Apart from network effect, and Google's Ad Monopoly, what does YT have that has made it a clear winner in this field? What would a competitor need to take on them?
YouTube is a huge technical achievement that would require billions of dollars to replicate:
1. It consumes nearly unlimited bandwidth.
2. It consumes nearly unlimited CPU for transcoding and serving media at different bitrates.
3. It consumes massive resources to police, from user moderation to appeasing content owners by building systems and databases like ContentID, etc.
4. It generates endless PR and legal headaches, which also costs a lot of money.
5. A huge amount of work has gone into getting users hooked through algorithms that seek to maximize watch time.
6. A huge amount of work has gone into building a network of advertisers who want to pay to put their ads on the platform.
7. And importantly, a huge amount of work has gone into building up an ecosystem of video producers who make their entire living off of YouTube and spend countless hours producing content for them at no cost to YouTube. Obviously YouTube isn't giving out Golden Play Button plaques out of the kindness of their heart. That's marketing.
And despite all this, Youtube almost always works perfectly for almost all users. People click on their phones and the videos just play - all around the world, even while traveling on transit, etc.
There are very few companies who have the resources to attempt to compete with that. Vimeo has obviously given up targeting the same mass market audience. Other competitors without unlimited deep pockets can't seem to make a dent.
It's a lot like asking why doesn't someone just make "a better Google." Unless you have unlimited resources and an unlimited budget, it probably isn't possible. It's smarter to make something else tangental in video that can outcompete Google instead of facing them head on. See: Twitch, TikTok, etc.
you offer a largely technical[0] answer to a business (and a politicoeconomic) problem. this is a common perspective bias of tech-focused folks of all stripes, and leads to incorrect, or at least incomplete, solutions to the problems faced by businesses. some of those technical aspects support youtube's strategy of dominating the online video provider market, but none of them are (even collectively) the reason why youtube dominates. for instance, vimeo has all of those to some degree and doesn't dominate the market.
youtube's strategy (e.g., 'the reason') was to leverage google's resources to undermine the revenue-making opportunities of the whole market so that it could outlast them to domination. it used google's (monopolistic) advantages in search and online advertising, as well as its capital warchest, to effect this strategy. that warchest, for instance, allowed it to offer free hosting/streaming, something that was difficult for smaller players to do. google's dominance in search allowed it to offer premium advertising to youtube videos. google's dominance in online advertising (again, monopolistically) gave youtube an advantage in monetization and targeting.
in short, this wasn't a story of a scrappy competitor overcoming the odds to become the market leader. it was hoarded capital and monopoly advantage being deployed to corner another market. that is, it was an (unprosecuted) anti-trust violation.
[0]: note the broader connotation of 'technical', not limited to just technology
Sounds like PornHub or similar could easily branch into providing a separate service for general videos if they wanted. They already have all this stuff down for the most part.
You're right that Netflix and Pornhub have both been able to replicate this.
IMO, it might be wise for Netflix to start their own YouTube-like service. For example, subscribe to Netflix, get access to user-created videos on a separate app. The best part is that users would then generate content for a fraction of what they currently pay to produce content, and they could have basically what YouTube has, but ad-free.
> Sounds like PornHub or similar could easily branch into providing a separate service for general videos if they wanted. They already have all this stuff down for the most part.
The key part there is "if they wanted."
Any upstart would have to burn who knows how much capital to try and ramp up, hosting videos for free and getting only a tiny fraction of the ad revenue that Google can extract from a video due to their smaller scale. Even if somebody wanted to subsidize this with reserves or VC funding, the endgame is that they're competing directly against Google, and if faced with actual competition Google can always afford to undercut them until they ran out of reserves or VC funding.
Far better for these sites to claim a niche that Google has no interest in and just fly below the radar.
Pornhubs parent-company MindGeek can only be described as shady. [0] As a privately held company, they might also have problems raising the necessary funds for such a large expansion. And of course, there is still a pretty large stigma attached to pornography, so content creators might be a bit shy to associate with them.
[0] MindGeek operates under a complex structure of multiple companies in countries such as the British Virgin Islands, Canada, Curaçao, Cyprus, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mauritius, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.[60][8] Its structure has been described as mostly a way to avoid corporate tax by a de facto Canadian company;[8][3][61] with billing companies in Ireland,[62] subsidiaries in Curaçao and holding ones in Cyprus and Luxembourg, all countries that have been identified as tax havens or having lax tax regulations. Canada also has special tax treaties with Luxembourg, the legal headquarters of MindGeek, where a Canadian subsidiary is exempt from taxes paid on royalties to its Luxembourg parent.[8]
>YouTube is a huge technical achievement that would require billions of dollars to replicate.
YouTube achieved this in 15 years time with the help of Google's enormous resources. YouTube competitor would need to have some innovation that is hard for YouTube to replicate.
Funny enough TikTok was able to replicate YouTube in a few years time but only for short videos so it shows you don't need all that what you mentioned. Innovation is what you need.
Not to downplay the tech, but you could replicate majority of the tech nowadays with proper engineering effort, proper timeline and a budget. YouTube competitor would need to beat them in the business side of things, which is extremely hard, however not unachievable. The company would need to have proper monetization, proper support with proper appeal system and to enable producers to create high quality content without the fear of their accounts being banned. I believe this would be sufficient enough to start making a dent in the YouTube creator base.
"proper engineering effort, proper timeline and a budget"
Like all things? The proper engineering effort is hard to find in such a capacity and a budget to do all of this is overwhelming for most tech companies to attempt where an ROI can be seen within tolerable risk.
It's like saying we could live on mars if we had "proper engineering effort, timeline and budget".
This is the least informative hyperbole I've read on HN. It's a bunch of smoke and mirrors, everything is unlimited, cannot be replicated, forget about it. Let's accept defeat.
I thought HN was the opposite of this - finding ways to upend fat companies from occupying monopoly positions. "Hacker" news.
More reasons to break up Big Tech from a government regulations perspective - The only democratic politician talking about it is Elizabeth Warren. But many are upending large incumbents without gov reg - Stripe ("Increase the GDP of the internet") and Square in payments/ecommerce space. Tesla taking on Big 4. I would like to see a real competitor for Google search. Perhaps Algolia? Their search is incredible on HN.
It's a two-sided coin. It's not a very smart bet to say "I can out-compete a US$182.53 billion revenue company... by doing things that require massive amounts of capital."
Are Stripe, Square, and Tesla not big tech? They have market caps of $95B, $88B, and $1.05T, respectively. And is YouTube not upending the incumbents (TV and traditional media) in the same way that they are?
>And despite all this, Youtube almost always works perfectly for almost all users. People click on their phones and the videos just play - all around the world, even while traveling on transit, etc.
Yes! I find any other video website that is not YouTube to be simply unusable. Don't get me started with Spotify's video player. My thought when I see a website using anything else: just put the damn thing on YouTube! The players suck, the experience suck, everything sucks on other products.
To add to this list, YouTube does an excellent job on its core competency — streaming high quality video without hickups and buffering. I've tried other video streaming services before, and none of them have the reliability as youtube. When I click a youtube video, I know it'll play immediately and throughout the video without buffering or hanging. I don't have the same confidence as other providers.
This actually kind of depresses me, how certain technologies are so entrenched and require so much effort/resources to compete against as to render the entrenched technology as the one and only that we can ever have (for all practical purposes). I feel particulary depressed about this considering how YOUNG the tech industry is, and how stagnant things become when the winners are decided so early.
> Apart from network effect, and Google's Ad Monopoly
This is like asking "why don't we live on the moon except that there is no atmosphere there and it's pretty far away?". Those two reasons are the main reasons Youtube is the clear winner in its field, saying "apart from that" does not make a lot of sense. If you'd want to start a competitor to take on Youtube, you either need to focus on a tiny niche not well served by Youtube (extreme far right or far left personalities perhaps, or porn) or you would need to find a way to match Google money (maybe partner up with FB/Microsoft/Amazon/etc) so you can buy popular creators away from Youtube.
I'm quite confident you'll find Mindgeek/Pornhub has a Youtube-esque unassailable position in that market segment. Unless you're catering to illegal content, but I think you'll find that market isn't the greatest for building a profitable business on.
Pornhub has nothing even close to the kind of monopoly YouTube does. XVideos, XNXX, and xHamster at the very least are similarly gigantic in terms of content. The only thing Pornhub may have is more mindshare, being the more recognizable brand. By contrast, you simply cannot expect to find what you're looking for, or much of it, on YouTube's competitors.
There are dozens of sizeable competitors. And I'm not even sure Mindgeek is the biggest player here, at some point Xvideos was even bigger, even though it was never featured in the news.
my guess is pornhub has been on steep decline since most of their payment processing methods has been removed. I will admit I haven't checked back but last I checked they were essentially crypto only.
> so you can buy popular creators away from Youtube
...and this is also an incredibly hard sell to any upstart, since to creators, reach is usually more important than money.
Source: Worked for one of the last semi-serious local Youtube competitors in our country who tried this strategy and miserably failed, after which the site was effectively shut down and rebranded as a storefront for the TV station that bought it.
TikTok is doing this. Using the same playbook as YT (paying creators for views) and they're creating a unique moat by building great tools for creators. iMovie may have helped YT get started by giving everyone an easy tool for video making, and TT is bringing comparable tools in-house.
They're also avoiding the issue of letting creators get too big and dictating the platform like some think started happening to youtube, because the algo pushes smaller creators and doesn't put focus on who you follow. This really shows their Chinese heritage (CCP wouldn't want individuals to have too much influence without being replaceable).
Also, i've seen some large youtubers or youtube catagories try to band together to make apps/sites that offer that content without YT influence. (eg. some tech reviewers, or some niche content like relaxation videos or meditation guides). If i were more entrepreneurial i'd throw my hat in this space and use Cloudflare's new hosting to lower costs.
Yes TikTok is a serious threat to YouTube because they have solved the chicken-and-egg problem. Most YouTube competitors don't have enough users to be worthwhile for content creators, but TikTok now has billions of users. Currently TikTok is limited to short, popular videos but if they can branch into long-term videos it will kill YouTube
For sure. And I would add that Google bought the network-effect leader at just the right time to put Google's massive ops resources behind it. They basically killed off the competition and then made if very hard for anybody to compete.
this is all accurate and i'd add that it is deceivingly hard to make something that sustains itself via advertising. when youtube was acquired google had a large part of that already figured out.
It does have competitors. IMO, Odysee/LBRY is the most viable one but only time will tell because all the competitors lack some things and have been slow to develop.
The competitors have a hard time gaining traction because in the way many of us would expect because we live in a different world from when YouTube first became a thing.
YouTube in 2005 was way different. You could find just about anything on there. Pranks, home videos, entire TV shows, bumfights, skits, you name it. Mostly young people used it, and back then the youth were a little more "based" than my impression of Gen Z today. I remember older folks like my parents almost universally dismissing YouTube as "a bunch of crap" and how wrong I felt they were. Guess who turned out to be right about the future of information and entertainment!
Today, I'd wager everyone's interacted with YouTube at least once. There is nothing edgy or fringe about YouTube anymore. It's a mainstream media platform saddled with its past that it just can't shake. Without big advertisers and big audiences, it wouldn't be sustainable, thus it has developed to not offend the normies or their political allies.
Many have moved over to other platforms, but they are essentially the same kind of audience and creators that were on YouTube back in the old days. The so-called normies who didn't take YouTube seriously back then are now easily frightened of the dangerous content found on alt-tech. They are unlikely to ever move away from the warm fuzzy feeling only provided by the MSM and Silicon Valley.
Although I desire people be a little less allergic to supposedly dangerous content, can we really blame people for being disinterested or avoidant to YouTube competitors?
Maybe this is the way it should be. Average Joes/Janes/Jaydens will be happy on YouTube and TikTok, and the ends of the bell curve will find their place on smaller platforms that aren't interested in pleasing everyone.
I mean in terms of having lots of the creators I like on it (around 80% I'm guessing), being less likely to become censorious, and isn't a broken piece of crap. I don't give a hoot whether they are an economic competitor.
> The competitors have a hard time gaining traction because in the way many of us would expect because we live in a different world from when YouTube first became a thing.
> Although I desire people be a little less allergic to supposedly dangerous content, can we really blame people for being disinterested or avoidant to YouTube competitors?
My takes on this is that DMCA/copyright laws is huge barrier of scaling. Lots of contents providers (I mean small players) are not comfortable expanding their platform due to copyright laws. It would requires to have a human moderation, legal contact, etc. Content Farms and Media Companies are huge abuser of DMCA takedowns, you can see the effects on YouTube. It is ramparts with legal issues because Google rather to use the bots to deal with the issues and that didn't help. Google allows companies to spam the takedowns with random urls that are not relevant to the contents.
Also public domain contents is another issues as well. There are companies that use DMCA takedown on content that are public domain which allows fair use. Sony Entertainments did this a few times, and they are not the only one doing this blatantly. They can do this because they knows they won't be accountable for it.
There are illegal contents uploaded daily and it have to be taken down which the small players don't have the resources to do so.
There are a lot of legal hurdles that small players need to account for before trying to scale bigger. It comes with risks, some players are not willing to take that risks, even Section 230 offers protections. But it didn't offer protection against companies that are brutal and ruthless with faking DMCA takedowns.
Unquestionably. If you recall, YouTube originally made its mark by having pirated copies of the SNL Lazy Sunday skit floating around, which quickly saw it become recognized it as the place to watch all kinds of pirated TV shows.
Eventually they started enforcing duration limits to quash people uploading entire episodes, but it wasn't until the content ID system was implemented that it started to see that type of content disappear and the 'homemade' stuff take over.
The home videos may have always been there, but it wasn't why people were using the service originally.
It's interesting that TikTok is a formidable competitor that focused on a different experience and a slightly different format (short form). Tiktok seems to work by choosing for you and only showing a single video at a time (esp on mobile, which is where it's really most at home), but allowing you to quickly reject that choice and learning from your rejections.
Is it possible to beat YouTube itself with a different experience but the same, longer-form, format? If so, what would that experience even look like, especially on mobile?
And the reason they are able to do so is because by rejecting a video, you don't see it anymore. On the other hand, if you are given a view of 5 videos on YouTube and you click next, what YouTube should be doing is rejecting all 5 and showing you a new 5. For some reason this doesn't happen on YouTube. When you come back to the frontpage, you see the same videos over and over and over again unless you manually tell YouTube you're not interested.
So it's not the auto-play that's crucial, it's realizing that the user is giving you a signal. YouTube has been ignoring that signal. Perhaps it's a performance issue that makes them unable to?
I think Vimeo was once going after a similar market, but lately they seem to be distancing themselves from individual content creators. Their landing page, for example, describes their offering as "simple tools for any professional, team, and organization to create, manage, and share high-quality videos".
Sometimes I can find stuff in Vimeo that’s not available anywhere else. There was dailymotion, I don’t know about the state of it but back in the day it looked like it might have been a competitor to YouTube, too.
1) Video hosting is very expensive, due to high bandwidth and storage requirements. This is made worse when emulating YouTube, with its "anyone can upload for free, and anyone can view for free" model.
2) YouTube is an entrenched platform with a huge audience and wide reach. This causes a positive feedback loop where creators upload to YouTube because that's where the viewers are, and viewers flock to YouTube because that's where the creators are. This means that any creator that wants to upload elsewhere will struggle to find an audience, and any viewer looking to switch will lack content to view.
This means that few companies have the resources to even attempt to compete with YouTube, and those that do struggle to find consistent users. YouTube certainly has its issues, but there isn't an obvious way for a major competitor to enter the space.
I think the average person generally isn't aware of YouTube alternatives. Alternative video platforms don't seem to be a thing people seek out. In my own experience, I only know about Rumble and Odysee because a content creator I like wanted to mirror their work on other sites in order to avoid having all their eggs in one basket. If it wasn't for that, I probably wouldn't even be aware of these platforms.
Going a step further, people use YouTube like a video search engine. If people want to see a video they type in the terms they are looking for and see the results. They don't search for an alternative platform first, and then enter the keywords on those sites. Perhaps designing a video search engine that looks across multiple platforms would address this?
There is a new "free speech" alternative called Rumble emerging. Rumble for now promises Not to become a censorship platform like YouTube is now currently.
Even though some high profile civil libertarian and free speech advocates like Glenn Greenwald and Zaid Jilani have chosen Rumble as home, YouTube is still lights years ahead. But if they continue to censor, alternative free speech platform will emerge.
The problem with media platforms that market themselves as pro-free-speech is that they attract alt-right content - and their hyper-toxic followers - like a warm pile of shit attracts flies, even if that's not the intent of the platform operators.
I have this idea in my head that most people (users, even platform creators) think "free speech" and they mostly just think "my speech" or "speech I agree with".
Beyond that there are some folks with some free speech ideals but even that devolves into "anything goes" and they turn a blind eye to the results because it is messy / unpleasant.
A lot (but not all) of YouTube's problems would go away if they 1) used the actual DMCA and not their own system that allows for things that would be illegal under the DMCA and 2) stopped being retaliatory (latest example, deleting comments from creators critical of the dislike count removal). But they have a huge hegemony, so there's no incentive whatsoever for those two things to happen.
Cancel culture is hyper-toxic, and that came from far-left advocates.
It's nice to see that something you disagree with strongly, like alt-right content, can be labeled hyper-toxic and not be downvoted into oblivion. It is encouraging that HN as a platform can tolerate a strong opinion without retaliating.
Usually that is the case, and those people are just unnecessarily painful to deal with. Everything is an avenue to bring it back to their pet issue which is that their life sucks because of women, immigrants, brown people, god knows what. But I saw Russell Brand on the front page, and I recall him not being one of those folks so maybe these guys have figured out a way to not get overwhelmed by the annoying folks.
Not to claim that Brand can't be annoying, but he's not alt-right and I can't imagine them both occupying the same space.
Absolutely. I was one of the early members of voat.co (a reddit clone in C#), and never really used it due to a lack of content. Fast forward a few years, and that place became a portal to an alternate universe where Hitler won, slavery is taken for granted, and (he who must not be named) is the American emperor.
The stimulating nature of extremism makes it really hard for a new platform to be pro-"sensible free speech".
They also have removed many leftists as well. My favorite story is an advocate of censorship, the British leftist media group Novara Media, got itself deleted by YouTube. Once there was an uproar on twitter it reinstated them saying it was a mistake:
> Rumble for now promises Not to become a censorship platform like YouTube is now currently.
Which is all fine and good until people start filing copyright claims, lawyering up, withdrawing adverts, and cancelling subscriptions. Not to mention the possibility of governments intervening.
Sooner or later regulation comes, whether that's directly, or indirectly via market pressures.
(Note that this isn't necessarily a bad thing - or a good thing, for that matter - just a thing. An example where it might be seen as more positive for, say, a government intervention to occur is Facebook/Meta. I'm certainly losing patience with Mark Zuckerberg's indifference to the individual and societal damage his platforms are causing.)
99% of the users of any platform don't care. They want to see videos of cats, cartoons they can stick in front of their kids, and how to detach the door clips on a 2007 Camry. While I don't agree with the politics of the typical Rumble or Gettr user, I do believe sites like that are a strong part of a free speech society, but they'll never compete with the likes of Youtube or Twitter.
Bloody hell. That site is blazing fast. I click and it loads instantly. The videos play instantly. It's actually genuinely amazing - though the design looks awful.
Readit News
1. It consumes nearly unlimited bandwidth.
2. It consumes nearly unlimited CPU for transcoding and serving media at different bitrates.
3. It consumes massive resources to police, from user moderation to appeasing content owners by building systems and databases like ContentID, etc.
4. It generates endless PR and legal headaches, which also costs a lot of money.
5. A huge amount of work has gone into getting users hooked through algorithms that seek to maximize watch time.
6. A huge amount of work has gone into building a network of advertisers who want to pay to put their ads on the platform.
7. And importantly, a huge amount of work has gone into building up an ecosystem of video producers who make their entire living off of YouTube and spend countless hours producing content for them at no cost to YouTube. Obviously YouTube isn't giving out Golden Play Button plaques out of the kindness of their heart. That's marketing.
And despite all this, Youtube almost always works perfectly for almost all users. People click on their phones and the videos just play - all around the world, even while traveling on transit, etc.
There are very few companies who have the resources to attempt to compete with that. Vimeo has obviously given up targeting the same mass market audience. Other competitors without unlimited deep pockets can't seem to make a dent.
It's a lot like asking why doesn't someone just make "a better Google." Unless you have unlimited resources and an unlimited budget, it probably isn't possible. It's smarter to make something else tangental in video that can outcompete Google instead of facing them head on. See: Twitch, TikTok, etc.
youtube's strategy (e.g., 'the reason') was to leverage google's resources to undermine the revenue-making opportunities of the whole market so that it could outlast them to domination. it used google's (monopolistic) advantages in search and online advertising, as well as its capital warchest, to effect this strategy. that warchest, for instance, allowed it to offer free hosting/streaming, something that was difficult for smaller players to do. google's dominance in search allowed it to offer premium advertising to youtube videos. google's dominance in online advertising (again, monopolistically) gave youtube an advantage in monetization and targeting.
in short, this wasn't a story of a scrappy competitor overcoming the odds to become the market leader. it was hoarded capital and monopoly advantage being deployed to corner another market. that is, it was an (unprosecuted) anti-trust violation.
[0]: note the broader connotation of 'technical', not limited to just technology
Your side point about it supposedly being an anti-trust violation isn't even a proper answer to the question.
IMO, it might be wise for Netflix to start their own YouTube-like service. For example, subscribe to Netflix, get access to user-created videos on a separate app. The best part is that users would then generate content for a fraction of what they currently pay to produce content, and they could have basically what YouTube has, but ad-free.
The key part there is "if they wanted."
Any upstart would have to burn who knows how much capital to try and ramp up, hosting videos for free and getting only a tiny fraction of the ad revenue that Google can extract from a video due to their smaller scale. Even if somebody wanted to subsidize this with reserves or VC funding, the endgame is that they're competing directly against Google, and if faced with actual competition Google can always afford to undercut them until they ran out of reserves or VC funding.
Far better for these sites to claim a niche that Google has no interest in and just fly below the radar.
[0] MindGeek operates under a complex structure of multiple companies in countries such as the British Virgin Islands, Canada, Curaçao, Cyprus, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mauritius, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.[60][8] Its structure has been described as mostly a way to avoid corporate tax by a de facto Canadian company;[8][3][61] with billing companies in Ireland,[62] subsidiaries in Curaçao and holding ones in Cyprus and Luxembourg, all countries that have been identified as tax havens or having lax tax regulations. Canada also has special tax treaties with Luxembourg, the legal headquarters of MindGeek, where a Canadian subsidiary is exempt from taxes paid on royalties to its Luxembourg parent.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek
Video quality is low.
Video amount should probably be 1000 if not 10000 smaller than yt.
I'm not aware of millions uploading hour and hours of high quality videos to their platform.
I myself only go there for a short period of time.
I know plenty of people who keep streams from yt running in parallel.
YouTube achieved this in 15 years time with the help of Google's enormous resources. YouTube competitor would need to have some innovation that is hard for YouTube to replicate.
Funny enough TikTok was able to replicate YouTube in a few years time but only for short videos so it shows you don't need all that what you mentioned. Innovation is what you need.
Like all things? The proper engineering effort is hard to find in such a capacity and a budget to do all of this is overwhelming for most tech companies to attempt where an ROI can be seen within tolerable risk.
It's like saying we could live on mars if we had "proper engineering effort, timeline and budget".
Isn't this the MO of vimeo? Target higher quality content, and allow pay-per-hosting to avoid ads?
I thought HN was the opposite of this - finding ways to upend fat companies from occupying monopoly positions. "Hacker" news.
More reasons to break up Big Tech from a government regulations perspective - The only democratic politician talking about it is Elizabeth Warren. But many are upending large incumbents without gov reg - Stripe ("Increase the GDP of the internet") and Square in payments/ecommerce space. Tesla taking on Big 4. I would like to see a real competitor for Google search. Perhaps Algolia? Their search is incredible on HN.
Yes! I find any other video website that is not YouTube to be simply unusable. Don't get me started with Spotify's video player. My thought when I see a website using anything else: just put the damn thing on YouTube! The players suck, the experience suck, everything sucks on other products.
Dead Comment
This is like asking "why don't we live on the moon except that there is no atmosphere there and it's pretty far away?". Those two reasons are the main reasons Youtube is the clear winner in its field, saying "apart from that" does not make a lot of sense. If you'd want to start a competitor to take on Youtube, you either need to focus on a tiny niche not well served by Youtube (extreme far right or far left personalities perhaps, or porn) or you would need to find a way to match Google money (maybe partner up with FB/Microsoft/Amazon/etc) so you can buy popular creators away from Youtube.
Other niches are history videos and music analysis videos, the former which gets demonetized and the latter receives copyright strikes with abandon.
Many history channels are on Armchair History TV: https://armchairhistory.tv/content-creators/
Adam Neely (music analysis) is on Nebula: https://nebula.app/
I'm quite confident you'll find Mindgeek/Pornhub has a Youtube-esque unassailable position in that market segment. Unless you're catering to illegal content, but I think you'll find that market isn't the greatest for building a profitable business on.
...and this is also an incredibly hard sell to any upstart, since to creators, reach is usually more important than money.
Source: Worked for one of the last semi-serious local Youtube competitors in our country who tried this strategy and miserably failed, after which the site was effectively shut down and rebranded as a storefront for the TV station that bought it.
TikTok is doing this. Using the same playbook as YT (paying creators for views) and they're creating a unique moat by building great tools for creators. iMovie may have helped YT get started by giving everyone an easy tool for video making, and TT is bringing comparable tools in-house.
They're also avoiding the issue of letting creators get too big and dictating the platform like some think started happening to youtube, because the algo pushes smaller creators and doesn't put focus on who you follow. This really shows their Chinese heritage (CCP wouldn't want individuals to have too much influence without being replaceable).
Also, i've seen some large youtubers or youtube catagories try to band together to make apps/sites that offer that content without YT influence. (eg. some tech reviewers, or some niche content like relaxation videos or meditation guides). If i were more entrepreneurial i'd throw my hat in this space and use Cloudflare's new hosting to lower costs.
Dead Comment
The competitors have a hard time gaining traction because in the way many of us would expect because we live in a different world from when YouTube first became a thing.
YouTube in 2005 was way different. You could find just about anything on there. Pranks, home videos, entire TV shows, bumfights, skits, you name it. Mostly young people used it, and back then the youth were a little more "based" than my impression of Gen Z today. I remember older folks like my parents almost universally dismissing YouTube as "a bunch of crap" and how wrong I felt they were. Guess who turned out to be right about the future of information and entertainment!
Today, I'd wager everyone's interacted with YouTube at least once. There is nothing edgy or fringe about YouTube anymore. It's a mainstream media platform saddled with its past that it just can't shake. Without big advertisers and big audiences, it wouldn't be sustainable, thus it has developed to not offend the normies or their political allies.
Many have moved over to other platforms, but they are essentially the same kind of audience and creators that were on YouTube back in the old days. The so-called normies who didn't take YouTube seriously back then are now easily frightened of the dangerous content found on alt-tech. They are unlikely to ever move away from the warm fuzzy feeling only provided by the MSM and Silicon Valley.
Although I desire people be a little less allergic to supposedly dangerous content, can we really blame people for being disinterested or avoidant to YouTube competitors?
Maybe this is the way it should be. Average Joes/Janes/Jaydens will be happy on YouTube and TikTok, and the ends of the bell curve will find their place on smaller platforms that aren't interested in pleasing everyone.
As a competitor? It's not even a bug on their radar...
It's like waiting for Mastodon to replace Facebook and co...
> Although I desire people be a little less allergic to supposedly dangerous content, can we really blame people for being disinterested or avoidant to YouTube competitors?
My takes on this is that DMCA/copyright laws is huge barrier of scaling. Lots of contents providers (I mean small players) are not comfortable expanding their platform due to copyright laws. It would requires to have a human moderation, legal contact, etc. Content Farms and Media Companies are huge abuser of DMCA takedowns, you can see the effects on YouTube. It is ramparts with legal issues because Google rather to use the bots to deal with the issues and that didn't help. Google allows companies to spam the takedowns with random urls that are not relevant to the contents.
Also public domain contents is another issues as well. There are companies that use DMCA takedown on content that are public domain which allows fair use. Sony Entertainments did this a few times, and they are not the only one doing this blatantly. They can do this because they knows they won't be accountable for it.
There are illegal contents uploaded daily and it have to be taken down which the small players don't have the resources to do so.
There are a lot of legal hurdles that small players need to account for before trying to scale bigger. It comes with risks, some players are not willing to take that risks, even Section 230 offers protections. But it didn't offer protection against companies that are brutal and ruthless with faking DMCA takedowns.
I had not heard of Odysee/LBRY, so thanks for the tip.
LiveLeak was a bit too extreme for me, personally, though I am glad it existed, puzzled to see it go. Anything replace it?
Vimeo is nice for finding avant-garde or art videos.
There are curated, paid services for films like Mubi, Shudder and NoBudge.
I always thought the point was to make it easy for anyone to publish an original video? (And then to make it easy for anyone to watch the video.)
Unquestionably. If you recall, YouTube originally made its mark by having pirated copies of the SNL Lazy Sunday skit floating around, which quickly saw it become recognized it as the place to watch all kinds of pirated TV shows.
Eventually they started enforcing duration limits to quash people uploading entire episodes, but it wasn't until the content ID system was implemented that it started to see that type of content disappear and the 'homemade' stuff take over.
The home videos may have always been there, but it wasn't why people were using the service originally.
Is it possible to beat YouTube itself with a different experience but the same, longer-form, format? If so, what would that experience even look like, especially on mobile?
So it's not the auto-play that's crucial, it's realizing that the user is giving you a signal. YouTube has been ignoring that signal. Perhaps it's a performance issue that makes them unable to?
Maybe focus on content longer than the YouTube average , like courses and documentaries and in depth video podcasts?
To be a serious alternative you’d need apps for Apple TV, Android TV, Roku plus iOS and Android and a solid desktop browser.
2) YouTube is an entrenched platform with a huge audience and wide reach. This causes a positive feedback loop where creators upload to YouTube because that's where the viewers are, and viewers flock to YouTube because that's where the creators are. This means that any creator that wants to upload elsewhere will struggle to find an audience, and any viewer looking to switch will lack content to view.
This means that few companies have the resources to even attempt to compete with YouTube, and those that do struggle to find consistent users. YouTube certainly has its issues, but there isn't an obvious way for a major competitor to enter the space.
Going a step further, people use YouTube like a video search engine. If people want to see a video they type in the terms they are looking for and see the results. They don't search for an alternative platform first, and then enter the keywords on those sites. Perhaps designing a video search engine that looks across multiple platforms would address this?
https://rumble.com/
Even though some high profile civil libertarian and free speech advocates like Glenn Greenwald and Zaid Jilani have chosen Rumble as home, YouTube is still lights years ahead. But if they continue to censor, alternative free speech platform will emerge.
Beyond that there are some folks with some free speech ideals but even that devolves into "anything goes" and they turn a blind eye to the results because it is messy / unpleasant.
It's nice to see that something you disagree with strongly, like alt-right content, can be labeled hyper-toxic and not be downvoted into oblivion. It is encouraging that HN as a platform can tolerate a strong opinion without retaliating.
...but at the same time anyone who deviates from progressive orthodoxy in any way will be labeled alt-right.
So in addition to the hyper-toxic folks, you will get people looking for a platform allowing debate and a broad range of ideas.
Not to claim that Brand can't be annoying, but he's not alt-right and I can't imagine them both occupying the same space.
The stimulating nature of extremism makes it really hard for a new platform to be pro-"sensible free speech".
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59052155
Censorship advocates always get hit by the divine justice boomerang.
Which is all fine and good until people start filing copyright claims, lawyering up, withdrawing adverts, and cancelling subscriptions. Not to mention the possibility of governments intervening.
Sooner or later regulation comes, whether that's directly, or indirectly via market pressures.
(Note that this isn't necessarily a bad thing - or a good thing, for that matter - just a thing. An example where it might be seen as more positive for, say, a government intervention to occur is Facebook/Meta. I'm certainly losing patience with Mark Zuckerberg's indifference to the individual and societal damage his platforms are causing.)
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