By Laharee Chatterjee and Pushkala Aripaka
(Reuters) - IAC/Interactive Corp's video hosting service Vimeo is targeting 1 million in paid subscribers and more than $100 million in revenue in about a year, its chief executive officer said in an interview.
Vimeo, which offers cloud-based video hosting, editing and sharing tools to individuals and business customers, had 873,000 paid subscribers at the end of the fourth quarter, up 14 percent from a year earlier.
"(Hitting 1 million subscribers) is a near-term goal for us and ideally we should be able to hit that goal in a year or so," IAC CEO Joey Levin told Reuters.
"Vimeo is probably the biggest non-public opportunity inside of IAC right now."
Levin, however, said the company was not looking for an initial public offering for Vimeo at the moment. "(We would) love to have it in position to be ready for that in the future," he said.
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The video sharing service is worth about $1 billion, according to at least three analysts.
Vimeo's parent IAC, controlled by media mogul Barry Diller, is known for spinning off businesses performing well under its umbrella.
IAC's spun-off companies include Expedia Inc, HSN shopping network, Ticketmaster box office service and mortgage service LendingTree. It also spun off Match Group, owner of the popular Tinder dating app, in 2015.
Levin said the company has no plans to spin off Tinder into a separate company.
Vimeo has 70 million total users, far behind YouTube's more than 1 billion. But analysts say Vimeo is attractive to professionals and business customers mainly for its ad-free platform and online video editing tools.
More than half of the Vimeo's revenue comes from business customers, Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud said. IAC does not break out revenue for Vimeo.
"I think the company has identified an addressable market of about $15 billion (for Vimeo)," Cowen and Co analyst John Blackledge said. "It kind of sits in between a Netflix and a YouTube."
With four packages ranging from a free basic service to a $50 per month business package, analysts say the service is cheaper than offerings from Brightcove Inc and Walt Disney Co's Bamtech.
"You're going to see a lot of new tools coming from us that help creators distribute and monetize on multiple destinations directly from within Vimeo," Sud said.
(Reporting by Laharee Chatterjee and Pushkala Aripaka in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)