Lodwick and Klein eventually left by 2009, and IAC implemented a more corporate-focused structure to build out Vimeo's services, with former CEO Anjali Sud having been in place since July 2017.

Vimeo was founded in November 2004 by Connected Ventures, the parent company of the humor-based website CollegeHumor, as a side project of web developers Jake Lodwick and Zach Klein to share and tag short videos with their friends.

[4] The idea for a video-sharing site was inspired after CollegeHumor received a large number of views from a posted video clip of the October 2004 Saturday Night Live show that included Ashlee Simpson's infamous lip-syncing incident.

[4] IAC, owned by Barry Diller, acquired a majority ownership of Connected Ventures in August 2006, as they were drawn by the success of CollegeHumor which was bringing around 6 million visitors a month at the time.

[6] In reviewing the assets of Connected Ventures, IAC discovered the Vimeo property; this came at the same time that Google had purchased YouTube for US$1.65 billion in October 2006.

[4][7] By the start of 2007, IAC had directed Lodwick, Klein, and Andrew Pile to work on Vimeo full time and expand its capabilities.

[5] Lodwick was planning to leave the company near the end of 2007, as he said that IAC's incorporation of business processes hampered their creativity, but was fired a few weeks before that point.

[10] Vimeo began rolling out a major redesign of its site in 2009 aimed to put the user's focus on the video, which ultimately was completed by January 2012.

The new version was aimed to feature the video playback as the central focus of the design, contrasting with the numerous user interface elements that YouTube had within its layout at the time.

[12][13] In December 2014, Vimeo introduced 4K support, though it would only allow downloading due to the low market penetration of 4K displays at the time.

[18] Vimeo acquired VHX, a platform for premium over-the-top subscription video channels, in May 2016, subsequently offering this as a service to its sites customers.

[26] According to Sud, Vimeo saw that the demand for online video services had shifted away from Hollywood productions and media producers and was gaining more traction by large businesses, and just as Vimeo had originally drawn attention from indie filmmakers at its start, they saw an opportunity to help with smaller businesses needed video sharing capabilities but lacking the resources to develop those internally.

[28] Vimeo acquired Magisto, an artificial intelligence (AI)-backed video creation service with over 100 million users, in April 2019.

IAC formally announced plans to spin off Vimeo as a public-owned company in December 2020, with the process expected to close by the second quarter of 2021.

[39] That same November, the company also brought Vimeo Events which allowed users to schedule webinar-type experiences alongside other video content.

[56] Paid subscriber tiers, first introduced in 2008,[57] provide accounts with a larger upload allowance and greater storage capacity.

[31] To further promote Vimeo as a home for professional video support, Vimeo opened a "For Hire" job marketplace in September 2019, allowing companies seeking professional video services to freely post job requests for the site's users to browse and respond to.

[71] As of February 2013, Vimeo accounted for 0.11% of all Internet bandwidth, following far behind its larger competitors, video sharing sites YouTube and Facebook.

In 2019, enterprise customers were Vimeo's fastest-growing segment in terms of revenue according to Glenn Schiffman, IAC's chief financial officer.

[82] In 2020, Vimeo invited previous Staff Picks recipients to create videos about their favorite small business owners and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic as part of its Stories in Place program.

[86][87] Vimeo was blocked in India in December 2014, due to fears that the website was spreading ISIS propaganda through some of its user-made videos.

[89] In January 2019, the Commercial Court of Rome determined that Vimeo's video-hosting platform played an "active role" in copyright infringement and the posting of Italian television programs owned by media conglomerate Mediaset.

After Vimeo declined to remove over 2,000 copyrighted videos at the request of Mediaset, the company was forced to pay $9,700,000 in penalties.

[94] In June 2019, California pastor James Domen, founder of the "ex-gay" ministry Church United, sued Vimeo after the website, in 2018, removed 89 of his videos for violating its content guidelines.

[98] After its acquisition of Magisto, Vimeo was sued in September 2019 for violations of the state of Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA).

The class-action suit alleged that Vimeo, via Magisto's software, had automatically scanned and tracked specific individuals in the videos uploaded through the service, identifying their gender, age, and race, without prior consent as required by BIPA.