Cards, End Screens, and Email Capture: Vimeo Adds New Business Features

Recognizing that most video views happen on mobile, Vimeo continues to target mobile monetization and interaction for its creators with customizable cards, end screens, and email capture. You'll recognize some of these features that have already existed on other video platforms for years, but it's safe to anticipate that Vimeo's implementation will be above average. Whereas end screens can feel like random clutter on places like YouTube or Brightcove, being able to fully customize your viewers' next click is a welcome feature.

Trading an email addresses for views can be a transaction of utmost importance if you're looking to broaden your base.

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The most important of these features for independent filmmakers is likely the email capture, as trading email addresses for views can be a transaction of utmost importance if you're looking to broaden your base. With the addition of the three new features, you'll also be able to track impressions, click rates and engagement data (most likely geolocation info) for each.

Straight from Vimeo's press release, the new features include:

• Cards: A customizable, notification-style layer that Business members can set to appear at any point during playback, that provides relevant information or link viewers to a custom destination. Available on embedded videos, cards come in a sleek design that appears native to the video experience and are optimized for both iOS and Android viewing.
• End screens: New end screens offer eight ways to customize what appears after the video, from clickable background images to a customized thumbnail, to call to action buttons.
• Capture viewers’ emails before, during, or after: Business members can now set their email capture field to appear before, during, or after their video, with the option to withhold their video behind the email capture field. Captured emails can be seamlessly imported into email marketing services like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, and Constant Contact.

These features are ostensibly intended to make your video content feel more integrated and full (end screens) instead of a collection of disparate elements spread across the Vimeo platform, which is ideal for existing Business subscribers or anyone managing something more than just your single-user channel. With more ways to interact with your viewers (cards) and communicate with them (email capture), we'll probably see more companies and organizations investing in Vimeo's premium subscription tier. However, at $50/month, it's still too steep for most single-user creators to take advantage of these new features. Hopefully, these features will eventually trickle down to the Pro tier ($17/month) so independent filmmakers and freelancers can get in on the action.