an essay by Sean Buckelew
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The top of the Vimeo homepage on October 31st, 2018
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Extremely popular on YouTube, but not the kind of animation I’m talking about.
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David Firth has more problems with YouTube than most, despite being one of the most popular animators on the platform.
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Carl Burton’s test — creating a new YouTube account, and only following links for high brow film content (in this case, a video showing the first three minutes of Federico Fellini’s “8 1/2”, the YouTube algorithm suggests mostly relevant recommendations, but can’t help but slip in one clickbait video with a Jimmy Kimmel thumbnail.
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![](https://cdn.myportfolio.com/aa13cb40e1f87c7b72d9f82d3e09764a/f0396d68-ca76-4fe7-8948-0c96e7344c9d_rw_1920.png?h=dcef2167382cc1901f7c9a15dca9697a)
the Vimeo house at SXSW, celebrating 10 years of Staff Picks. This reminded me how powerful this culture of independent filmmaking could be, and made me desire a world where Vimeo’s marketing efforts would exclusively emphasize filmmakers and films on a large scale.
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My extremely informal research into whether my highly biased twitter followers would pay to watch an animated short online. Lots of questions spiraled out of this, and twitter isn’t a great place for meaningful follow up.
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A discussion on Twitter about what a new video platform might look like.
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