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Not entirely true. First the platform is free, but also is the content that people provide and without it Youtube wouldn't make sense - so it's not a free servi
by ivanhoe 6y ago
Not entirely true. First the platform is free, but also is the content that people provide and without it Youtube wouldn't make sense - so it's not a free service, it's a partnership. Second, for many people YouTube is the primary source of income, and I'm sure there would be plenty of content authors who'd be glad to pay a service with human moderators rather than bots - GIVEN THAT they get to keep access to the same traffic that YouTube provides. That's the key thing, you can't just go somewhere else when all the users are on a few popular platforms. If it's not for that, many high-profile authors who get their videos demonetized on stupidities would have left YouTube long time ago - but they can't, big players keep them in a checkmate position due to the form of monopoly on viewers that they have.
And that means you can't just say "If you don't like it, leave, it's a free service", because it's not that simple, as leaving in reality means "give up on your business", and most of people just can't afford that. Youtube has them cornered and thus needs to be careful, since it's not a game, it affects people's lives. For many accidental blocking of channel can mean they'll be living in their cars until the Gods of Google show mercy and fix the error.... and if they do it, since sometimes you don't even get a meaningful reply on what happened, just a template message.
- nautilus12 6y agoYou just described a monopoly
- pjanoman 6y agoWhat does youtube do that is monopolistic? Just because all users congregate onto one site doesn't mean that Youtube needs to be broken apart.
- sillysaurusx 6y agoI don't think Youtube necessarily needs to be broken apart, but they are a natural monopoly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly The cost to a competitor is in getting a user to switch. Think of it in terms of paying users: how much would you have to pay someone to switch from Youtube to your site? Multiply the average by the number of users, and that's the advantage Youtube has over competitors.
- yellowapple 6y agoYouTube doesn't really fit the definition of a natural monopoly, particularly because there's nothing fundamentally stopping other services from popping up. YouTube's status as an effective monopoly doesn't come from some sort of scarcity of the means of production. > The cost to a competitor is in getting a user to switch. Only if we're assuming that users and uploaders will only ever use exactly one service at any given time. No reason why that needs to be the case; nothing stopping people from uploading to YouTube and Vimeo and Twitch and DailyMotion and PornHub and LBRY and PeerTube and whatever other platforms, and nothing stopping people from viewing from those platforms, either.
- sillysaurusx 6y agoThen where is the YouTube competitor? The closest seems to be odysee (https://odysee.com/ https://odysee.com/) where you're lucky to break a few hundred views. Suppose YouTube disappeared tomorrow. Where would everyone go? Probably odysee. So why don't they go there now? That's why Youtube is a natural monopoly.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 6y agoI think it's Facebook and Instagram. You can put a video up there and a lot of people will watch it.
- yellowapple 6y ago> Then where is the YouTube competitor? I named multiple said competitors. And they seem to get plenty of traffic themselves. > So why don't they go there now? Do people know about odysee? First I've heard of it (to my recollection at least).
- visarga 6y ago> YouTube's status as an effective monopoly doesn't come from some sort of scarcity of the means of production. The problem here is in the network effect, not in scarcity.
- tomcooks 6y agoYeah the fact that said service is the very first result on a major search engine, who's conveniently the owner of said service, has nothing to do with it. Organic congregation and all.