty-free license — and ceding control to the algorithm that decides who sees it, what plays next and which ads appear beside it — Vimeo keeps creators in charge. Its ad-free, subscription-based model is built around ownership, with creators keeping the rights to their work and dictating where that work lives.  

“That’s one of the big reasons people come to us,” Moyer said. “In a world where there’s too much information, too much distraction, companies want to control the experience of their customers.”

He points to one of the site’s most prominent users, Michaels craft store, which once hosted its tutorials on an ad-driven competitor. There, a customer learning how to weave a basket might finish the video only to be served an ad directing them to Amazon — or, worse, a competitor selling a cheaper version of the same supplies.

Vimeo closes the loop. No competing products, no algorithmic detours. 

“We’re secure,” Moyer said. “We’re trusted.”

In his eyes, that work is becoming ever more vital.

Nearly 38 zettabytes of data — one zettabyte is about one trillion gigabytes and holds the equivalent of 250 billion DVDs — will be added to the internet in 2025. Video will make up roughly 80% of it. The volume is growing too fast for anyone, or anything, to fully grasp.

This story is part of NYNext, an indispensable insider insight into the innovations, moonshots and political chess moves that matter most to NYC’s power players (and those who aspire to be).

To Moyer, Vimeo’s purpose in the AI age is restoring clarity — helping creators, brands, and audiences make sense of an increasingly overwhelming medium without sacrifice.

“We were trusted 20 years ago to hold creators and their authentic content,” Moyer said. “That’s what we want to do in this new era.”

Send NYNext a tip: [email protected]