Followers
On the profile. Reads as a body of work somebody chose to keep up with, which is what a client checks.
3 services available
Vimeo has three services here. The audience is different from YouTube's and so is what the numbers are for: a Vimeo page is read by clients and programmers more often than by subscribers. The pages below carry the rate, the minimum and the delivery window that apply right now.
On the profile. Reads as a body of work somebody chose to keep up with, which is what a client checks.
On one video. Approval from a viewer who got to the end, which is the reading a portfolio page needs.
The cheapest of the three. Ordered against the public video link, with nothing installed and no account access.
Vimeo is where a lot of work gets shown rather than where it gets discovered, and that changes what a counter is for.
A view count on a portfolio piece is read by somebody deciding whether to hire you, not by an algorithm deciding whether to recommend you. Vimeo has no feed that works the way YouTube's does.
Followers sit on the profile and read as a body of work somebody has chosen to keep up with.
Likes attach to one video and read as approval from a viewer who finished it. That is the whole mechanism, and nothing here changes what Vimeo shows to anybody.