The technology and media conglomerate IAC has announced that it’ll spin off one of its most popular and lucrative properties, the video site Vimeo, as a separate publicly-traded company. 

The spin-off announcement comes just after Vimeo raised $150 million in outside funding from the investment firms Thrive Capital and GIC at a valuation of $2.75 billion. When Vimeo raised that outside round, rumors were swirling that IAC was looking to spin off the video site, rumors that have now turned up true.

IAC expects to spin off Vimeo as a separate publicly-traded company in the second quarter of next year, a spin-off that’ll make Vimeo the 11th publicly traded company to get spun off from IAC since the tech conglomerate’s start.

The Vimeo spin-off will be pulled through with reclassification of IAC shares, whereby current IAC shareholders will receive a proportionate of newly formed Vimeo shares upon the completion of the spin-off. In preparations for the spin-off, Vimeo will begin filing separately to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

A Vimeo spin-off marks a very successful run for a video site that was acquired in 2006 as part of the comedy content company CollegeHumor. IAC acquired Vimeo in the same year that Google made its landmark acquisition of YouTube and then sought to position Vimeo as a competitor to YouTube.

Although Vimeo didn’t grow anywhere near the scale of YouTube, it carved out a lucrative slice of the video market for itself and is one of the most popular video sites right now. It makes money from streams like storage fees for creators and taking a cut of video subscriptions facilitated through its platform.

Vimeo brought in $75 million in revenue in just the third quarter of this year, up 44% over the past year. Bestowed with a $2.75 billion valuation from its recent funding round, Vimeo could be heading towards an even much higher valuation on the public markets, given the heightened investor interest in technology companies as of late.

Photo: Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud by DLD Conference is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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