I doubt there will ever be an alternative to YouTube. "Disrupting" YouTube is difficult because the social conditions that created YouTube do not exist anymore.
Before you get into cdns, bandwidth, advertisers, and social features, you need to have content - and a steady flow of content. What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.
Any new competitor eventually runs into the fact that
* Your largest users eventually stop posting if you don't pay them (because they can go elsewhere after using your platform as a springboard: see Vine)
* In order to actually pay creators you need to have the capital, legal, and advertising side completely figured out.
So on top of building a giant cdn, you need gobs of money to pay people to stay on your platform, and another gob of money because you will be sued to death (especially because once you start paying people, people will cheat, and pirate content).
All this means is YouTube has an incredible moat. If YouTube dies, I doubt there will ever be a replacement.
I love YouTube, so many things to learn. But their recent push to just ignore people capable of speaking two or more languages with their auto-translated bullshit and no way to turn it off makes me use YouTube way less.
It’s a bummer that nobody there seems to realize this. They only see a very dumb metric. Probably something like "did this German dude watch at least one Spanish videos, because we auto-translate titles and voice". It feels disrespectful.
"to just ignore people capable of speaking two or more languages"
I'm terribly annoyed by this, and even more so with their latest push to translate the titles, so now you have to click and listen in on the video in order to know which the original language is.
I speak 3 languages, and I want the title and voice to be in the original language. And I won't bother nor would settle with watching an AI translated video even if it is translated from a language which I do not understand. Then I simply do not want to see that video.
I speak at least 3 languages at a native level.
Google's autotranslate 80% of the time selects a language I'm not just unfamiliar with, but can't even read due to the writing system difference (i.e. sudden arabic appears).
Considering I'm using it with an account that is about 20 years old now, that gave Google all of the permissions in the world and has all the possible data one might need to make the conclusions on which language I prefer, it is absolutely absurd that it cannot make a solid guess.
Go into your Google account settings, under General, then add any languages that you watch YouTube videos in. I did this for Spanish and all my Spanish videos stopped getting dubs and translated titles.
It's especially annoying when you're searching for things that are done very differently in different parts of the world. No, I don't want to learn how to build walls or wire up electricity from e.g. Americans.
Watching any dubbed video is a big no for me. You lose ALL original expression, this was already the case with TV dubbing and it's far worse with anything auto generated. People with accents get translated poorly at best, resulting in garbadge.
The excuse is "most people want it so we force it", hooray for the dictatorship of the masses (by assumption, I've seen no research papers on the matter published by any platform).
I was so confused by this when it first happened to me....
Watching quite some youtube content, and more than willing to pay any content provider for a worthy dose of content... I refuse to hand youtube any money and will happily play the adblocker cat and mouse and use clunky scripts to remove shorts. Starting to archive the most interesting channels myself. Thanks yt-dlp.
so many websites do this. ebay is another offender, where if you buy international items and speak english, it just gets in the way and introduces mistakes, which is especially bad if you're about to pay money for something. And of course, no way to turn it off.
This feature is so annoying. YouTube is always trying new stupid features that I wonder who they make sense to. The hype thing now, the games, I wonder for who are these things useful and if it's relevant in any sort of metric. I use unkook on desktop and Newpipe or my phone for a more minimal watching experience now
If I click I’m not interested on every short presented to me and I’ve never watched a short, why can’t YouTube get the point? At least give us the option to remove them. I don’t deal with the translation issue but not giving you the option is what is beyond frustrating for me.
What's even more bullshit is that this is easily fixable on their side without impacting the goal of the feature. They just need to take into account all the languages of the user, not just the first one.
I currently dislike and comment every video that has out dubbing enabled.
I hate this approach but it is the only way to somehow make this awful feature more visible.
Yeah this is infuriating. I read 4 languages and now I'm left trying to reverse-engineer/guess what the title I'm reading was supposed to mean.
Add on top of that googles persistent (14 years and counting) inability to decide which of the three countries I've lived in they attribute my account to (sometimes it still opens maps centered on Stockholm 12 years after I left) and I understand why I watch way less video these days...
> What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.
They still do. The vast majority of YT content is not monetized by creators, often not even eligible for it in the first place. Further, some big-ticket content creators hedge their bets, uploading to backup platforms, trying to shift to Patreon, etc.
The main thing is that viewers only ever go to YouTube, a learned habit. This is where they listen to music, where they get their news, where the algorithm suggests them related videos, where they can search for tutorials and reviews for gear, etc.
But TikTok shows that you can disrupt that simply by offering a video format that is different in some way and thus not gated by the same muscle memory.
Almost every reply has pointed to TikTok as some sort of counterfactual.
1. TikTok exists today, and the author still feels like YouTube is a monopoly. If TikTok was actually a viable alternative to YouTube, this article wouldn't exist.
2. Futhermore, TikTok is not a substitute for YouTube, especially for the kinds of content that the author is watching. People don't treat TikTok as a video library - how many TikTok videos are posted straight to HN? TikTok does not have the same diversity of content as YouTube.
3. TikTok addressed point (2) of my post - ByteDance launched in the US with the acquisition of Musically, and even then still had to pay for content. The creator fund, and now also the TikTok shop is a huge part of TikTok's content strategy.
>The vast majority of YT content is not monetized by creators, often not even eligible for it in the first place.
This is a social quirk, not something that a newcomer can replicate. The problem is, for a new platform, your best content creators will quickly defect to other more monetizable platforms once they get the eyeballs. This is what happened to Vine. If you want to have a sustainable platform you have to keep your creators. YouTube doesn't have the existential threat of the next PewDiePie defecting off the platform. TikTok paid AlixEarle millions to ensure they didn't lose her.
> The main thing is that viewers only ever go to YouTube, a learned habit. This is where they listen to music, where they get their news, where the algorithm suggests them related videos, where they can search for tutorials and reviews for gear, etc.
They go to Spotify and Apple Music to listen to music, they turn on cable TV or go to a website to get their news, they get the Netflix algorithm to suggest them related videos. Etc.
I wonder though, are all those YouTubers blissfully unaware of the problems created by making YouTube a monopoly for videos? Why not simply upload your videos on another platform as well? Or is YouTube engaging in this anti competitive stuff like "if you monetize here you are not allowed to upload elsewhere"?
But niches within YouTube can be disrupted. We've seen it with short form (TikTok etc), music (Spotify etc). We see it with specific niches of content creators (nebula etc). It's happened with livestreams.
I'm bad at predicting future, but could imagine niches like "publicly funded content" from e.g. EU public broadcasters moving away (e.g. NPOstart in NL) because of privacy issues or because they legally can't monetize their content anyway. Maybe university lectures? Or sports video? Game reviews by a specialized platform by steam? Video between 4 and 10 minutes? Podcast videos?
So YouTube as a whole will stay, but it can be chipped away at. Some chips may prove in themselves a small, but still good business model.
I agree with this. For example some tech creators are using peertube or similar.
University Lectures now posting in other websites as backup and people that do courses also have them in their website. What I think what will happen it's that YouTube will still be used for discovery to drive the traffic to these other sites until people finally migrate to the smaller ones.
I disagree, the internet is full of websites who were on the top of the world until they weren't. Its easy for content creators to post their content on multiple sites. The main moat is the critical mass of users.
/. Used to be the goto tech forum, but now we are all at hn. Digg was the place to be, now its reddit. Audiences can shift surprisingly suddenly.
YouTube has recently have had massive, competitive attacks on their business and have had to quite drastically amend their offerings.
TikTok, SnapChat and instagram has all had huge success in their short form formats.
It’s not unheard of, that even millennial couples, will spend and evening together in bed scrolling TikTok instead of watching tv together.
While the battle is far from over, had YouTube not reacted, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these mobile first competitors would have started experimenting with long form content by now.
Every three days I have to close the "shorts" bar in YouTube, which has been returning ever more quickly when I remove it. I yearn for the days before even the "Okay, we'll remove it for two weeks" or whatever. It was obvious that things wouldn't stay that way.
TikTok, SnapChat, and Instagram had the capital and the advertising parts completely figured out. They sidestepped a lot of legal troubles by limiting the length and by insisting on the vertical video format, unsuitable for pirated movies, shows, and most musical clips.
Those are very hard but also very solvable problems with a lot of capital. It's the same basic idea as creating a new media company, albeit a lot more costly to build. This is way too expensive to do in a seed round, but one of the other FAANG giants could try if they wanted to.
The even harder problem is just answering the basic question of why the viewer side should care, and why they should change their deeply-ingraned habit of going to YouTube to find something to watch. "YouTube isn't fair and transparent to creators" is not going to be compelling to very many people, if the experience of the likes of Tidal competing with Spotify is any indication. YouTube is valuable to creators because it aggregates a huge audience of viewers, those viewers stick around because it's addictive and there is a content flywheel already.
But if you actually had a truly good answer for why the average person should switch their YouTube habit to watching some other site instead, the resulting payoff is huge enough (and there's enough crazy risk-hungry investors in the world) that the capital and the moat problems could theoretically be overcome.
What was unique about Youtube is that it got to claim the first search result for "Lazy Sunday", a popular SNL skit at the time. That is how everyone came to learn of it. The "homemade" videos that followed were also necessary for its longevity, but initial discovery was critical.
Disrupting YouTube is difficult because the rampant piracy isn't as easy to pull off anymore.
I remember reading a history of YouTube once, and early on they were about to go under from the sheer weight of music industry copyright lawsuits and the cost of bandwidth. Google had the technology, heft and resources to do infringement detection at scale to really save them, not to mention their global bandwidth.
> What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.
The main reason youtube has no competitors is because people want free (no ads, no subscription) content. And people will gleefully ad-block your service.
Look up the story of Vid.me
It exploded in popularity around 2015-17. Many youtube creators moved to it.
Then they went bankrupt because no one wanted to pay a subscription, and no one wanted to view ads.
Internet users desperately need to look in the mirror to figure out why so many services have strangleholds and why so many services plain suck for users - the users aren't paying for anything in any form, and they celebrate that fact.
There is no paying by users - which is replaced by ads. But in my experience the number of ads on YouTube sky-rocketed. I had no problem watching 15 seconds of an ad, skipping and then watching the rest of the video. But I used to watch long-form videos - and now I have skip ads every 7-8 minutes.
I almost stopped watching YT. In the few instances I watch I will for a8 minutes or so and at the first ad I am leaving. I am wondering if behavior like this explains the drop in views, but the fact that revenue stayed the same....
On Youtube you also have a choice between watching ads or subscription, I don't see the difference. Yes you can use an ad-blocker, but they're making it harder and harder.
Youtube has no competition because it's a winner-takes-all market, and they won.
Creators go where viewers are. Viewers go where creators are. Rinse and repeat, and sooner or later you end up with a monopoly.
> Your largest users eventually stop posting if you don't pay them (because they can go elsewhere after using your platform as a springboard: see Vine)
I don't think that's as big as a problem as you do, as long as you don't care about exclusivity.
Think of the streaming music market: Youtube Music, Spotify, Tidal, Amazon Music, ect, generally have mostly the same content and little exclusivity.
For example, you could have a feature where all uploaded videos are automatically uploaded to YouTube and all of your competitors.
A lot of creators that started with a YouTube channel nowadays have moved a lot of content to social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram reels. To me YouTube risk to be replaced (or it has already been replaced) by short videos, because a lot of people is no longer interested in watching a 20 minutes long video nowadays, especially new generations tend to spend a lot of time on just TikTok.
Or, as the algorithm seemed to be rewarding 10min+ videos at one point and a bunch of creators put out filler content, people no longer enjoy forced long form content.
This has been a huge thing in car YouTube, a drag race that’s over in 11 seconds stretched out to a 19 minute video. Realistically 5-7 minutes would’ve been heaps of time.
Currently many YouTube creators request additional money on patreon-style platforms. It either means that YouTube's paycheck sucks OR they are greedy. In both cases this reverts your arguments on paying to creators, because if some platform would be better in some meaningful property, it could steal the user base.
For example - background playing, less commercials, less distractions etc.
For a company, it's impossible. For any country except for the US, it's very easy: you use any of the million different protectionist measures available. Such as tarriffs, as the US itself has taken a liking to - in this case it would be their digital equivalent, namely digital service taxes.
The US government is extremely active in going after governments which attempt to impose digital service taxes. It was proposed in the UK, and quickly vanished without a trace.
This is why YouTube should be treated, like all large social media, as a utility. There isn’t a real path to competition here. Things like censorship or Google having exclusive rights to train their AI on YouTube data have a lot of negative impact on the world.
So if you succeed, how the terabytes of content and bandwidth will be sponsored - by what?
The only way i can think of it is some super-efficient neural codec with extreme video compression ratio that runs on mobile devices. Othewise Youtube wins by sheer scale google invested in it.
Majors CDN already exists. They can build on top of cloudfare or Amazon services.
If you think about it Amazon it's on a good position to build an alternative,they already have experience with ads and hosting video content
> how the terabytes of content and bandwidth will be sponsored - by what?
How does it work in the Internet itself? By decentralization, i.e., different servers serve their own small part. The same can work with the videos: see PeerTube.
If YouTube dies, I doubt there will ever be a replacement.
Meta, Bytedance, Snap, and even X could fill the void relatively easily. a few new views focussing specifically on video, and video focussed apps that don't require a login for all the platforms.
YouTube is incredible, YouTube is poorly run. If I were making the laws, I'd do something similar to mandatory licensing of songs for radio: mandate that YouTube, as a sort de-facto content monopilist, provide third-party access to its database (upload, discovery, view counts, recommendations, etc). Devil is in the details, but well-done it would strictly improve the world.
Independent competitive companies are great, but things tend to devolve into de-facto mini-governments once things stabilize, and from there I think the (real) government using its power to force a little more competition could really improve things.
Absolutely. TikTok and Instagram are usurping the social video space with 3,590M MAUs between them (compared to YouTube's 2,530M MAUs). Although YouTube continues to do fine, it's far from a monopoly, and I personally don't think it can be assumed that it will retain its flagship position.
I do not see that as inherently correct. There have been and are several alternatives to YouTube and every single one has been actively sabotaged for primarily political/ideological reasons that have nothing to do with any of what you are talking about.
There is quite literally a conspiracy to suppress alternatives to YouTube because they do not align with the ideological parameters of the pernicious system. If you let that boot up from humanity’s neck, there would be many competitors to YouTube that would immediately atrophy YouTube. You seem to simply not be aware of what is going on outside of the authorized narrative. You will never be able to see the reality of things if you limit yourself to only the confines of the illusion matrix created for you by the system.
But yes, YouTube has a moat and like all moats it is built and maintained by the tyrannical monarch who believes himself to be chosen by God, but must hide away behind it from reality.
The replacement may be AI generated content or something.
Let me go into wild eyed futurist speculative mode here,
1- AI/LLMs are basically a response to the enshittification of Google. The reason this tech is so good and useful is because for years Google rewarded SEO optimized content a.k.a. long winded articles that repeat the same words over and over again and take ten years to make a point, which after training on all that gunk, your LLM can now do in one paragraph. The Google search monopoly gave rise to this lengthy word salad web content and blanketed the earth with it. The AI summarizer arose as a natural response. The web as we know it may now die.
2- The software industry seems to gravitate toward a layer cake of monopolies. E.g. we have Microsoft monopolize the OS and app platform, it becomes so awful the government even tries to put the brakes on it, partially succeeds, then we get the Web application platform. Sitting in a browser on top of Windows and others. Which Google goes on to monopolize. One may suppose that another platform will be built on top of this, which will be unmonopolized for a few years, and then someone will monopolize and enshittify that too, paving the way for the next cycle. It's turtles all the way down.
3- How this pertains to YouTube, well in the near future I suppose someone could ingest all of YouTube, and create AI versions of it, exactly like what was done with the web. And they might even get away with it once we set a bunch of legal precedents that this is not a thing you can get sued for. Presumably the AI platform would need to be different or better in some way, so perhaps we'll see a video platform where all the content is generated on the fly by AI, and you can get exactly what you want because it was trained on the videos that humans made. E.g. you can simply tell the AI you want to watch a comedy show called Three and a Half Horses where all the characters are reverse centaurs, and it will spin up as many episodes as you want until you get bored. And YouTube will continue to be an aging monopoly for decades, like Windows, but no one will really care because we'll be watching horses deliver Seinfeld quality jokes [1]
[1] It's not horses and it's not as good as Seinfeld, but someone's already doing this. So all that remains for my prognostication to come true is for a financial crisis to happen, at which point the government can use it as an excuse to print a random $500B and give it to a politically connected billionaire intermediary who will invest a fraction of it into the engineering, and history will continue to march forward as it does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever
If the US government was a function body, it would force Youtube to separate the hosting business and the website itself. The hosting would be a low margin low risk business which doesn't care about traffic either way. It's just selling infrastructure the way telecom companies do. It would be paid by websites to offer a frontend to users.
This way there is real competition on what matters, the user experience and still a economy of scale on what costs a lot which is actually storing and delivering videos.
Some frontend would be free with ads, some with a paywall but without ads. Some low quality, some high quality, some both. The user would have a choice. Each creator would be free to choose its licensing model. The hosting company would then only provide the video to frontends following the creator's wish.
The creator would pay by the bytes stored and the frontend by the bytes transferred. No incentive for the hosting provider to favor either of them.
Not perfect as the hosting company is still a monopoly, but it could be regulated to be neutral and behave like a utility.
The frontend has to cater to users and nobody else. They have competition and disappear if they enshittify.
Creators are free from the tyranny of google. They become the clients of the hosting company which makes steady money whatever the content.
Everybody wins, except google, which is fine by me.
This is incredibly funny considering AI generated content is currently endemic thrash on YouTube. AI generated fake trailers, universally hated zombodubbing, weird "touches" on shorts…
Which to be clear isn't a contradiction to your comment at all. It'll take work and time though, at minimum.
Author here. I woke up to a surprising amount of traffic! Some notes based on the discussion.
This wasn't coordinated between Jeff Geerling and myself. However, I did mention the post in the Bluesky thread that Jeff was included in. [0]
I concluded the piece with “[t]his space is ripe for disruption”. That was a really poor choice of words. I've since updated the piece to better match what I was trying to say. Diffs are available. [1]
On YouTube: as I mention in the piece, I think the service is excellent as a consumer, and I pay for Premium.
This piece was mostly written because I've been frustrated that YouTube is effectively the only place for user submitted video on the internet. I wasn't going to write anything until I saw the video from RedLetterMedia that I mentioned in the post. They have a huge following and were blaming something that might be related? Or might not? It's really hard to tell! I'm not a YouTube creator, but I assume having metrics that determine your livelihood shift out from under you as a creator must feel awful.
> On YouTube: as I mention in the piece, I think the service is excellent as a consumer, and I pay for Premium
Why? Because the tools that allow them to take almost 50% of the revenue (they say you earn) have low friction?
I would say the opposite. There is no customer service. There are endless legal pit traps that allow larger channels and companies to predate on smaller ones alongside the AI channels, which lead to the same end. The entire point of the platform is to push as much advertising as possible, while mutating a user's search habits. Ironically, this leads to videos becoming borderline useless for many use cases, without taking them off youtube. This is not a good platform.
I'm sure I feel this way because I don't have a bunch of content I'm afraid of being yanked from the platform. Another "benefit" of having a big youtube presence, is I would be forever worried about implied retaliation.
They said an LTT store message directed them to the Brodie Robertson video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hVwUjcsl6s so they did their own investigation which confirmed similar things.
It looks like Youtube might be measuring views differently and perhaps getting rid of unmonetizable views which doesn't impact the number of likes or revenue. I think the annoyance is over the lack of transparency and the power Youtube holds over content creators rather than any immediate concern over loss of income etc.
I host videos on my own server and there's Vimeo and Mux. I guess you're saying it's the free-as-in-beer service that has a social network and recommendation network attached to uploaded videos.
Mux is new to me. Looks like a video-first headless CMS with some neat AI integrations.
Vimeo does have monetization tools [1] but they’re focused on direct sales.
YouTube is just way ahead… even if you ignore the ads platform, a YouTube premium subscription gives you WAY more ad free content than a Vimeo purchase or Floatplane/Nebula subscription.
> This piece was mostly written because I've been frustrated that YouTube is effectively the only place for user submitted video on the internet.
I realized this back in 2009 and tried really hard to start using other platforms, but wound up just not watching YouTube as often instead. I hope this changes. The only true competitors are places like TikTok and Instagram, but they don't feel like a true replacement to the rest of us who don't want to be tied to "social media" but YouTube shorts are evidence that it does compete with YouTube directly.
I think YouTube even tried to have "IG Stories" at one point iirc.
One of the things that is notable about Youtube is there was once competition (Vimeo and Daily Motion) but they effectively outdistanced it. A bit like Amazon and Ebay. There are related things semi-competing like Twitch.TV etc, also, of course.
I suspect that the situation with the earlier video providers is that they were "bleeding cash" for many years until the process finally reversed - if they were the winner (again like Amazon).
I think this long capital investment process is what means that no one wants to or expects to step into the ring with a large, successful player. It took that player a long time to learn to be successful, that player will fight you to keep their relative monopoly and you will have to risk a lot of money.
Youtube content creators are effectively Youtube's suppliers. Youtube is squeezing and its "normal" - squeezing suppliers is part of the monopolist's playbook. Its unfortunately convenient for Youtube that people have been willing to make good quality video for nearly nothing since the tools to do so became cheaply available.
Why there is "no competition" for Nvidia, Amazon, Youtube, etc. Not that I like the situation but it's not an "unnatural" situation.
Structurally there's only a few ways disruption can happen to a platform that has existing centralized hosting of metadata and centralized hosting of data. Either the disruptor also centralizes both, decentralizes just the data or decentralizes both.
The second isn't viable in most real world cases until something changes the huge expense of decentralized CDN fetching. My gut says that the third would be on the losing side of almost every network effect.
> This piece was mostly written because I've been frustrated that YouTube is effectively the only place for user submitted video on the internet.
Well, technically there's lots of user submitted videos posted to p*rn sites... Apparently even started posting educational videos there, like math and neural networks and stuff.
The author makes an argument that at least looks like people choose YT over Nebula because YT is free. I, for example, already pay for Nebula, so I can watch it for free, but I still go to YT.
IMO it might be just a product problem. I opened nebula and:
* The same video had a better title on YT that was actually less clickbaity and more informative - assumedly because of YT algorithm for optimization
* Nebula auto set quality to 480p compared to 1080p in YT - if I wasn't tech-savvy I'd assume it's just worse quality.
* The loading times when you seek to part that's not loaded yet are 10x longer
* I missed comments
The recommendation algorithm is weaker too, I can't tell to what extent this is due to YouTube having simply more data and to what extent it's weaker engineering.
As someone who was subbed to Nebula, this matches my experience. Especially the lack of comments, spending time on Nebula just felt cold and isolating, even if the content was good.
just want to also plug dropout.tv, which is way less annoying than Nebula with ads-in-video, and is just a generally entertaining good time + inspiring business story.
Seconded! Funniest content out there right now. I’d recommend Game Changer season 2 or Make Some Noise. Good old funny improv games. Like whose line meets modernity with younger people.
Dropout annoys me with some of their UX decisions. I know it's a younger app, but every time I go to watch a longer-run show (Game Changer for example) it defaults me to Season 1, Episode 1. I want the latest stuff, not the oldest!
Same. I like the idea of Nebula, but I'll often find videos on YouTube, then switch to Nebula to watch. Definitely speaks to a failure of whatever the Nebula discovery algorithm is.
This seems like a very strange perspective. Nebula is for specifically following content creators you really like and enjoy their videos earlier and at a better quality (plus some exclusive content).
Why would you particularly care about the title is that's a videomaker you follow anyway? Why would you care about seeking times? Are you jumping constantly in an ad-free and sponsor-free video you specifically subscribed for? Why miss the comments? Is it a video sharing platform or social media?
> Why miss the comments? Is it a video sharing platform or social media?
Because Nebula has a lot of complex content. Things like history, science, making stuff.
And those things have a lot of room for things like the maker messing something up, or struggling with something, or not explaining something properly.
On Youtube if somebody makes an obvious mistake, or is obviously incompetent to an expert, somebody will point it out. If a hobbyist doesn't quite have the skills to do a thing sometimes an expert will show up and help them. If an educative video doesn't include crucial details, somebody will ask.
Like look at say, Inheritance Machining or Alec Steele on Youtube, who take on challenging projects they struggle with and often get advice from expert viewers.
It's weird not to have this on Nebula. On one hand it seems to sell itself as "smart content", on the other hand it's a return to the old TV model of "shut up and consume".
ArchiveTeam is working on backing up selected channels/videos to the Internet Archive, where they can also be watched via their Wayback Machine. You can help them decide what is culturally or historically important enough to save.
ArchiveTeam generally is an interesting project I highly recommend people read about.
Do you happen to know if there are any project or talk of not archiving the video content itself, but instead the transcripted content instead? I feel that this would be very advantageous to archive knowledge based (versus delivery based, such as prank and stand up comedy) videos much more efficiently than the videos themselves.
Someone below brought up a very good point about many of these videos being much longer than they need to be (mainly for reimbursement and ad reasons). If the transcripted content can be archived, it could also be abridged and/or summarized as well as being combined with other similar video content as well.
I'm sort of thinking as I go here now, but I would think that perhaps Youtube has an API that lets you access the closed captions of videos?
Video quality apparently slightly degrades as youtube constantly re-encodes/processes things and there's at least one well-known example of a Neil Cicierega video being completely unplayable
https://twitter.com/neilcic/status/911080613733580801?s=20 (not this specific video, but this has happened in the past)
You should be locally saving any video you ever think you will want to watch again. Many of the videos I enjoyed in college of regular people just making stuff for fun (when being a content creator wasn't a thing) have been taken out by reruns of copyright searching bots and creators turning 30 and being embarrassed by what they posted in their 20s. One musical artist I followed decided to take down all of their old content because their latest album wasn't getting enough plays.
I save everything with replay value now, especially music.
If music, video or writing is something you want to see again, download a copy to own it yourself. Trusting a for-profit streaming company is simply idiotic.
On a personal level, you don't need the entire platform to go down to notice the bitrot. Over half of my "Watch Later" and other playlists from 8(?) years ago are now "deleted/private" videos.
It has already happened. A lot of content that used to be available on YouTube is gone because of policy changes (unlisted content automatically changed to private, banned users, videos deleted by the site) and more is already only available to logged in users or only in certain countries even though they used to be public.
If stuff disappeared (even just the Youtuber rage quit, not necessarily end of the platform) and people were talking about being bothered about it I tend to think people like you would pop up with archives.
It's the really niche stuff that few if anyone would notice or care enough to talk about that would be properly lost. And if it's niche but there's a lot of care from the few, then that's one way that archivists are made.
Anything can disappear in this modern era.
Thankfully YouTube is not DRM protected yet and you can do something about it.
Any media company can take any video offline and your access to it will be gone. Same for ebooks, not only those tied to your account, but I was thinking, what if Overdrive/Libby terminate the access to particular library.
I worry about that as well. I guess we assume nothing is going to happen because it's Google. But Google just dodged a bullet with Chrome which, if they had been hit, had a real chance to harm the entire web. Youtube could be next.
The steady state idea that most people have about civilization is just not applicable once there is oil-dependent information technology.
Either we go up and eliminate the oil dependence but acceleration eats YouTube in a transformative way, or we go up and eliminate the oil dependence but societal fission eats YouTube in a catabolic way.
> I think this space is ripe for disruption, but there are only a handful of companies who could make a go of it… and I think they’d lose a lot of money for a long time while they tried.
If you have to lose a lot of money for a long time to compete, how is it ripe for disruption?
YouTube works because it has eyeballs, content/creators, advertisers, a cdn, and has made enough piece with large copyright license holders that it's allowed to continue.
Competing with YouTube is certainly possible, and there's a lot of fun technical work, but there's also a big challenge to attract the people you need to make the thing work. You probably already need to already have two out of four of users, content, advertisers, cdn. And you need to get licenseholders on board quick. And probably law enforcement as well.
I'm not saying it is or isn't a monopoly, but it would be hard to compete with. I think monopoly would depend on the defined market... a broadly defined market might include netflix and even cable tv. A narrowly defined market would include durably published user uploads, which has a lot fewer entrants.
In the UK we have the venerable BBC which is struggling with the revenue model, cost of broadcasting and much else. I am not a fan but I think that under new leadership they could do the disruption.
In what way?
Youtube is not social media. Nobody makes new friends whilst on YT. However, broadcast TV in the olden days before satellite TV and video recorders provided a shared conversation for the whole nation. You could spark up a conversation by asking a friend if they saw something on the TV during the previous evening. Nowadays people say DON'T TELL ME, I HAVEN'T WATCHED IT YET with no further conversation possible without changing topic.
A video platform could build community by letting people know if their friends and family have enjoyed watching the same programmes. Also possible is a mechanism whereby you can have a schedule made just for you. I have two YT faves, one which is fun (parasocial relationship) and another which is intellectual. If it is early in the evening and I am possibly relaxing with food then I will want the former, not the latter. On a daily basis I could have what we had in the olden days, light entertainment in the early evening and stuff that requires some brain cells later.
Revenue is always interesting and the state broadcasters in the English speaking world might as well pool resources and supply content people enjoy as soft propaganda on a free basis with no adverts. If the CDNs are in place with everything cached with a little bit of P2P, the cost model for delivery could be improved on.
I don't know what their licensing deals look like, but they should sell subscriptions in foreign countries.
I pay $5cad/mo to get ad free access to the CBC catalog. I would gladly pay the same or even double for the BBC catalog or iPlayer (whatever its called).
That's because it's a winner-take-all market. Any of those could have won and get the monopoly instead, and Youtube would have starved, but Youtube is the one who won.
And don't say Youtube was first, Dailymotion is slightly older than Youtube.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't find such kind of work "fun". I would have a constant feeling of "well, we are simply trying to mimic what YT did, maybe we should just hire someone that worked there and do the same, instead of going through the same inevitable mistakes".
Some people think dealing with the following are fun.
Handling massive amount of video ingestion from content creator; Transcoding to various format that is optimal for various devices, Live streaming with Live to VOD, Geo restriction, Live Commenting, Ad insertion and penalise adblocker, Recommendation engine.
There are many features and challenges that are unique to OTT streaming applications and running at YouTube scales makes it even more challanging, or fun to some, to handle.
nah its too late honestly, if big tech didn't want or care to make competing platform
how can you expect company that has less resource make an alternative ????
I still remember when microsoft throwing money to make mixer (twitch alternative) and yet it failed miserably
tiktok is close as we can get honestly, but youtube also expand toward shorts
Agree, another point is that video content making is a space full of grifters, unlike other form of media.
Take Kick for example, made to compete against Youtube and Twitch, but ended up with mostly people who are banned by those 2 platforms for a good reason. "Kick streamers" is now a negative words.
So new players on this field has to be specific about curating the people posting on their platforms.
I don't think this monopoly is really mysterious. Storage costs money. Bandwidth costs money. Someone needs to pay for it and the only way to cover those costs at any meaningful fraction of Youtube's scale is to have a money printing machine like Google's ads.
Its a bit more mysterious now a days though. Video compression got way better (albeit video quality also went way up), hard drives got way cheaper. Bandwidth is really cheap at scale. People are way better selling ads now then they used to be. A lot of video serving infrastructure got standardized.
Don't get me wrong, its still hard and expensive, but i don't feel that is the moat it once was. Network effects is also a whole other conversation.
This is extremely false, where are you getting this information? Bandwidth is ludicrously expensive, no matter what your scale.
Why do you think Netflix gives ISPs server racks filled with the entire Netflix catalog, or Microsoft/Google/Meta spend billions on their own private submarine cables? Nobody would do that if bandwidth was cheap, but it isn't.
Why do you think every single streaming provider and platform does checks every so often to see if you're still watching? It's not because they are being nice; it's because it is costing them money, even the huge companies.
I don't thinks it's quite that simple, there are other factors as well:
There are significant network effects. Content creators use youtube because there are a lot of viewers watching content there, and viewers use it because there is lots of content there. Since YouTube already dominates the market, it is extremely difficult for another platform to compete, even if it was better in every way.
Google can promote YouTube using its other monopolies/oligopolies. Most notably, google search prioritizes videos on YouTube over other videos. Also, being able to pay for video ads and search ads with a single vendor is probably actractive for ad space buyers.
Google also already has its own CDN, which probably reduces the cost of distributing the content.
I think this network effect and the discoverability aspect are the main reasons why it's extremely hard to compete with YouTube. Why would people use another site if the content they want to see is not there, or is too difficult to find? Why would creators put videos there if they can't find a large audience?
The YouTube algorithm is problematic in many ways but it does succeed in viewers being suggested videos they want to see, even if the signal-to-noise ratio is not very good. That's hard to replicate when starting a new service.
Also youtube is big enough that they can get cache servers in isp datacenters for the popular content - it saves the isp the cost of a bigger pipe so deals not offered in general exist. (Netflix also has this with some - or at least they were working on it years ago)
At the rates I use video, my CDN doesn't care I'm distributing video bits, so at my end of the use spectrum, video bandwidth costs no more than the CDN fees I'm already paying. But yes, that won't work for Netflix or Disney+.
If the quantities of money paid to all the YouTube freelance advertisers is anything to go on, a video platform having their own ad network would itself be highly profitable.
> If the quantities of money paid to all the YouTube freelance advertisers is anything to go on, a video platform having their own ad network would itself be highly profitable.
Then why isnt everyone jumping at the opportunity to make a competitor? If it is soooo easy, we should have competitors. Nobody is stopping you from launching margalabargalatube.com and win the market.
Nobody, including Jeff Geerling, has an exclusive deal with YouTube to distribute the videos. Make it happen!
I’m a paying customer, but my biggest issue is that the content and suggestions themselves are still ads. I feel like I am paying to remove ads from within my ads.
The videos I am being recommended are still about how natural McDonalds food is, how this natural supplement from XYZ is disrupting healthcare and how this coffee machine will revolutionize the way I make coffee.
If the recommendation algorithm would be a bit less corporate, I’d be a happy customer. That, plus Apple Watch standalone Youtube Music app.
My personal experience is that the increase in ads has encouraged me to subscribe to creators I like via Patreon and view content on there. If many people are doing this, I wonder if it skews the view statistics and, therefore, lowers the number of recommendations for the best channels. In turn, this makes it less likely for good channels to be discovered. The increase in YouTube ads also makes me much less interested in browsing there, and I am finding other things to do instead.
You just don't make enough money from ads anyway, a lot of creators now see YT as more of top of funnel advertising leading you to a patreon or even more common livestream format where they make the real money from superchats.
Readit News
Before you get into cdns, bandwidth, advertisers, and social features, you need to have content - and a steady flow of content. What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.
Any new competitor eventually runs into the fact that
* Your largest users eventually stop posting if you don't pay them (because they can go elsewhere after using your platform as a springboard: see Vine)
* In order to actually pay creators you need to have the capital, legal, and advertising side completely figured out.
So on top of building a giant cdn, you need gobs of money to pay people to stay on your platform, and another gob of money because you will be sued to death (especially because once you start paying people, people will cheat, and pirate content).
All this means is YouTube has an incredible moat. If YouTube dies, I doubt there will ever be a replacement.
It’s a bummer that nobody there seems to realize this. They only see a very dumb metric. Probably something like "did this German dude watch at least one Spanish videos, because we auto-translate titles and voice". It feels disrespectful.
I'm terribly annoyed by this, and even more so with their latest push to translate the titles, so now you have to click and listen in on the video in order to know which the original language is.
I speak 3 languages, and I want the title and voice to be in the original language. And I won't bother nor would settle with watching an AI translated video even if it is translated from a language which I do not understand. Then I simply do not want to see that video.
Considering I'm using it with an account that is about 20 years old now, that gave Google all of the permissions in the world and has all the possible data one might need to make the conclusions on which language I prefer, it is absolutely absurd that it cannot make a solid guess.
Go into your Google account settings, under General, then add any languages that you watch YouTube videos in. I did this for Spanish and all my Spanish videos stopped getting dubs and translated titles.
The excuse is "most people want it so we force it", hooray for the dictatorship of the masses (by assumption, I've seen no research papers on the matter published by any platform).
Watching quite some youtube content, and more than willing to pay any content provider for a worthy dose of content... I refuse to hand youtube any money and will happily play the adblocker cat and mouse and use clunky scripts to remove shorts. Starting to archive the most interesting channels myself. Thanks yt-dlp.
Add on top of that googles persistent (14 years and counting) inability to decide which of the three countries I've lived in they attribute my account to (sometimes it still opens maps centered on Stockholm 12 years after I left) and I understand why I watch way less video these days...
They still do. The vast majority of YT content is not monetized by creators, often not even eligible for it in the first place. Further, some big-ticket content creators hedge their bets, uploading to backup platforms, trying to shift to Patreon, etc.
The main thing is that viewers only ever go to YouTube, a learned habit. This is where they listen to music, where they get their news, where the algorithm suggests them related videos, where they can search for tutorials and reviews for gear, etc.
But TikTok shows that you can disrupt that simply by offering a video format that is different in some way and thus not gated by the same muscle memory.
1. TikTok exists today, and the author still feels like YouTube is a monopoly. If TikTok was actually a viable alternative to YouTube, this article wouldn't exist.
2. Futhermore, TikTok is not a substitute for YouTube, especially for the kinds of content that the author is watching. People don't treat TikTok as a video library - how many TikTok videos are posted straight to HN? TikTok does not have the same diversity of content as YouTube.
3. TikTok addressed point (2) of my post - ByteDance launched in the US with the acquisition of Musically, and even then still had to pay for content. The creator fund, and now also the TikTok shop is a huge part of TikTok's content strategy.
>The vast majority of YT content is not monetized by creators, often not even eligible for it in the first place.
This is a social quirk, not something that a newcomer can replicate. The problem is, for a new platform, your best content creators will quickly defect to other more monetizable platforms once they get the eyeballs. This is what happened to Vine. If you want to have a sustainable platform you have to keep your creators. YouTube doesn't have the existential threat of the next PewDiePie defecting off the platform. TikTok paid AlixEarle millions to ensure they didn't lose her.
They go to Spotify and Apple Music to listen to music, they turn on cable TV or go to a website to get their news, they get the Netflix algorithm to suggest them related videos. Etc.
They tried to put longer videos but it didn't take off. Also search sucks so I can't got a search for a tutorial.
But niches within YouTube can be disrupted. We've seen it with short form (TikTok etc), music (Spotify etc). We see it with specific niches of content creators (nebula etc). It's happened with livestreams.
I'm bad at predicting future, but could imagine niches like "publicly funded content" from e.g. EU public broadcasters moving away (e.g. NPOstart in NL) because of privacy issues or because they legally can't monetize their content anyway. Maybe university lectures? Or sports video? Game reviews by a specialized platform by steam? Video between 4 and 10 minutes? Podcast videos?
So YouTube as a whole will stay, but it can be chipped away at. Some chips may prove in themselves a small, but still good business model.
/. Used to be the goto tech forum, but now we are all at hn. Digg was the place to be, now its reddit. Audiences can shift surprisingly suddenly.
TikTok, SnapChat and instagram has all had huge success in their short form formats.
It’s not unheard of, that even millennial couples, will spend and evening together in bed scrolling TikTok instead of watching tv together.
While the battle is far from over, had YouTube not reacted, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these mobile first competitors would have started experimenting with long form content by now.
We're doomed
The even harder problem is just answering the basic question of why the viewer side should care, and why they should change their deeply-ingraned habit of going to YouTube to find something to watch. "YouTube isn't fair and transparent to creators" is not going to be compelling to very many people, if the experience of the likes of Tidal competing with Spotify is any indication. YouTube is valuable to creators because it aggregates a huge audience of viewers, those viewers stick around because it's addictive and there is a content flywheel already.
But if you actually had a truly good answer for why the average person should switch their YouTube habit to watching some other site instead, the resulting payoff is huge enough (and there's enough crazy risk-hungry investors in the world) that the capital and the moat problems could theoretically be overcome.
Deleted Comment
Disrupting YouTube is difficult because the rampant piracy isn't as easy to pull off anymore.
What if I told you it did?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Original_Channel_Initi...
https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/investing-in-future-of-...
Look up the story of Vid.me
It exploded in popularity around 2015-17. Many youtube creators moved to it.
Then they went bankrupt because no one wanted to pay a subscription, and no one wanted to view ads.
Internet users desperately need to look in the mirror to figure out why so many services have strangleholds and why so many services plain suck for users - the users aren't paying for anything in any form, and they celebrate that fact.
I almost stopped watching YT. In the few instances I watch I will for a8 minutes or so and at the first ad I am leaving. I am wondering if behavior like this explains the drop in views, but the fact that revenue stayed the same....
Youtube has no competition because it's a winner-takes-all market, and they won.
Creators go where viewers are. Viewers go where creators are. Rinse and repeat, and sooner or later you end up with a monopoly.
I don't think that's as big as a problem as you do, as long as you don't care about exclusivity.
Think of the streaming music market: Youtube Music, Spotify, Tidal, Amazon Music, ect, generally have mostly the same content and little exclusivity.
For example, you could have a feature where all uploaded videos are automatically uploaded to YouTube and all of your competitors.
Deleted Comment
It also helped that tons of copyrighted content was uploaded and the policing and take down was originally pretty lax.
This has been a huge thing in car YouTube, a drag race that’s over in 11 seconds stretched out to a 19 minute video. Realistically 5-7 minutes would’ve been heaps of time.
Shorts have been shown to cause more issues in the brain than not.
Long slows the brain down to actually be able to sit with an idea.
For example - background playing, less commercials, less distractions etc.
For a company, it's impossible. For any country except for the US, it's very easy: you use any of the million different protectionist measures available. Such as tarriffs, as the US itself has taken a liking to - in this case it would be their digital equivalent, namely digital service taxes.
How does it work in the Internet itself? By decentralization, i.e., different servers serve their own small part. The same can work with the videos: see PeerTube.
I am sure if YouTube somehow died overnight, TikTok or some other player would work very quickly to get the alternative out there.
Meta, Bytedance, Snap, and even X could fill the void relatively easily. a few new views focussing specifically on video, and video focussed apps that don't require a login for all the platforms.
I think the Zero Interest Rate era made a lot of business like this.
I can think about YouTube, Uber, several food delivery apps, Fintechs, and so on.
A competitor needs a good legal department willing to take up that fight.
That simply means that the alternative to YouTube will look nothing like YouTube.
Independent competitive companies are great, but things tend to devolve into de-facto mini-governments once things stabilize, and from there I think the (real) government using its power to force a little more competition could really improve things.
Long form YT is a gold mine of
- documentaries (hobbyist and professional)
- informative content (literally any hobby you can imagine from gardening to warhammer to free diving)
- educational content, similar to above but world class institutions hosting their lectures for free
- musical content, live performances ranging from tiny amateur bands to top names and performances of now dead artists
- sports events, the entire 6 hour+ Wimbledon 08 final is there
I can go on but for a while now I have seen YouTube as the Video Internet (where web 1.0 was the Document Internet).
Now, the other platforms certainly have added shorts.
There is quite literally a conspiracy to suppress alternatives to YouTube because they do not align with the ideological parameters of the pernicious system. If you let that boot up from humanity’s neck, there would be many competitors to YouTube that would immediately atrophy YouTube. You seem to simply not be aware of what is going on outside of the authorized narrative. You will never be able to see the reality of things if you limit yourself to only the confines of the illusion matrix created for you by the system.
But yes, YouTube has a moat and like all moats it is built and maintained by the tyrannical monarch who believes himself to be chosen by God, but must hide away behind it from reality.
Let me go into wild eyed futurist speculative mode here,
1- AI/LLMs are basically a response to the enshittification of Google. The reason this tech is so good and useful is because for years Google rewarded SEO optimized content a.k.a. long winded articles that repeat the same words over and over again and take ten years to make a point, which after training on all that gunk, your LLM can now do in one paragraph. The Google search monopoly gave rise to this lengthy word salad web content and blanketed the earth with it. The AI summarizer arose as a natural response. The web as we know it may now die.
2- The software industry seems to gravitate toward a layer cake of monopolies. E.g. we have Microsoft monopolize the OS and app platform, it becomes so awful the government even tries to put the brakes on it, partially succeeds, then we get the Web application platform. Sitting in a browser on top of Windows and others. Which Google goes on to monopolize. One may suppose that another platform will be built on top of this, which will be unmonopolized for a few years, and then someone will monopolize and enshittify that too, paving the way for the next cycle. It's turtles all the way down.
3- How this pertains to YouTube, well in the near future I suppose someone could ingest all of YouTube, and create AI versions of it, exactly like what was done with the web. And they might even get away with it once we set a bunch of legal precedents that this is not a thing you can get sued for. Presumably the AI platform would need to be different or better in some way, so perhaps we'll see a video platform where all the content is generated on the fly by AI, and you can get exactly what you want because it was trained on the videos that humans made. E.g. you can simply tell the AI you want to watch a comedy show called Three and a Half Horses where all the characters are reverse centaurs, and it will spin up as many episodes as you want until you get bored. And YouTube will continue to be an aging monopoly for decades, like Windows, but no one will really care because we'll be watching horses deliver Seinfeld quality jokes [1]
[1] It's not horses and it's not as good as Seinfeld, but someone's already doing this. So all that remains for my prognostication to come true is for a financial crisis to happen, at which point the government can use it as an excuse to print a random $500B and give it to a politically connected billionaire intermediary who will invest a fraction of it into the engineering, and history will continue to march forward as it does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever
This way there is real competition on what matters, the user experience and still a economy of scale on what costs a lot which is actually storing and delivering videos.
Some frontend would be free with ads, some with a paywall but without ads. Some low quality, some high quality, some both. The user would have a choice. Each creator would be free to choose its licensing model. The hosting company would then only provide the video to frontends following the creator's wish.
The creator would pay by the bytes stored and the frontend by the bytes transferred. No incentive for the hosting provider to favor either of them.
Not perfect as the hosting company is still a monopoly, but it could be regulated to be neutral and behave like a utility.
The frontend has to cater to users and nobody else. They have competition and disappear if they enshittify.
Creators are free from the tyranny of google. They become the clients of the hosting company which makes steady money whatever the content.
Everybody wins, except google, which is fine by me.
Youtube will be disrupted by AI created, better content.
Who builds AITube? AITok?
Which to be clear isn't a contradiction to your comment at all. It'll take work and time though, at minimum.
This wasn't coordinated between Jeff Geerling and myself. However, I did mention the post in the Bluesky thread that Jeff was included in. [0]
I concluded the piece with “[t]his space is ripe for disruption”. That was a really poor choice of words. I've since updated the piece to better match what I was trying to say. Diffs are available. [1]
On YouTube: as I mention in the piece, I think the service is excellent as a consumer, and I pay for Premium.
This piece was mostly written because I've been frustrated that YouTube is effectively the only place for user submitted video on the internet. I wasn't going to write anything until I saw the video from RedLetterMedia that I mentioned in the post. They have a huge following and were blaming something that might be related? Or might not? It's really hard to tell! I'm not a YouTube creator, but I assume having metrics that determine your livelihood shift out from under you as a creator must feel awful.
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/gavin.anderegg.ca/post/3lyeayuckv22...
[1] https://github.com/gavinanderegg/gavinanderegg.github.io/com...
Why? Because the tools that allow them to take almost 50% of the revenue (they say you earn) have low friction?
I would say the opposite. There is no customer service. There are endless legal pit traps that allow larger channels and companies to predate on smaller ones alongside the AI channels, which lead to the same end. The entire point of the platform is to push as much advertising as possible, while mutating a user's search habits. Ironically, this leads to videos becoming borderline useless for many use cases, without taking them off youtube. This is not a good platform.
I'm sure I feel this way because I don't have a bunch of content I'm afraid of being yanked from the platform. Another "benefit" of having a big youtube presence, is I would be forever worried about implied retaliation.
Something is going on.
It looks like Youtube might be measuring views differently and perhaps getting rid of unmonetizable views which doesn't impact the number of likes or revenue. I think the annoyance is over the lack of transparency and the power Youtube holds over content creators rather than any immediate concern over loss of income etc.
https://help.vimeo.com/hc/en-us/articles/30298226209169-Chan...
Vimeo does have monetization tools [1] but they’re focused on direct sales.
YouTube is just way ahead… even if you ignore the ads platform, a YouTube premium subscription gives you WAY more ad free content than a Vimeo purchase or Floatplane/Nebula subscription.
[1] https://vimeo.com/solutions/video-monetization
I realized this back in 2009 and tried really hard to start using other platforms, but wound up just not watching YouTube as often instead. I hope this changes. The only true competitors are places like TikTok and Instagram, but they don't feel like a true replacement to the rest of us who don't want to be tied to "social media" but YouTube shorts are evidence that it does compete with YouTube directly.
I think YouTube even tried to have "IG Stories" at one point iirc.
One of the things that is notable about Youtube is there was once competition (Vimeo and Daily Motion) but they effectively outdistanced it. A bit like Amazon and Ebay. There are related things semi-competing like Twitch.TV etc, also, of course.
I suspect that the situation with the earlier video providers is that they were "bleeding cash" for many years until the process finally reversed - if they were the winner (again like Amazon).
I think this long capital investment process is what means that no one wants to or expects to step into the ring with a large, successful player. It took that player a long time to learn to be successful, that player will fight you to keep their relative monopoly and you will have to risk a lot of money.
Youtube content creators are effectively Youtube's suppliers. Youtube is squeezing and its "normal" - squeezing suppliers is part of the monopolist's playbook. Its unfortunately convenient for Youtube that people have been willing to make good quality video for nearly nothing since the tools to do so became cheaply available.
Why there is "no competition" for Nvidia, Amazon, Youtube, etc. Not that I like the situation but it's not an "unnatural" situation.
The second isn't viable in most real world cases until something changes the huge expense of decentralized CDN fetching. My gut says that the third would be on the losing side of almost every network effect.
Well, technically there's lots of user submitted videos posted to p*rn sites... Apparently even started posting educational videos there, like math and neural networks and stuff.
IMO it might be just a product problem. I opened nebula and:
* The same video had a better title on YT that was actually less clickbaity and more informative - assumedly because of YT algorithm for optimization
* Nebula auto set quality to 480p compared to 1080p in YT - if I wasn't tech-savvy I'd assume it's just worse quality.
* The loading times when you seek to part that's not loaded yet are 10x longer
* I missed comments
The recommendation algorithm is weaker too, I can't tell to what extent this is due to YouTube having simply more data and to what extent it's weaker engineering.
Why would you particularly care about the title is that's a videomaker you follow anyway? Why would you care about seeking times? Are you jumping constantly in an ad-free and sponsor-free video you specifically subscribed for? Why miss the comments? Is it a video sharing platform or social media?
Because Nebula has a lot of complex content. Things like history, science, making stuff.
And those things have a lot of room for things like the maker messing something up, or struggling with something, or not explaining something properly.
On Youtube if somebody makes an obvious mistake, or is obviously incompetent to an expert, somebody will point it out. If a hobbyist doesn't quite have the skills to do a thing sometimes an expert will show up and help them. If an educative video doesn't include crucial details, somebody will ask.
Like look at say, Inheritance Machining or Alec Steele on Youtube, who take on challenging projects they struggle with and often get advice from expert viewers.
It's weird not to have this on Nebula. On one hand it seems to sell itself as "smart content", on the other hand it's a return to the old TV model of "shut up and consume".
Because you don't necessarily enjoy everything they produce?
That's a low bar to be honest, because google's recommendation algorithm is absolutely atrocious.
- Like
- Subscribe
- Dislike
And don't tell me it will never happen, I'm old enough to have heard that a few times already.
ArchiveTeam generally is an interesting project I highly recommend people read about.
Their YouTube project can be seen here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/YouTube
And you can learn how to get involved (by running a virtual machine appliance) here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
Someone below brought up a very good point about many of these videos being much longer than they need to be (mainly for reimbursement and ad reasons). If the transcripted content can be archived, it could also be abridged and/or summarized as well as being combined with other similar video content as well.
I'm sort of thinking as I go here now, but I would think that perhaps Youtube has an API that lets you access the closed captions of videos?
I save everything with replay value now, especially music.
If music, video or writing is something you want to see again, download a copy to own it yourself. Trusting a for-profit streaming company is simply idiotic.
HD space is cheap these days, so no excuses.
It's the really niche stuff that few if anyone would notice or care enough to talk about that would be properly lost. And if it's niche but there's a lot of care from the few, then that's one way that archivists are made.
Either we go up and eliminate the oil dependence but acceleration eats YouTube in a transformative way, or we go up and eliminate the oil dependence but societal fission eats YouTube in a catabolic way.
If you have to lose a lot of money for a long time to compete, how is it ripe for disruption?
YouTube works because it has eyeballs, content/creators, advertisers, a cdn, and has made enough piece with large copyright license holders that it's allowed to continue.
Competing with YouTube is certainly possible, and there's a lot of fun technical work, but there's also a big challenge to attract the people you need to make the thing work. You probably already need to already have two out of four of users, content, advertisers, cdn. And you need to get licenseholders on board quick. And probably law enforcement as well.
I'm not saying it is or isn't a monopoly, but it would be hard to compete with. I think monopoly would depend on the defined market... a broadly defined market might include netflix and even cable tv. A narrowly defined market would include durably published user uploads, which has a lot fewer entrants.
In what way?
Youtube is not social media. Nobody makes new friends whilst on YT. However, broadcast TV in the olden days before satellite TV and video recorders provided a shared conversation for the whole nation. You could spark up a conversation by asking a friend if they saw something on the TV during the previous evening. Nowadays people say DON'T TELL ME, I HAVEN'T WATCHED IT YET with no further conversation possible without changing topic.
A video platform could build community by letting people know if their friends and family have enjoyed watching the same programmes. Also possible is a mechanism whereby you can have a schedule made just for you. I have two YT faves, one which is fun (parasocial relationship) and another which is intellectual. If it is early in the evening and I am possibly relaxing with food then I will want the former, not the latter. On a daily basis I could have what we had in the olden days, light entertainment in the early evening and stuff that requires some brain cells later.
Revenue is always interesting and the state broadcasters in the English speaking world might as well pool resources and supply content people enjoy as soft propaganda on a free basis with no adverts. If the CDNs are in place with everything cached with a little bit of P2P, the cost model for delivery could be improved on.
The answer is "no", which is why YT is so amazing
I pay $5cad/mo to get ad free access to the CBC catalog. I would gladly pay the same or even double for the BBC catalog or iPlayer (whatever its called).
> Youtube is not social media.
But it is (as you point out) parasocial media.
It is, but it's hard to gain the same audience share for all the reasons you mention.
Just ask Dailymotion, Vimeo, Twitch, Odysee, Peertube, Rumble, Kick, BitChute...
And don't say Youtube was first, Dailymotion is slightly older than Youtube.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't find such kind of work "fun". I would have a constant feeling of "well, we are simply trying to mimic what YT did, maybe we should just hire someone that worked there and do the same, instead of going through the same inevitable mistakes".
Handling massive amount of video ingestion from content creator; Transcoding to various format that is optimal for various devices, Live streaming with Live to VOD, Geo restriction, Live Commenting, Ad insertion and penalise adblocker, Recommendation engine.
There are many features and challenges that are unique to OTT streaming applications and running at YouTube scales makes it even more challanging, or fun to some, to handle.
Deleted Comment
how can you expect company that has less resource make an alternative ???? I still remember when microsoft throwing money to make mixer (twitch alternative) and yet it failed miserably
tiktok is close as we can get honestly, but youtube also expand toward shorts
Take Kick for example, made to compete against Youtube and Twitch, but ended up with mostly people who are banned by those 2 platforms for a good reason. "Kick streamers" is now a negative words.
So new players on this field has to be specific about curating the people posting on their platforms.
Its a bit more mysterious now a days though. Video compression got way better (albeit video quality also went way up), hard drives got way cheaper. Bandwidth is really cheap at scale. People are way better selling ads now then they used to be. A lot of video serving infrastructure got standardized.
Don't get me wrong, its still hard and expensive, but i don't feel that is the moat it once was. Network effects is also a whole other conversation.
This is extremely false, where are you getting this information? Bandwidth is ludicrously expensive, no matter what your scale.
Why do you think Netflix gives ISPs server racks filled with the entire Netflix catalog, or Microsoft/Google/Meta spend billions on their own private submarine cables? Nobody would do that if bandwidth was cheap, but it isn't.
In the past 480p would be okay. Now everyone wants 4k.
In fact, in the past IMAGES were normal. Imgur was an image website. Now everything is about short videos. Even memes are now videos.
I'm pretty sure if we make Internet faster and storage cheaper, we'll also invent a new sort of media to waste that speed and storage.
There are significant network effects. Content creators use youtube because there are a lot of viewers watching content there, and viewers use it because there is lots of content there. Since YouTube already dominates the market, it is extremely difficult for another platform to compete, even if it was better in every way.
Google can promote YouTube using its other monopolies/oligopolies. Most notably, google search prioritizes videos on YouTube over other videos. Also, being able to pay for video ads and search ads with a single vendor is probably actractive for ad space buyers.
Google also already has its own CDN, which probably reduces the cost of distributing the content.
The YouTube algorithm is problematic in many ways but it does succeed in viewers being suggested videos they want to see, even if the signal-to-noise ratio is not very good. That's hard to replicate when starting a new service.
Then why isnt everyone jumping at the opportunity to make a competitor? If it is soooo easy, we should have competitors. Nobody is stopping you from launching margalabargalatube.com and win the market.
Nobody, including Jeff Geerling, has an exclusive deal with YouTube to distribute the videos. Make it happen!
It's very possible that it's only that profitable at Youtube-sized scale.
The videos I am being recommended are still about how natural McDonalds food is, how this natural supplement from XYZ is disrupting healthcare and how this coffee machine will revolutionize the way I make coffee.
If the recommendation algorithm would be a bit less corporate, I’d be a happy customer. That, plus Apple Watch standalone Youtube Music app.