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This article should say - you can't compete with google using google. The "final blow" was adsense being cutoff. Their revenue model to compete with google was

This article should say - you can't compete with google using google. The "final blow" was adsense being cutoff. Their revenue model to compete with google was ... adsense. OK. Their traffic model was google search. Ok. Between the lines it sounds like some aggressive SEO, and maybe the network click bounce thing (you click on one video, and then it clicks through to another site etc). Be curious what their content moderation story was. Seriously, if you are building a google competitor, you probably need to use something other than adsense. And a reminder, adsense is a key revenue generation value add. The paying of creators definitely anti-competitive. I do think there will be a youtube alternative (small scale) eventually. The problem is a lot of these "competitors" get filled with absolutely trash / hateful content right away because the first people to use them are the rejects from youtube and the moderation teams are so glad to have someone show up they don't moderate heavily enough. Checkout some of the reddit competitors, total disgusting trash.

noobermin 7y ago
Nothing you said is wrong, but that is part of the problem right? To do anything online, you have to use google to some extent, so how can you compete in the first place? Google is already a monopoly in search which makes it impossible to make something online that requires search (ie., almost everything) and have it properly compete.
- defen 7y ago
  Hey, if you want to compete with Standard Oil just build your own railroad line.
  - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
    Until Standard Oil builds pipelines. That literally happened.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  Exactly. You may as well try to compete with a railroad monopoly while at the same time not using any of their existing rail infrastructure. Good fucking luck.
- dageshi 7y ago
  Pornhub probably could. They've got the tech, the traffic, the money, the advertising infrastructure, they've got everything they need to launch a youtube competitor because the big tech companies don't really touch porn.
  - darkpuma 7y ago
    > "the big tech companies don't really touch porn." Isn't that the case because mainstream American advertisers don't want anything to do with it? I don't think it's a matter of west coast tech companies being prudes, but rather tech companies appeasing big consumer goods companies that spend billions on advertising, like P&G, J&J, PepsiCo, etc. And those companies are in turn likely appeasing 'middle america' by trying to keep their brands as bland and "family friendly" as possible. Edit: (And now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure Amazon sells pornography, so that's one of the big tech companies at least that is willing to. And I don't think it's a coincidence that advertising from those big consumer goods companies isn't nearly as important to Amazon... Then again Amazon doesn't allow nudity on twitch, which perhaps could be considered roughly analogous to Google's similar ban of pornography on youtube. Perhaps twitch, as a consumer brand, is subject to the same social pressures from the American public as PepsiCo?)
    - izzydata 7y ago
      Anyone else find it mildly strange how such a huge portion of the economy functions solely on the production and consumption of terrible products such as soda?
      - Chris_Chambers 7y ago
        It’s retardation juice. You have to keep people in a permanent malnutrition-induced malaise of retardation to grease the path for them to accept all of the even worse things you want to throw at them.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        I'm more worried about the huge supporting portion of the economy that is advertising. Seems to have much more harmful effects on everything around us, including but not limited to making people consume more terrible products such as soda than they otherwise would.
- bduerst 7y ago
  Not quite. First, Google isn't a monopoly on search. Popular? yes. Best product? For most use cases, yeah. The fact that the search competition is a click away makes it dominant in the market but not a monopoly or monopsony. Second, companies are doing fine in this regard by bypassing Google. There are online businesses that exist solely on Amazon and Instagram. Building out a strong social presence is one way to get traffic without relying on Google search. Several major content hosting sites (images/gifs) have taken off in part because of their social saturation. Is it easy? No, but to GP's point it doesn't sound like they were being strategic in this regard either.
  - noobermin 7y ago
    I should rephrase my argument. What I really meant to highlight is you cannot have a business online that google does not approve of without great difficulty, given to be online you must use google in some extent. That is a problem and decidedly anti-competitive. Also I don't care too much about the OP's attitude or lack of strategy, actors don't have to be paragons of virtue in order to be wronged and their situation be an example of a larger problem. Also, finally, why do you need to dispute the basic facts, no one in their right mind thinks Google isn't a monopoly on search, I think that is more or less an established fact at this point.
    - root_axis 7y ago
      > What I really meant to highlight is you cannot have a business online that google does not approve of without great difficulty I disagree. I have worked at several companies with very successful sales and marketing departments where referrals from google were a noticeable but ultimately unimportant part of the revenue picture. I have also worked at a place that literally lived and died by the grace of a top ranking on google, once we hit the 2nd and then 3rd page, the business was basically dead. This sucked, but it was very nice for the company that replaced us. There is no inherent reason why one company should be entitled to the slot any more than any other (besides the google algorithm that determines ranking).
    - mrep 7y ago
      > no one in their right mind thinks Google isn't a monopoly on search, I think that is more or less an established fact at this point. "A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity" [0]. Bing exists so by definition, you are wrong. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
slimscsi 7y ago
> The paying of creators definitely anti-competitive. Its actually very common practice and has been for a very long time (way before 2007). Once people get mindshare, they get offers. The top you tubers, twitch streamers, etc have negotiated contracts with terms that are very different that what a standard creator has. Think of it just like Hollywood. The top talents are sough after and franchises are built around them, the rest have to audition.
quocble 7y ago
Sort of hard to avoid google when they control 90% ads traffic.
devmunchies 7y ago
Haven’t used reddit in over a year and hardly visit YouTube. #1 competitor for my time is reading a book. The freedom and clarity I feel now that I’m not plugged in to these types of social networks makes me believe reddit is also “disgusting trash”.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 7y ago
  I also am trying to read more books and unplug, but Reddit isn’t so bad if you find good sub-Reddit’s. The main site and default sub-Reddit’s are definitely trash, though. The same is true of YouTube if you heavily scrutinize your subscription list. It’s extremely annoying because there are pockets of communities that remind me of the Internet before the masses trashed it and everything was centralized around a handful of sites. I’ve been playing with Mastodon lately and that reminds me more of the 90s Internet.
- xiphias2 7y ago
  What's the problem with YouTube? If I'm interested in a subject / person, I try to both read about it and listen video about it / from him. I found that the two information sources are often complementary.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tasty_freeze 7y ago
  You are painting with a very broad brush. There are tens of thousands of subreddits covering a dizzying array of topics. Many are low information garbage communities, but many are amazing resources that can't be found anywhere else. I'm not suggesting you change your personal choice, but as someone who is a sometimes member of those communities, I resent being called trash.
- otakucode 7y ago
  Book publishers let white nationalists, pedophiles, sex offenders, and others publish books. Books don't even have age gated ratings, so parents don't even have any idea what kind of content their children are consuming when they read a book. If you want disgusting trash, pick up 'In Defense of Elitism' sometime. It's the only book I have destroyed after reading several chapters. When you paint a medium or platform with a broad brush, and chastise them for not censoring it to your liking, you should at least check the alternative you're recommending is at least as censorial.
nemothekid 7y ago
>The paying of creators definitely anti-competitive It's really not any different than what Netflix is doing now, right? Discounting SEO, the major issue was that they didn't build their own ad network. You set up business in Google's front yard and didn't like it when they told you to get out. The ad network (or rather the monetization model) is the hardest part of building a video sharing site. If that part wasn't figured out then it's hard for me to believe you were actually serious about building a content network. Given how much this guy cried about how much money he is "owed" I'm less likely to believe he was slighted and more likely to believe he was a greedy exec who was in over his head.
- dalore 7y ago
  From the article: > he walked away with about $50 million when News Corp purchased my space. He should have walked away with a lot more He thinks that News Corp should have paid more for myspace? Because they got so much value from it.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - metildaa 7y ago
    It does seem a bit out of proportion, News Corp bought a business that proceeded to sink. I think Peertube and other Fediverse stacks like Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed & Lemmy will continue to bleed users from more traditional sites over the next few years. They've significantly lowered the barriers to running your own social site, creating a great variety of communities that otherwise would be much smaller or non-existent.
    - dalore 7y ago
      Yes, MySpace wasn't making any money if I recall and so had no real business plan. Sounds like the same like the guy complaining. They don't have real business plans to make money except an exit strategy to sell it to someone else. Their revenue was going to come from adsense? And he's complaining about google cutting him off. He should have been thinking how to make money, like his own adsense.
pwinnski 7y ago
This is why people want Alphabet to be split up. Google is leveraging their monopoly position in online advertising to benefit their monopoly position in online video, as well as their monopoly position in online search.
Chris_Chambers 7y ago
Wow dude, you’re so above people who leave the shitty sites you like.
im3w1l 7y ago
You have your timeline mixed up. First they were dependent on Google. Then Google started competing. Then they were cut off.
thayne 7y ago
> Seriously, if you are building a google competitor, you probably need to use something other than adsense. That's kind of the point. Using Monopoly power in one industry (advertisement or search) to cripple a competitor in another (video) is kind of the definition of anti-competitive behavior.
zaphirplane 7y ago
I am assuming you are implying that a human in google made the decision to bury competition search results and deny the competition’s AdWords relationship and not benign factors like bad SEO or misbehaving website Google has been stung and made to show search results in an unbiased way with relation to their products. While it happened in the past the current monopoly, anticompetitive, antitrust commission in Europe California and some awaking Asian countries prevent that kind of behavior That is the crux of antitrust/monopoly protection commission. The reason the exist
harryf 7y ago
> Seriously, if you are building a google competitor, you probably need to use something other than adsense. And a reminder, adsense is a key revenue generation value add. OK but this story begins in 2006. At that time there basically was only Google for generating significant traffic. Facebook was growing and Twitter had just launched but neither had the size of audience (or real ad products) to generate the type of traffic Google could
lumberingjack 7y ago
>Checkout some of the reddit competitors, total disgusting trash. These people where on reddit up until recently you just never visited the subs that got banned. It took some loud squealing to make the admins do something, then the result was way worse. It made the "disgusting trash sites" and the people that use them more vigilant that why none are really growing.
- thinkingemote 7y ago
  Reddit has also changed how it wants it's users to use the site. Previously users would subscribe to a collection of subreddits and have a feed of them. Then a bunch of subreddits got banned and more quarantined. They labelled those who subscribed to a quarantined as a "community" and not just something you subbed to. Now any subreddit you "join" and "leave" and they have dropped the subscribe/unsubscribe wording further enforcing the isolated community angle of invested enthusiasts rather than the casual subscriber to random things. Now if you subscribe to some random subreddit you can be viewed as agreeing with all its postings and viewpoints where previously people wouldn't think this way about using the site. Things won't grow as they are aopealing to the hardcore focus users rather than the casual ones. Any competition would do well to appeal to the more casual and disconnected users.
sct202 7y ago
So I was looking at old blog posts about LiveVideo and saw a reference to a rumor that LiveVideo paid off creators to cause the initial jump from Youtube to LiveVideo. There might have been a lot of shady dealings on both sides, but it was so long ago someone from each side should be able to do a tell all with the actual details. http://willvideoforfood.com/2007/02/07/livevideo-vs-youtube-2/ http://willvideoforfood.com/2007/02/07/livevideo-vs-youtube-...

noobermin 7y ago

Nothing you said is wrong, but that is part of the problem right? To do anything online, you have to use google to some extent, so how can you compete in the first place? Google is already a monopoly in search which makes it impossible to make something online that requires search (ie., almost everything) and have it properly compete.

defen 7y ago
Hey, if you want to compete with Standard Oil just build your own railroad line.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
  Until Standard Oil builds pipelines. That literally happened.
darkpuma 7y ago
Exactly. You may as well try to compete with a railroad monopoly while at the same time not using any of their existing rail infrastructure. Good fucking luck.
dageshi 7y ago
Pornhub probably could. They've got the tech, the traffic, the money, the advertising infrastructure, they've got everything they need to launch a youtube competitor because the big tech companies don't really touch porn.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  > "the big tech companies don't really touch porn." Isn't that the case because mainstream American advertisers don't want anything to do with it? I don't think it's a matter of west coast tech companies being prudes, but rather tech companies appeasing big consumer goods companies that spend billions on advertising, like P&G, J&J, PepsiCo, etc. And those companies are in turn likely appeasing 'middle america' by trying to keep their brands as bland and "family friendly" as possible. Edit: (And now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure Amazon sells pornography, so that's one of the big tech companies at least that is willing to. And I don't think it's a coincidence that advertising from those big consumer goods companies isn't nearly as important to Amazon... Then again Amazon doesn't allow nudity on twitch, which perhaps could be considered roughly analogous to Google's similar ban of pornography on youtube. Perhaps twitch, as a consumer brand, is subject to the same social pressures from the American public as PepsiCo?)
  - izzydata 7y ago
    Anyone else find it mildly strange how such a huge portion of the economy functions solely on the production and consumption of terrible products such as soda?
    - Chris_Chambers 7y ago
      It’s retardation juice. You have to keep people in a permanent malnutrition-induced malaise of retardation to grease the path for them to accept all of the even worse things you want to throw at them.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      I'm more worried about the huge supporting portion of the economy that is advertising. Seems to have much more harmful effects on everything around us, including but not limited to making people consume more terrible products such as soda than they otherwise would.
bduerst 7y ago
Not quite. First, Google isn't a monopoly on search. Popular? yes. Best product? For most use cases, yeah. The fact that the search competition is a click away makes it dominant in the market but not a monopoly or monopsony. Second, companies are doing fine in this regard by bypassing Google. There are online businesses that exist solely on Amazon and Instagram. Building out a strong social presence is one way to get traffic without relying on Google search. Several major content hosting sites (images/gifs) have taken off in part because of their social saturation. Is it easy? No, but to GP's point it doesn't sound like they were being strategic in this regard either.
- noobermin 7y ago
  I should rephrase my argument. What I really meant to highlight is you cannot have a business online that google does not approve of without great difficulty, given to be online you must use google in some extent. That is a problem and decidedly anti-competitive. Also I don't care too much about the OP's attitude or lack of strategy, actors don't have to be paragons of virtue in order to be wronged and their situation be an example of a larger problem. Also, finally, why do you need to dispute the basic facts, no one in their right mind thinks Google isn't a monopoly on search, I think that is more or less an established fact at this point.
  - root_axis 7y ago
    > What I really meant to highlight is you cannot have a business online that google does not approve of without great difficulty I disagree. I have worked at several companies with very successful sales and marketing departments where referrals from google were a noticeable but ultimately unimportant part of the revenue picture. I have also worked at a place that literally lived and died by the grace of a top ranking on google, once we hit the 2nd and then 3rd page, the business was basically dead. This sucked, but it was very nice for the company that replaced us. There is no inherent reason why one company should be entitled to the slot any more than any other (besides the google algorithm that determines ranking).
  - mrep 7y ago
    > no one in their right mind thinks Google isn't a monopoly on search, I think that is more or less an established fact at this point. "A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity" [0]. Bing exists so by definition, you are wrong. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

slimscsi 7y ago

> The paying of creators definitely anti-competitive. Its actually very common practice and has been for a very long time (way before 2007). Once people get mindshare, they get offers. The top you tubers, twitch streamers, etc have negotiated contracts with terms that are very different that what a standard creator has. Think of it just like Hollywood. The top talents are sough after and franchises are built around them, the rest have to audition.

quocble 7y ago

Sort of hard to avoid google when they control 90% ads traffic.

devmunchies 7y ago

Haven’t used reddit in over a year and hardly visit YouTube. #1 competitor for my time is reading a book. The freedom and clarity I feel now that I’m not plugged in to these types of social networks makes me believe reddit is also “disgusting trash”.

eeeeeeeeeeeee 7y ago
I also am trying to read more books and unplug, but Reddit isn’t so bad if you find good sub-Reddit’s. The main site and default sub-Reddit’s are definitely trash, though. The same is true of YouTube if you heavily scrutinize your subscription list. It’s extremely annoying because there are pockets of communities that remind me of the Internet before the masses trashed it and everything was centralized around a handful of sites. I’ve been playing with Mastodon lately and that reminds me more of the 90s Internet.
xiphias2 7y ago
What's the problem with YouTube? If I'm interested in a subject / person, I try to both read about it and listen video about it / from him. I found that the two information sources are often complementary.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tasty_freeze 7y ago
You are painting with a very broad brush. There are tens of thousands of subreddits covering a dizzying array of topics. Many are low information garbage communities, but many are amazing resources that can't be found anywhere else. I'm not suggesting you change your personal choice, but as someone who is a sometimes member of those communities, I resent being called trash.
otakucode 7y ago
Book publishers let white nationalists, pedophiles, sex offenders, and others publish books. Books don't even have age gated ratings, so parents don't even have any idea what kind of content their children are consuming when they read a book. If you want disgusting trash, pick up 'In Defense of Elitism' sometime. It's the only book I have destroyed after reading several chapters. When you paint a medium or platform with a broad brush, and chastise them for not censoring it to your liking, you should at least check the alternative you're recommending is at least as censorial.

nemothekid 7y ago

>The paying of creators definitely anti-competitive It's really not any different than what Netflix is doing now, right? Discounting SEO, the major issue was that they didn't build their own ad network. You set up business in Google's front yard and didn't like it when they told you to get out. The ad network (or rather the monetization model) is the hardest part of building a video sharing site. If that part wasn't figured out then it's hard for me to believe you were actually serious about building a content network. Given how much this guy cried about how much money he is "owed" I'm less likely to believe he was slighted and more likely to believe he was a greedy exec who was in over his head.

dalore 7y ago
From the article: > he walked away with about $50 million when News Corp purchased my space. He should have walked away with a lot more He thinks that News Corp should have paid more for myspace? Because they got so much value from it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- metildaa 7y ago
  It does seem a bit out of proportion, News Corp bought a business that proceeded to sink. I think Peertube and other Fediverse stacks like Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed & Lemmy will continue to bleed users from more traditional sites over the next few years. They've significantly lowered the barriers to running your own social site, creating a great variety of communities that otherwise would be much smaller or non-existent.
  - dalore 7y ago
    Yes, MySpace wasn't making any money if I recall and so had no real business plan. Sounds like the same like the guy complaining. They don't have real business plans to make money except an exit strategy to sell it to someone else. Their revenue was going to come from adsense? And he's complaining about google cutting him off. He should have been thinking how to make money, like his own adsense.

pwinnski 7y ago

This is why people want Alphabet to be split up. Google is leveraging their monopoly position in online advertising to benefit their monopoly position in online video, as well as their monopoly position in online search.

Chris_Chambers 7y ago

Wow dude, you’re so above people who leave the shitty sites you like.

im3w1l 7y ago

You have your timeline mixed up. First they were dependent on Google. Then Google started competing. Then they were cut off.

thayne 7y ago

> Seriously, if you are building a google competitor, you probably need to use something other than adsense. That's kind of the point. Using Monopoly power in one industry (advertisement or search) to cripple a competitor in another (video) is kind of the definition of anti-competitive behavior.

zaphirplane 7y ago

I am assuming you are implying that a human in google made the decision to bury competition search results and deny the competition’s AdWords relationship and not benign factors like bad SEO or misbehaving website Google has been stung and made to show search results in an unbiased way with relation to their products. While it happened in the past the current monopoly, anticompetitive, antitrust commission in Europe California and some awaking Asian countries prevent that kind of behavior That is the crux of antitrust/monopoly protection commission. The reason the exist

harryf 7y ago

> Seriously, if you are building a google competitor, you probably need to use something other than adsense. And a reminder, adsense is a key revenue generation value add. OK but this story begins in 2006. At that time there basically was only Google for generating significant traffic. Facebook was growing and Twitter had just launched but neither had the size of audience (or real ad products) to generate the type of traffic Google could

lumberingjack 7y ago

>Checkout some of the reddit competitors, total disgusting trash. These people where on reddit up until recently you just never visited the subs that got banned. It took some loud squealing to make the admins do something, then the result was way worse. It made the "disgusting trash sites" and the people that use them more vigilant that why none are really growing.

thinkingemote 7y ago
Reddit has also changed how it wants it's users to use the site. Previously users would subscribe to a collection of subreddits and have a feed of them. Then a bunch of subreddits got banned and more quarantined. They labelled those who subscribed to a quarantined as a "community" and not just something you subbed to. Now any subreddit you "join" and "leave" and they have dropped the subscribe/unsubscribe wording further enforcing the isolated community angle of invested enthusiasts rather than the casual subscriber to random things. Now if you subscribe to some random subreddit you can be viewed as agreeing with all its postings and viewpoints where previously people wouldn't think this way about using the site. Things won't grow as they are aopealing to the hardcore focus users rather than the casual ones. Any competition would do well to appeal to the more casual and disconnected users.

sct202 7y ago

So I was looking at old blog posts about LiveVideo and saw a reference to a rumor that LiveVideo paid off creators to cause the initial jump from Youtube to LiveVideo. There might have been a lot of shady dealings on both sides, but it was so long ago someone from each side should be able to do a tell all with the actual details. http://willvideoforfood.com/2007/02/07/livevideo-vs-youtube-2/ http://willvideoforfood.com/2007/02/07/livevideo-vs-youtube-...