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?
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.
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.
I bet they also know a lot of problems we are not even aware of, because these were fixed in trade offs they’ve made. Content id claims may even be beneficial to US-based creators because even if false, it’s still a [manageable] alarm before a real lawsuit, which creators couldn’t stand against anyway. They have a hegemony no doubt, but why wouldn’t another platform have it in the same position and under same legal circumstances. Investors be like “ah yes, it’s not youtube, so we’ll refrain from pursuing our goals and safety policies”?
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:
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.
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".
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.
Kind of doubtful, unless they can also bring the mainstream over with them.
That's the rub: Whenever a new platform starts up, marketing itself as the "free speech alternative" to some big, mainstream platform, what always ends up happening is the new platform's user base consists entirely of people who got kicked off the mainstream platform--leading to all the toxicity and problems noted in this sub-thread. You need to be more than a place where the cast-offs from mainstream sites hang out. You need to bring the mainstream to your platform too.
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.
> 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.
for me personally Peertube checks all the boxes because it is in the fediverse and can be selfhosted.
you can do whatever the hell you want and that is quite a big thing for people who have been burned by youtube.
edit: Tilvids.com is a good example of the power of peertube
I noticed no subtitles or captions on videos and no obvious way to turn them on. I was able to watch the same videos on YouTube with closed captions but on my TV instead of my phone.
Because it’s impossible to draw eyeballs without content and impossible to draw content without eyeballs.
Many well funded companies have successfully drawn some content with money in the form of production budget, guarantees & advances but few with a developed audience elsewhere are willing to give it up and people watch the content they like where it is most convenient.
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?
If YouTube were just a website like any other video host, people wouldn't care. Do you really care about which video host a video you want to watch is on? No, more than likely you care about the video itself.
But YouTube is an app, on your phone, click it and search for what you want, oh whatever you're looking for is probably on YouTube anyway.
And that's another thing, YouTube is basically the only site with google search embedded into itself that only searches itself. Imagine a video search engine like YouTube that showed you results from all sorts of video sites.
These two things together are why. Want to find a video? Click the video finding app on your phone. Oh, it only searches YouTube? Oh well, the video is probably on YouTube anyway.
I wonder what the usage metrics for disparate video hosts look like around the time of that change, and also the change on DDG to showing other video host results and their deal with Apple. I'd be willing to bet viewership on other sites went up and YouTube went down to some degree.
It's a shame, Apple's app was far better than Google's, to the extent that I stayed on iOS 5 (last version that had the old app) until they shut off the API it was using.
Vimeo seems to have found a good niche – professional video hosting.
YouTube is a social network as much as a video hosting service, and for professional applications, embeds in websites, portfolios, etc, it's often a bad idea to include things that will detract from other content or take users away from the site. YouTube embeds are still fairly branded, may show ads, etc.
YouTube has no interest in this market, so I think Vimeo will be fine.
> Vimeo seems to have found a good niche – professional video hosting.
Yet I prefer websites use youtube to embed content. Whenever I encounter an embedded vimeo video, I'm asked to fill a captcha. This almost never happens with youtube.
I believe vimeo purposely isn't interested in much of the you from youtube, although these days youtube isn't either. Vimeo is looking to be a hoster for commercial content mainly.
I tried to use vimeo, but even if it had content on it that interests me, I find it very frustrating to use for some intuitive reason. Maybe it’s constant flashing of wait-spinners, maybe no place to discover things. It feels like yet another pic hosting but for videos. https://vimeo.com doesn’t look like a promising landing for 99% of users either.
I also signed up for a curiosity stream trial (or was it its competitor? idk), watched one video, only to delete my account afterwards. Their video player doesn’t support left-right keys and when I missed a sentence I had no chance to rewind just a little, because in an hour+ long video you can’t just point to a second with your mouse. It’s so stupid technically that I can’t imagine who could do that for a platform which is advertised from every crack.
I don’t think that youtube no-competition is just a network effect and ads and money. Even if we were to find youtube deleted tomorrow, both viewers and content creators would have a fucking hard time to continue their usual activities. I often blame youtube for its ui/ux, but—and this is my personal opinion—its competition is just trash.
this. Vimeo is great, but we've seen hardly any continued development in the last 10 years. It looks exactly the same now as it did 10+ years ago. In order to pursue the market you need to keep coding, adding things, trying things. Discovery, yes! W/o discovery you're sunk. But there are 20 other things you could do to defrictionize the platform. And 20 more you could do to improve its reach. Scale will come with the audience graph justifies the expenditure. I would argue that YouTube's recent machine-learning suggestions actually totally ffing suck. The way they were 8 years ago was incredibly better. This is one area you could challenge them in. Be a YouTube of 2014 and you could beat them in suggestion.
Daily Motion was a strong alternative for a time in France, but it isn't used much now. Most long video content creators are on Youtube now. (DailyMotion is french)
None of those are available on "modern" TVs or set top boxes. YouTube is _everywhere_ and has monetization, the eyeballs, and a seemingly infinite number of videos. It will be extraordinarily difficult to compete with this.
Literally over a billion smart phones are sold each year, most of which have YouTube apps on them already. At the moment nothing can reasonably compete with YouTube. They can, of course, be successful but will remain a niche product.
Yeah but that is akin to laptops having Windows installed by default. Actually, it is worse, because in case of Android: it is from Google, and so is YouTube, so it makes sense that they have a YouTube app pre-installed. I do not expect them to pre-install a competitor's one, no matter how successful or great that is. This is why you have billions of Android phones with YouTube app instead of something else.
Bandwidth and storage cost a lot. YouTube wasn't even profitable till a few years ago. Any new "free speech" video platform will be inundated with content that YouTube bans, things like hate speech, gore and calls for violence etc. which are not palatable to advertisers.
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.
> 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.
Not everyone is a Graduate at the Internet University of I Am Very Smart.
Great discussion can start from the simplest questions, no need to show off around here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
Network effect, and Google's Ad Monopoly account for 99.9% of the dominance of YouTube. Only Facebook could launch a competing product (maybe Twitter). It would take millions (or Billions) to build a platform just to end up like one of the many competitors (Vimeo). There will be something that kills YouTube, but it will look different (or work differently).
Is it really network effect though? I think with regard to YouTube the influence of network effect is overstated.
The easy monetization capability is unrivaled, this is a big reason people that make videos choose YouTube. This is where their network effects come from. People don't really choose where to watch videos, people choose where to upload them though.
But as far as a viewer is concerned, do you care what video host a video is on before you watch it? Probably not. You'll click a vimeo or dailymotion or whatever link if the video you want to watch is on one of those sites. YouTube by and large is not a social platform, so it's network effects are very limited.
IMO the reasons YouTube has basically a monopoly is they have what amounts to embedded google search that only searches their site, and their app comes preinstalled on almost all mobile phones. Think about it, as a user, you want to search for a video, you click the video searching app on your phone, oh it only searches YouTube? Oh well, the video is probably on YouTube anyway.
I'd argue that Youtube is a strong video discovery mechanism and "People don't really choose where to watch videos" is very much false. Many people watch videos by directly searching for them on youtube and by subscribing to specific "youtubers" (perhaps it's different between various ages/demographics, though); and, IMHO this is the largest part, when watching the next video people stay on the same site, at least in the case of youtube; they'll just pick one of the recommendations and it's not going to be on another site.
We are basically making the same point. People don't watch the videos because they're on YouTube, people watch the videos because the app on their phone only plays and searches videos on YouTube.
The competition is paid/subscription niche video sites. Outside of adult content I think they are very, very small compared to Youtube. But some do thrive.
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.
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.
Which is in part why building youtube competitor is so difficult. Bootstrapping with pirated content is not something that will fly as easily in 2020 as it did in 2005
When was the content id system implemented? I'm sure there were plenty of pirated videos on YouTube (honestly there still are but they use cuts/filters/awful quality to get around), but I remember homemade videos in the top charts even before 2008.
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.
> Like, do these creators have thousands or millions of viewers?
Yes, Minute Physics and Veritasium are two examples I remember off the top of my head (not an LBRY user since I quit algorithmic video binges after abusing them possibly worse then I do HN, IRC, and assorted doomscrolling now :P).
But, Minute Physics and Veritasium are on YouTube. So, maybe it's just cross-posting and their 99% audience is not there?
Of course from a "can I adopt X" perspective, cross-posted content to X is fine, even if most users watch it on YouTube.
But for that to be meaninful on a larger scale most popular content should be cross-posted to Odysee (or original to it).
E.g. Veritasium is for sure popular, but it might just be part of a tiny slither of YouTube content that made it to the platform - so that would mean I could adopt Odysee as a YouTube replacement only if my interests intersect with that slither.
> 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.
It does, but not in the form of video-only platforms.
In terms of medium/long form videos, plenty of time is spent watching those on Instagram and Facebook. For shorter "clip"-style videos, those are watched on TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat.
Then you have livestreaming, in which Twitch and once again Facebook/Instagram have large viewership.
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 that, on average, you are probably correct. More people prefer the current behavior over the opposite behavior, where instead of 'Not Interested' one would be forced to select 'Interested', or perhaps 'Add to Watch List -> Chill Music'.
But I'm not interested in an average case, and if given the opportunity to switch between a blocklist and an allowlist approach, I would do so frequently. Unfortunately we're not given that opportunity whereas I am given that opportunity in many other different cases, the 'Mark as Unread' button on e-mails and RSS readers being one such example.
Yes, same. EXCEPT there is new content all the time, and if you're like me, you'll probably never watch 4 of those videos because a new top pick emerged since.
If you’re talking about sites that host videos for creators and stream videos to end users, YouTube has some very strong competitors who have eaten into YouTube’s percentage of online video watched:
- Facebook
- Twitch
- TikTok
While you might not think of them as competitors, they provide a very similar service.
Video hosting is a perfect storm of expensive things: lots of egress bandwidth, lots of storage, and lots of compute for transcoding. And most of the effort is wasted because most videos get watched only a few times, and only in a few of those transcoded formats. So they're not going to pull their weight even if you slap ads all over them.
You mean like a company? I mean, this has been answered a million times over. It's scale, it's always scale.
Yes, Youtube needs a real competitor, and it's the sort of thing that would be very difficult to do as a for-profit company. I'd begin by asking Jimmy Wales and the like. Peertube's a great start.
Makes me wonder if this is a case where regulation needs to inject competition, like when we broke up Ma Bell into separate companies.
What if The act of uploading and hosting had to be a separate company from the act of searching and viewing? What would "YouTube" look like if someone could write their own app that had access to all of the same content? What would "YouTube" look like if someone could provide their own uploading and hosting service?
Does Twitch count? A lot of chess streamers I used to follow on YouTube moved to Twitch. Sometimes they replicate their content back to YouTube, but not always.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadhttps://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.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59052155
Censorship advocates always get hit by the divine justice boomerang.
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.
...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.
The stimulating nature of extremism makes it really hard for a new platform to be pro-"sensible free speech".
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.
That's the rub: Whenever a new platform starts up, marketing itself as the "free speech alternative" to some big, mainstream platform, what always ends up happening is the new platform's user base consists entirely of people who got kicked off the mainstream platform--leading to all the toxicity and problems noted in this sub-thread. You need to be more than a place where the cast-offs from mainstream sites hang out. You need to bring the mainstream to your platform too.
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.
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.)
edit: Tilvids.com is a good example of the power of peertube
https://framatube.org/w/217eefeb-883d-45be-b7fc-a788ad8507d3
here is a good video intro to peertube which has subtitles
Many well funded companies have successfully drawn some content with money in the form of production budget, guarantees & advances but few with a developed audience elsewhere are willing to give it up and people watch the content they like where it is most convenient.
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?
If YouTube were just a website like any other video host, people wouldn't care. Do you really care about which video host a video you want to watch is on? No, more than likely you care about the video itself.
But YouTube is an app, on your phone, click it and search for what you want, oh whatever you're looking for is probably on YouTube anyway.
And that's another thing, YouTube is basically the only site with google search embedded into itself that only searches itself. Imagine a video search engine like YouTube that showed you results from all sorts of video sites.
These two things together are why. Want to find a video? Click the video finding app on your phone. Oh, it only searches YouTube? Oh well, the video is probably on YouTube anyway.
YouTube is a social network as much as a video hosting service, and for professional applications, embeds in websites, portfolios, etc, it's often a bad idea to include things that will detract from other content or take users away from the site. YouTube embeds are still fairly branded, may show ads, etc.
YouTube has no interest in this market, so I think Vimeo will be fine.
Yet I prefer websites use youtube to embed content. Whenever I encounter an embedded vimeo video, I'm asked to fill a captcha. This almost never happens with youtube.
I also signed up for a curiosity stream trial (or was it its competitor? idk), watched one video, only to delete my account afterwards. Their video player doesn’t support left-right keys and when I missed a sentence I had no chance to rewind just a little, because in an hour+ long video you can’t just point to a second with your mouse. It’s so stupid technically that I can’t imagine who could do that for a platform which is advertised from every crack.
I don’t think that youtube no-competition is just a network effect and ads and money. Even if we were to find youtube deleted tomorrow, both viewers and content creators would have a fucking hard time to continue their usual activities. I often blame youtube for its ui/ux, but—and this is my personal opinion—its competition is just trash.
Odysee
WTV
Bitchute
Daily Motion
Peer Tube
..ad infinitum
There's literally hundreds out there, not everything needs to be 'Facebook scale' to be successful.
edit: formatting
Literally over a billion smart phones are sold each year, most of which have YouTube apps on them already. At the moment nothing can reasonably compete with YouTube. They can, of course, be successful but will remain a niche product.
To be a serious alternative you’d need apps for Apple TV, Android TV, Roku plus iOS and Android and a solid desktop browser.
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.
So that leaves a volume of shit-tier players. That's not that worthwhile.
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/
...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.
The easy monetization capability is unrivaled, this is a big reason people that make videos choose YouTube. This is where their network effects come from. People don't really choose where to watch videos, people choose where to upload them though.
But as far as a viewer is concerned, do you care what video host a video is on before you watch it? Probably not. You'll click a vimeo or dailymotion or whatever link if the video you want to watch is on one of those sites. YouTube by and large is not a social platform, so it's network effects are very limited.
IMO the reasons YouTube has basically a monopoly is they have what amounts to embedded google search that only searches their site, and their app comes preinstalled on almost all mobile phones. Think about it, as a user, you want to search for a video, you click the video searching app on your phone, oh it only searches YouTube? Oh well, the video is probably on YouTube anyway.
To wit: https://www.offcenterharbor.com
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 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.
As a competitor? It's not even a bug on their radar...
It's like waiting for Mastodon to replace Facebook and co...
Are you tastes in any way representative of any large segment of the population though? Like, do these creators have thousands or millions of viewers?
Yes, Minute Physics and Veritasium are two examples I remember off the top of my head (not an LBRY user since I quit algorithmic video binges after abusing them possibly worse then I do HN, IRC, and assorted doomscrolling now :P).
Of course from a "can I adopt X" perspective, cross-posted content to X is fine, even if most users watch it on YouTube.
But for that to be meaninful on a larger scale most popular content should be cross-posted to Odysee (or original to it).
E.g. Veritasium is for sure popular, but it might just be part of a tiny slither of YouTube content that made it to the platform - so that would mean I could adopt Odysee as a YouTube replacement only if my interests intersect with that slither.
> 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.
In terms of medium/long form videos, plenty of time is spent watching those on Instagram and Facebook. For shorter "clip"-style videos, those are watched on TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat.
Then you have livestreaming, in which Twitch and once again Facebook/Instagram have large viewership.
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?
But I'm not interested in an average case, and if given the opportunity to switch between a blocklist and an allowlist approach, I would do so frequently. Unfortunately we're not given that opportunity whereas I am given that opportunity in many other different cases, the 'Mark as Unread' button on e-mails and RSS readers being one such example.
Maybe focus on content longer than the YouTube average , like courses and documentaries and in depth video podcasts?
While you might not think of them as competitors, they provide a very similar service.
Yes, Youtube needs a real competitor, and it's the sort of thing that would be very difficult to do as a for-profit company. I'd begin by asking Jimmy Wales and the like. Peertube's a great start.
What if The act of uploading and hosting had to be a separate company from the act of searching and viewing? What would "YouTube" look like if someone could write their own app that had access to all of the same content? What would "YouTube" look like if someone could provide their own uploading and hosting service?
Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller
Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube