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Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

134 points by ash110 5y ago

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?

wheybags 5y ago
CEO of vimeo will cry themself to sleep after reading this post
- Topgamer7 5y ago
  I remember a day where I preferred vimeo because of its support for higher resolutions...
- simonbarker87 5y ago
  They should make the platform quicker and more reliable then
- danpalmer 5y ago
  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.
  - IceWreck 5y ago
    > 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.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  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.
- wruza 5y ago
  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 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.
  - gregn 5y ago
    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.
KoftaBob 5y ago
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.
calferreira 5y ago
I think the only company that could probably compete with YouTube, although long term, is TikTok. If you think about it, it's like YouTube, just with smaller videos.
Jiro 5y ago
>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? Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
robomartin 5y ago
Not surprisingly, most of the answers on HN are from an engineering perspective. When I started selling the first products I designed and manufactured --decades ago-- I absolutely sucked at it. I was selling like an engineer thinks. Which means I was a horrible sales person. It wasn't until one of my friends, who happened to be one of my resellers, took me under his wing and taught me sales that I understood the process. It took somewhere around six to eight months for me to "see the light". Towards the end I could sell our products almost without saying a word about them. You are dealing with people, not robots. Everything you care about as an engineer is usually of no interest whatsoever to the buyer (that can be the case even for highly technical products). I think the answer is far simpler than the obvious go-to's in this case (established, network, google, infrastructure, technical blah, blah, etc.). Sure, those are factors, but this is about sales and sales is about psychology. Simple question: What would it take to sell anyone on Y and have them stop stop using X? Let's say X is a brand of forks and knives and Y is a different brand. Furthermore, assume they are free. Cost of the switch is exactly $0. Effort is also zero. You say "I want to switch to Y" and they magically appear in your kitchen and replace X. As easy as can be. Well, Y has to give you a reason strong enough to compel you to make the change. Call it value, if you will. The mythical "differentiation" with, perhaps, more attached to it than just being different. A few weeks ago I saw metal cutlery that was black. It looked beautiful. Same stainless steel material usually used for cutlery everyone if familiar with. Except, in this case, it was blackened, likely using a chemical process. If that was Y, it could inspire some to make the switch, just to be different. Maybe. More likely than that, they'll get Y and keep using X. Put a different way, if X works well and does everything you want it to do, there are very few reasons to change to Y. The company behind X might have to do something horrible to suddenly inspire mass exodus. I believe this is the case with YouTube/Google. What they do, they do well. The user experience is excellent. Yes, we all know about the ridiculous no-customer-service account suspensions where you lose all of your Google app access, etc. However, this is not the average user experience. In fact, I would venture to say that this is well outside two standard deviations from the mean, ridiculously outside of that. The area under the curve is deeply dominated by users who are satisfied to the extent that the thought of going elsewhere never really crosses their minds. When a user/customer/client can't be compelled to even think about Y when using X, the probability of them considering a switch is as close to zero as can be. The only way for someone to mount a solid effort against YouTube falls under two areas: A- By force. Spend billions advertising and educating the audience and, over time, if the product is good and the message is solid, N% of YouTube users would migrate. This would require so much money it would easily meet the definition of insanity. The cost of acquisition isn't likely to ever justify the investment. B- Cater to a deeply motivated audience to carve out a much smaller percentage of YouTube's audience. The most obvious audience I can identify in this moment in history is Trump's audience. Regardless of what the reader might thing of them, they have grievances with social media and YouTube that could be addressed by an alternative platform. The cost of acquisition, in this case, would be relatively low. In fact, I would not be surprised if most of the investment went into creating a solid infrastructure with only a modest marketing push to trigger network effects. Other than option B --which would only capture an audience in the tens of millions, and possibly grow it to >100million over time--- I can't see anything that would inspire people to leave YouTube behind. And, even with B, the same audience would continue to use YouTube, because, well, everything is already there and the user experience is good. B takes advantage of deep motivation for change. Without that, it simply isn't going to happen.
bdcravens 5y ago
Ask TikTok.
tomcooks 5y ago
Because they show up on top of searches. Wait until the freemium approach fails and they lose content producers, and they will pivot into something more approachable by competitors. If you would like to speed up the process refuse to login, support independent content producers and creators, and give search engines a reason to promote other platforms (don't click, simple as that)
chalcolithic 5y ago
How much does YouTube traffic cost? And for those of us who are not Google?
1cvmask 5y ago
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. https://rumble.com/ https://rumble.com/ Even though some high profile civil libertarian and free speech advocates like Glenn Greenwald and Zaid Jilani have chosen Rumble as home, YouTube is still lights years ahead. But if they continue to censor, alternative free speech platform will emerge.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  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.
  - sli 5y ago
    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.
    - wruza 5y ago
      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”?
  - jimbokun 5y ago
    It does... ...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.
2Gkashmiri 5y ago
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
- mattl 5y ago
  How does the experience compare for the average user? I’ve put things on Peertube only for the instance to shut down.
  - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
    tilvids.com check it and give your opinion
    - mattl 5y ago
      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.
      - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
        subtitles have to be added the video. youtube imo does this automatically for some videos but i am not sure https://framatube.org/w/217eefeb-883d-45be-b7fc-a788ad8507d3 https://framatube.org/w/217eefeb-883d-45be-b7fc-a788ad8507d3 here is a good video intro to peertube which has subtitles
        mattl 5y ago
        Those appear to be baked into the video. I can’t control how they look.
tehwebguy 5y ago
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.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
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?
- gtirloni 5y ago
  Google Search does video search across multiple platforms relatively well.
  - mohanmcgeek 5y ago
    I hardly see a non YouTube video on Google video search results
    - MiguelX413 5y ago
      It depends on what you're searching for, I often even get bilibili videos in Google video search results
betwixthewires 5y ago
It comes preinstalled on all mobile phones. 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.
- mattl 5y ago
  No longer preinstalled on iPhones. Not for a long while now since Apple’s app was discontinued in favor of Google’s own app.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    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.
  - ndiddy 5y ago
    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.
new_guy 5y ago
Rumble 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
- louhike 5y ago
  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)
  - mattl 5y ago
    Daily Motion seems to be a place where people just upload Jeopardy episodes and random movies and they don’t get taken down quickly.
- fullstop 5y ago
  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.
  - johnisgood 5y ago
    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.
belltaco 5y ago
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.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Yeah, I wonder what YouTube spends just keeping child pornography off the site. It surely isn’t a small amount.
strikelaserclaw 5y ago
content, and pure scale, video hosting is enormously expensive to do at scale, youtube is able to do so because it is backed by google.
xboxnolifes 5y ago
Competitors would have to make the content creators want to move their communities, knowing a large part of their community will not follow.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  But it's not all or nothing. You can have videos on two websites.
mattl 5y ago
Vimeo is the only thing that comes close. All the open source offerings lack the dedicated apps for dedicated media players. To be a serious alternative you’d need apps for Apple TV, Android TV, Roku plus iOS and Android and a solid desktop browser.
- NelsonMinar 5y ago
  Ironically, YouTube is about to lose its Roku app. Contract expires Dec 9 and the two children seem unable to share a playground.
  - mattl 5y ago
    Thanks for the heads up.
- dorkwood 5y ago
  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".
  - randomluck040 5y ago
    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.
WJW 5y ago
> 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.
- mrschultz93 5y ago
  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.
- tw04 5y ago
  >or porn 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.
  - psyc 5y ago
    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.
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    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.
mgamache 5y ago
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).
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  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.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    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.
    - betwixthewires 5y ago
      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.
subpixel 5y ago
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. To wit: https://www.offcenterharbor.com https://www.offcenterharbor.com
ravenstine 5y ago
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.
- gwbas1c 5y ago
  The content may have matured, but has YouTube really changed? 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.)
  - randomdata 5y ago
    > but has YouTube really changed? 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.
_hyn3 5y ago
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?
- jedimastert 5y ago
  YT seems to think so, they've basically made a mini-TT experience with the shorts.
- ItsMonkk 5y ago
  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?
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    I often want to see some of those 5 later, but just not now. I suspect that’s common enough that YT’s algorithms have learned that.
    - ItsMonkk 5y ago
      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.
gdudeman 5y ago
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.
AlwaysRock 5y ago
It does. Vimeo is probably the most popular YouTube alternative. But YouTube has a community that I don't know of any other video platform having.
sp332 5y ago
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.
jrm4 5y ago
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.
- gwbas1c 5y ago
  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?
deadalus 5y ago
Youtube Alternatives : Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube
jimmytucson 5y ago
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.
zuminator 5y ago
bilibili in China Niconico in Japan
- michaelyuan2012 5y ago
  bilibili is good. if anyone want, also can check the video of trailer, https://www.dreamtruegroup.com/diesel-tank-trailer/ https://www.dreamtruegroup.com/diesel-tank-trailer/
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
They were anticompetitive using multiple illegal tricks. Their competitors like dailymotion or vimeo couldn't compete for years. Now that google is under antitrust investigation around the world. They have started operating properly and that's why you get an ad every 12 seconds. Twitch only survived because big daddy amazon came in with the same deal as google. We will now see players like rumble finally taking off.
ageitgey 5y ago
YouTube is a huge technical achievement that would require billions of dollars to replicate: 1. It consumes nearly unlimited bandwidth. 2. It consumes nearly unlimited CPU for transcoding and serving media at different bitrates. 3. It consumes massive resources to police, from user moderation to appeasing content owners by building systems and databases like ContentID, etc. 4. It generates endless PR and legal headaches, which also costs a lot of money. 5. A huge amount of work has gone into getting users hooked through algorithms that seek to maximize watch time. 6. A huge amount of work has gone into building a network of advertisers who want to pay to put their ads on the platform. 7. And importantly, a huge amount of work has gone into building up an ecosystem of video producers who make their entire living off of YouTube and spend countless hours producing content for them at no cost to YouTube. Obviously YouTube isn't giving out Golden Play Button plaques out of the kindness of their heart. That's marketing. And despite all this, Youtube almost always works perfectly for almost all users. People click on their phones and the videos just play - all around the world, even while traveling on transit, etc. There are very few companies who have the resources to attempt to compete with that. Vimeo has obviously given up targeting the same mass market audience. Other competitors without unlimited deep pockets can't seem to make a dent. It's a lot like asking why doesn't someone just make "a better Google." Unless you have unlimited resources and an unlimited budget, it probably isn't possible. It's smarter to make something else tangental in video that can outcompete Google instead of facing them head on. See: Twitch, TikTok, etc.
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  Sounds like PornHub or similar could easily branch into providing a separate service for general videos if they wanted. They already have all this stuff down for the most part.
  - Zanni 5y ago
    They may not have to even offer a separate service. There's a math tutor sharing his lessons on PornHub already: https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyp8wa/math-tutor-video-lessons-pornhub-changhsu https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyp8wa/math-tutor-video-less...
somesortofthing 5y ago
Because Youtube can only make sense to run within Google. Youtube's actual service of providing free HD streaming video in exchange for showing the viewers ads is not, has never been, and cannot be profitable. Totally free, unlimited HD video streaming is just too expensive. It can only exist as part of a huge conglomerate because the only purpose Youtube can serve is to attract people into the ecosystem it's part of. No other company has an ecosystem valuable enough to justify losing that much money on Youtube.
- mohanmcgeek 5y ago
  The day Google shows a split up between YouTube ad revenue vs the rest, it's going to be an AWS moment. I don't know why people believe YouTube is a loss maker. My guess is that it makes up 25% of the ad income
  - zokier 5y ago
    Alphabet has been reporting youtube ad revenue separately since last year or so: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-alphabet-earnings-revenue-first-time-reveal-q4-2019 https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al... In their latest (Q3/21) report they are hairs breadth away from Netflix revenue figures: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/youtube-q3-2021-earnings-1235036727/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/youtube-q... Considering that Netflix is profitable with the immense cost of producing their own content, I don't find it far fetched that Youtube would be profitable too (albeit with very different cost structure).
  - Nasrudith 5y ago
    Fixed expectations from before Google bought them/it was stand-alone profitable perhaps? Although people got over the image of Amazon not making any money.
handrous 5y ago
Because RSS/Atom subscriptions as the standard for following things you like, across websites, didn't really catch on, in part because no browsers (or mobile OS vendors) really championed the feature in their UX to make it better than having lots of interfaces on different sites (looking at you, Firefox—add it to the list of dropped balls). Because network effects let them pay creators more, so of course creators tend to stick around. Because people default to searching on Youtube for videos, and Youtube Search only searches Youtube, rather than being like Google Video Search. > What would a competitor need to take on them? A shitload of VC cash to burn on both data transfer / CDN buildout and paying prominent YouTubers way more than they're making you in exchange for exclusive videos (time limited would probably be fine, e.g. 1 year exclusivity). Also, maybe, integrate something like Patreon directly.
ARandumGuy 5y ago
1) Video hosting is very expensive, due to high bandwidth and storage requirements. This is made worse when emulating YouTube, with its "anyone can upload for free, and anyone can view for free" model. 2) YouTube is an entrenched platform with a huge audience and wide reach. This causes a positive feedback loop where creators upload to YouTube because that's where the viewers are, and viewers flock to YouTube because that's where the creators are. This means that any creator that wants to upload elsewhere will struggle to find an audience, and any viewer looking to switch will lack content to view. This means that few companies have the resources to even attempt to compete with YouTube, and those that do struggle to find consistent users. YouTube certainly has its issues, but there isn't an obvious way for a major competitor to enter the space.
jokoon 5y ago
Gfycat and imgur are pretty good alternative to post videos. Youtube is good for large videos, gfycat is good for short ones, but honestly, I would really favor video platforms who offer direct access to the file. And since it's pretty common knowledge that videos need to be short to get views (free content, short attention span), hosting longer videos is more appropriate for platforms like netflix (entertainment, paid). Youtube is dominating because it existed prior to html5 videos, since it used flash. Now, h264 is everywhere and easily accessible. Online, ubiquitous videos don't require 4K, that's mostly for entertainment. 4K is okay for short videos maybe. Youtube is really awful in many many ways, it has become so big it's acting like a news channel (removing content etc). It has become too big to fail, while I'm pretty sure there are terabytes of video that are almost never watched. When you compartmentalize the types of youtube videos, its competitors are spotify for music, netflix for youtube red, gfycat and cousins for shorts, etc. Platforms like patreon are much better suited to support creators. Not to mention the ecological impact of such a large platform.
bryanlarsen 5y ago
Any viable YouTube competitor is going to be considerably different from YouTube. I would argue that both TikTok and Netflix are very successful YouTube competitors.
pjfin123 5y ago
https://odysee.com https://odysee.com
bla3 5y ago
In addition to the other comments pointing out the moat, it's also just a good product. There's some controversy here or there, but the watching experience is fast and good, it's available almost everywhere (phones, laptop, smart tvs, consoles, ...), and it just works well. If someone hosts something on Vimeo, I always perceive that as giving users a worse experience just to make a point. Vimeo embeds don't sync how far I've watched across devices. It doesn't even remember it in a single tab on a single device. (Maybe that's because I don't have a Vimeo account but I do have a YouTube account. But that's part of the mount.)
ztauras 5y ago
Joe Rogan moved away, and it seems he is losing influence. https://www.sportskeeda.com/mma/news-monthly-listeners-joe-rogan-spotify https://www.sportskeeda.com/mma/news-monthly-listeners-joe-r...
- clarge1120 5y ago
  Spotify employees, not a tolerant group, has been pushing to have Rogan deplatformed since he moved to Spotify. Yet, his reach has increased dramatically even while the listener numbers, according to this source, had decreased.
iancmceachern 5y ago
It's interesting that many content producers are starting to create their own websites, complete with ad free and extended content. I predict YouTube will become like Pandora was. Used for discovery but when folks want to deep dive on a specific content producer you go to their site or content portal directly.
wastedhours 5y ago
What use-case of YouTube would you want a competitor to though? Personal video hosting? Independent creator video distribution? Social network for video? Music video streaming? One of the greatest achievements of YouTube is basically serving countless audiences and numerous use-cases under the guise of a single service. You'd need to roll-up WhatsApp video sharing, Vimeo, Facebook Watch/Tik Tok/IG Reels, MTV, and then throw the aspirational element of creator payments over the top of it. I'd question whether anyone would actually want to do all of that.
HamburgerEmoji 5y ago
All a competitor needs to do for me to prefer them is not be part of the Ministry of Truth, i.e., to not set itself up as the arbiter of whether information is correct. It should know its role: to store and play videos and such. Odysee, Rumble, Bitchute, Gab TV, NewTube, all of these fit the bill. All of these are very valuable in an era when censorship has been normalized.
ergonaught 5y ago
Because AMZN and maybe MSFT have not yet decided there is sufficient revenue potential attached to it. The other contenders don’t have the various resources or would do it “wrong enough” it wouldn’t matter.
- ju-st 5y ago
  AMZN has Twitch which is a competitor.
zitterbewegung 5y ago
YouTube is sort of like Craigslist for videos and their competitors generally target either something they can do like Twitch and Instagram or something they can’t do.
anderspitman 5y ago
I don't think we'll see a real competitor to YouTube until someone manages to decouple hosting from discovery. No startup can compete with free unlimited video hosting. But it would be relatively easy to make a better discovery algorithm. The problem is the network effects moat. But I think if you started in a specific community (say tech talks or ASMR) it might work.
- kypro 5y ago
  YouTube used to have a 10 minute video limit. While I like that 1,2 or even 3 hour podcasts can now be uploaded in a single YouTube video, other than that I honestly probably wouldn't even notice if suddenly every video on YouTube was under 10 minutes. Same with things like full-HD / 4k support. I'm fine with 720p 99% of the time. In most cases I suspect a video hosting service with a 10 minute video limit and a 420p / 720p resolution would suffice just fine. IMO what YouTube alternatives should focus on is being unique and different from YouTube in someway -- at least initially. Maybe focus on short-form video and build algorithms and moderation tools that ensure users are only served extremely high quality videos. Perhaps a video service providing something like a daily digest of the best daily / weekly videos that match your preferences could work. As the platform grows it could then increase the allowed video length and expand into a more general video hosting service like YouTube. We see this trend in social media all the time, Facebook has a lot of competitors, but non of them are competing directly with Facebook. They're all doing something a little different and a little better than Facebook.
baby 5y ago
Dailymotion? Youku? Fb watch?
PascLeRasc 5y ago
Youtube makes it pretty easy to search for videos and watch without an account, and the other big platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok go out of their way to make sure you can't do that.
- silvershell 5y ago
  About making it easy to search... Do you know if there's a way to limit your searches to only the channels you're subscribed to?
tonfreed 5y ago
Rumble just received a major investment, and has been the streaming alternative for when people got banned off YouTube. There's also LBRY/Odysee and Bitchute. I quite like Odysee and use it a lot.
webinvest 5y ago
Nebula is pretty good but they need downvote / upvote options or some method of curating bad videos from good videos.
wodenokoto 5y ago
There are some in the Chinese market, but I don't know which are left. There used to be a few real contenders, like Vimeo, but Vimeo simply couldn't afford to host videos to all markets. Japanese Nico Nico is the 34th most visited site in Japan, so I guess they are still doing okay. For certain things, I think Twitch is very much a real competitor, and I think the best example to answer your question, on what a competitor would need to get an in on the market - a unique twist on video hosting. Personally I consider Netflix, HBO and Disney+ the biggest competitors. It's basically the internet version of cable vs terrestrial TV, imho. Youtube isn't so much about sharing your vacation video, as it is a platform to turn amateur content creators into professional content creators (with an odd side hustles of hosting professional music videos).
bdcravens 5y ago
A time machine to travel back to 2005.
rognjen 5y ago
Other than a variety of technical reasons already mentioned, I think VEVO is an amazing moat that would be very difficult for even the most funded of competitors to cross.
- mohanmcgeek 5y ago
  This would have been a moat in 2013. But these days, at least where I live, I get music videos on my music app. And maybe it's just me but music videos don't have the same traction that they used to have. There are so many chart toppers that I've listened to often for which I hadn't watched the video for a very long time. Compare this to 2011 where we discovered songs, including Gangnam style, on YouTube charts.
  - rognjen 5y ago
    In general, that's a good point. It's not as important as it used to be, you're right. But I'd definitely not discount it entirely simply because not everyone has access or can afford to pay for the music apps, particularly in developing countries.
motohagiography 5y ago
This question is framed to preclude the answer. The real competitor won't be a video hosting service, it will be a content monetization model competitive to advertising. Even content monetization is a weak way of thinking about it, because by abstracting it from the people who want a certain kind of content, you've pre-defined your solution as just another tech without a clear market (a non-product). The question of "I have all these videos, how do I sell them?" is completely different from, "How do I sell videos?" or "What will these people really pay for and how does video distribution get it to them?" The question isn't how to reinvent streaming, it's how to discover something someone will pay for. Youtube's product isn't content, their product is the distribution it provides to people who make it - and a combination of the data and channel it provides to advertisers. That's what they sell. So, do you really want to make another product for advertisers? Even if you really like advertisers and did, investing in another video streaming platform seems like the least smart way to do that right now. The next real competitor to youtube will look more like AppleTV than Rumble. Arguably, if I will pay $15.99 for a season of Ancient Aliens, I'll pay $7.99 for all of 3blue1brown. It's a different monetization model, and that's the real competition. If I wanted to make a video streaming product, I would pop up a level and find a market then determine whether their need was more for produced content, or for distribution, and then solve for the economics of that desire. The quesiton isn't how do I monetize this landfill of content, the real question is, who is this customer and what do they want? I've thought some of this through, and reach out via my profile if you are with a company that is serious about this.
mohanmcgeek 5y ago
Everybody here seems to be focusing on the YouTube the video hosting platform which has a lot of competitors: p2p video platforms, edtech websites, paid history YouTube streams, a gazillion VOD platforms in my country, all the tiktok clones that consume just enough bandwidth. Video hosting isn't hard, relatively speaking. Instead, YouTube the video search engine is the product without any competition. And since people search for a video on YouTube and not on odysee or peertube, these other platforms have poor video discoverablity. On these platforms I tend to watch creators that I already found using YouTube. The video search is what somebody building a competitor needs to be focusing on.
danielrhodes 5y ago
YouTube does have competitors: Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Netflix. YouTube is a clear winner in a few big categories, but video is a huge market and they haven’t gotten an edge on anything new in awhile, for example short form.
bullen 5y ago
Twitch is the evolution of YouTube and Twitch has an open-source competitor, the question is rather why is nobody using the competition? Look at Mixer, and in specific Shrouds transition to Mixer. Almost nobody followed him there. When he came back to Twitch he was the single biggest streamer they have ever had with 200K+ viewers. Technology is feature monopolistic as long as it's "free", the evolution always happens by constructive destruction. Eventually there will be something that replaces Twitch by being _fundamentally_ better at capturing our attention without needing OBS. People that haven't moved to Twitch from YouTube simply do not know Twitch exists or haven't tried it because they lack time. Or maybe the transition is going from passive to active and some people wish to stay passive? As for video anyone with a computer and a range capable HTTP server can distribute it, the problem is competing with bandwidth.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  I view twitch and youtube as two completely different types of content. Twitch is livestreaming and youtube is prepared, scripted content. Sorta like 24/7 cable news channels vs a documentary or drama series. A lot of people have a preference for one or the other and I definitely prefer the latter. Especially since the "news" that happens on twitch often seems to be twitch-specific drama.
  - bullen 5y ago
    Twitch is not for news! It serves only two purposes: entertainment and community. Large streamers have humor, but chat is completely meaningless with them. Small streamers (mostly gamedev) are the community that is meaningful. It's surpisingly small still, only a few thousand viewers that all watch many of the same devs. Game development is really the only meaningful thing you can do today that does not involve energy (food, heat and water = electricity).
    - SahAssar 5y ago
      I didn't mean it was for news, I meant that the "live-ness" of it seems to be the main selling point for it. > Game development is really the only meaningful thing you can do today that does not involve energy I don't even know what you are trying to say with this. What makes game development more or less "meaningful" than other activities? How does game development not require energy?
dangoljames 5y ago
Youtube beeds a peer to peer competitor.
sharemywin 5y ago
Why compete with yesterday?
WheelsAtLarge 5y ago
It's mostly free and meets people's expectations. Also, one of the driving goals of silicon valley companies is to grow as large as possible as soon as possible so that it becomes a competitive advantage. At some point, it's impossible to complete against a giant even if the product is easy to replicate. Googles also has an ad network that finances the product's development and on going maintenance. So a competitor would have to compete against both giants to at least get a foothold. At this point, the only way to get competitors against YouTube is for the government to get involved and help the new companies in some way. One possible competitor is for a confederation of organizations to get together and produce a product. They would have to have a product that's at least as good and be willing to accept losses for a time. Also they have to stay together and act together as a force of one. It's unlikely to happen. I would say that a competitor would have to start by building an ad network first so that there's some money to finance a YouTube like product. The true competition is the one for people's attention. Find a product that can best get people's attention and you have chance to succeed against Google and YouTube.
cuddlybacon 5y ago
e
- extra88 5y ago
  > Users are going to upload copyrighted material, and the law says that's the platform's responsibility. The law says the opposite, this is what Section 230 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is about. The platform is responsible for acting upon takedown requests from copyright holders. Everything YouTube negotiated with major copyright holders is extralegal.
jfoster 5y ago
Viewers want to go where the content is. Content creators want to go where the users are.
laumars 5y ago
YouTube does have competition: TikTok (there is a reason YouTube released “shorts”), Twitch and Facebook (which also supports live streaming). Vimeo, Metacafe and Dailymotion used to be a lot more competitive with YouTube too. In some cases even having a larger market share than YT at one point. Plus there are plenty of adult streaming services too albeit they don’t directly compete due to YouTubes rules about video content. I think a large part of YouTubes success was because Google bought them back when Googles reputation was still top notch. I remember being indifferent about YouTube (even preferring Vimeo and Metacafe) but started using TouTube because of Google’s tie in. Now I use it in spite of Google.
Xorakios 5y ago
I am truly not trying to be snarky, but so it goes. Does anyone on HN actually still have YouTube videos playable on their machines? Why? Text is so much faster to learn from and without sound and video baggage that gets added. I understand people raised on MTV and Snapchat caring about video for fun and not caring about the wasted time. But isn't this a community focused on productivity and knowledge? YouTube is the opposite of that. Might as well watch sports or hanging out in bars. ;)
- shaftway 5y ago
  I'm unlikely to learn a new coding pattern on YouTube. But I have learned a ton of woodworking techniques from watching build videos. There are a ton of little techniques along the way that are innate to people who have been in the industry for years and thus wouldn't be in written instructions, but I can see them and pick them up from a video. It's really hard to describe the technique for some of the resin work out there too, like getting realistic looking waterlines. Or when I'm stuck at a certain point in a game it's a lot easier to see a video of someone doing it than read a half-assed description.
- minimoose 5y ago
  for me yt does podcast & music well. just download w/e for a jog. (really i would prefer to read a book but i need the exercise) as for tutorials sometimes it helps to see what's going on (like with painting or audio design), sometimes if I'm limiting to reading a book I can easily fool myself about what I know. solving pre-made problems help but is still limiting.
dazsnow 5y ago
Bilibili
hermitsings 5y ago
Apparently, Google's strategy is to target the middle class (Eric Scmhidt said in some interview) which is like the majority of population in any country. Then to give them incentives to use their platform. This worked for Youtube by giving creators money and in some countries when they wanted adoption for their payment apps, they gave back good cashbacks as rewards. The cashbacks diminished after sufficient adoption was attained.
bradgessler 5y ago
All I want is to be able to pay to remove ads without also having to pay for a YouTube music subscription.
nprateem 5y ago
It was first. Read Positioning by Reis for why this matters and why nothing will ever beat YouTube head on.

134 points by ash110 5y ago

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?

wheybags 5y ago

CEO of vimeo will cry themself to sleep after reading this post

Topgamer7 5y ago
I remember a day where I preferred vimeo because of its support for higher resolutions...
simonbarker87 5y ago
They should make the platform quicker and more reliable then
danpalmer 5y ago
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.
- IceWreck 5y ago
  > 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.
LegitShady 5y ago
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.
wruza 5y ago
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 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.
- gregn 5y ago
  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.

KoftaBob 5y ago

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.

calferreira 5y ago

I think the only company that could probably compete with YouTube, although long term, is TikTok. If you think about it, it's like YouTube, just with smaller videos.

Jiro 5y ago

>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? Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

robomartin 5y ago

Not surprisingly, most of the answers on HN are from an engineering perspective. When I started selling the first products I designed and manufactured --decades ago-- I absolutely sucked at it. I was selling like an engineer thinks. Which means I was a horrible sales person. It wasn't until one of my friends, who happened to be one of my resellers, took me under his wing and taught me sales that I understood the process. It took somewhere around six to eight months for me to "see the light". Towards the end I could sell our products almost without saying a word about them. You are dealing with people, not robots. Everything you care about as an engineer is usually of no interest whatsoever to the buyer (that can be the case even for highly technical products). I think the answer is far simpler than the obvious go-to's in this case (established, network, google, infrastructure, technical blah, blah, etc.). Sure, those are factors, but this is about sales and sales is about psychology. Simple question: What would it take to sell anyone on Y and have them stop stop using X? Let's say X is a brand of forks and knives and Y is a different brand. Furthermore, assume they are free. Cost of the switch is exactly $0. Effort is also zero. You say "I want to switch to Y" and they magically appear in your kitchen and replace X. As easy as can be. Well, Y has to give you a reason strong enough to compel you to make the change. Call it value, if you will. The mythical "differentiation" with, perhaps, more attached to it than just being different. A few weeks ago I saw metal cutlery that was black. It looked beautiful. Same stainless steel material usually used for cutlery everyone if familiar with. Except, in this case, it was blackened, likely using a chemical process. If that was Y, it could inspire some to make the switch, just to be different. Maybe. More likely than that, they'll get Y and keep using X. Put a different way, if X works well and does everything you want it to do, there are very few reasons to change to Y. The company behind X might have to do something horrible to suddenly inspire mass exodus. I believe this is the case with YouTube/Google. What they do, they do well. The user experience is excellent. Yes, we all know about the ridiculous no-customer-service account suspensions where you lose all of your Google app access, etc. However, this is not the average user experience. In fact, I would venture to say that this is well outside two standard deviations from the mean, ridiculously outside of that. The area under the curve is deeply dominated by users who are satisfied to the extent that the thought of going elsewhere never really crosses their minds. When a user/customer/client can't be compelled to even think about Y when using X, the probability of them considering a switch is as close to zero as can be. The only way for someone to mount a solid effort against YouTube falls under two areas: A- By force. Spend billions advertising and educating the audience and, over time, if the product is good and the message is solid, N% of YouTube users would migrate. This would require so much money it would easily meet the definition of insanity. The cost of acquisition isn't likely to ever justify the investment. B- Cater to a deeply motivated audience to carve out a much smaller percentage of YouTube's audience. The most obvious audience I can identify in this moment in history is Trump's audience. Regardless of what the reader might thing of them, they have grievances with social media and YouTube that could be addressed by an alternative platform. The cost of acquisition, in this case, would be relatively low. In fact, I would not be surprised if most of the investment went into creating a solid infrastructure with only a modest marketing push to trigger network effects. Other than option B --which would only capture an audience in the tens of millions, and possibly grow it to >100million over time--- I can't see anything that would inspire people to leave YouTube behind. And, even with B, the same audience would continue to use YouTube, because, well, everything is already there and the user experience is good. B takes advantage of deep motivation for change. Without that, it simply isn't going to happen.

bdcravens 5y ago

Ask TikTok.

tomcooks 5y ago

Because they show up on top of searches. Wait until the freemium approach fails and they lose content producers, and they will pivot into something more approachable by competitors. If you would like to speed up the process refuse to login, support independent content producers and creators, and give search engines a reason to promote other platforms (don't click, simple as that)

chalcolithic 5y ago

How much does YouTube traffic cost? And for those of us who are not Google?

1cvmask 5y ago

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. https://rumble.com/ https://rumble.com/ Even though some high profile civil libertarian and free speech advocates like Glenn Greenwald and Zaid Jilani have chosen Rumble as home, YouTube is still lights years ahead. But if they continue to censor, alternative free speech platform will emerge.

formerly_proven 5y ago
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.
- sli 5y ago
  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.
  - wruza 5y ago
    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”?
- jimbokun 5y ago
  It does... ...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.

2Gkashmiri 5y ago

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

mattl 5y ago
How does the experience compare for the average user? I’ve put things on Peertube only for the instance to shut down.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
  tilvids.com check it and give your opinion
  - mattl 5y ago
    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.
    - 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
      subtitles have to be added the video. youtube imo does this automatically for some videos but i am not sure https://framatube.org/w/217eefeb-883d-45be-b7fc-a788ad8507d3 https://framatube.org/w/217eefeb-883d-45be-b7fc-a788ad8507d3 here is a good video intro to peertube which has subtitles
      - mattl 5y ago
        Those appear to be baked into the video. I can’t control how they look.

tehwebguy 5y ago

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.

BitwiseFool 5y ago

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?

gtirloni 5y ago
Google Search does video search across multiple platforms relatively well.
- mohanmcgeek 5y ago
  I hardly see a non YouTube video on Google video search results
  - MiguelX413 5y ago
    It depends on what you're searching for, I often even get bilibili videos in Google video search results

betwixthewires 5y ago

It comes preinstalled on all mobile phones. 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.

mattl 5y ago
No longer preinstalled on iPhones. Not for a long while now since Apple’s app was discontinued in favor of Google’s own app.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  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.
- ndiddy 5y ago
  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.

new_guy 5y ago

Rumble 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

louhike 5y ago
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)
- mattl 5y ago
  Daily Motion seems to be a place where people just upload Jeopardy episodes and random movies and they don’t get taken down quickly.
fullstop 5y ago
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.
- johnisgood 5y ago
  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.

belltaco 5y ago

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.

MattGaiser 5y ago
Yeah, I wonder what YouTube spends just keeping child pornography off the site. It surely isn’t a small amount.

strikelaserclaw 5y ago

content, and pure scale, video hosting is enormously expensive to do at scale, youtube is able to do so because it is backed by google.

xboxnolifes 5y ago

Competitors would have to make the content creators want to move their communities, knowing a large part of their community will not follow.

betwixthewires 5y ago
But it's not all or nothing. You can have videos on two websites.

mattl 5y ago

Vimeo is the only thing that comes close. All the open source offerings lack the dedicated apps for dedicated media players. To be a serious alternative you’d need apps for Apple TV, Android TV, Roku plus iOS and Android and a solid desktop browser.

NelsonMinar 5y ago
Ironically, YouTube is about to lose its Roku app. Contract expires Dec 9 and the two children seem unable to share a playground.
- mattl 5y ago
  Thanks for the heads up.
dorkwood 5y ago
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".
- randomluck040 5y ago
  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.

WJW 5y ago

> 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.

mrschultz93 5y ago
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.
tw04 5y ago
>or porn 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.
- psyc 5y ago
  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.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  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.

mgamache 5y ago

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).

betwixthewires 5y ago
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.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  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.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    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.

subpixel 5y ago

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. To wit: https://www.offcenterharbor.com https://www.offcenterharbor.com

ravenstine 5y ago

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.

gwbas1c 5y ago
The content may have matured, but has YouTube really changed? 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.)
- randomdata 5y ago
  > but has YouTube really changed? 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.

_hyn3 5y ago

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?

jedimastert 5y ago
YT seems to think so, they've basically made a mini-TT experience with the shorts.
ItsMonkk 5y ago
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?
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I often want to see some of those 5 later, but just not now. I suspect that’s common enough that YT’s algorithms have learned that.
  - ItsMonkk 5y ago
    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.

gdudeman 5y ago

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.

AlwaysRock 5y ago

It does. Vimeo is probably the most popular YouTube alternative. But YouTube has a community that I don't know of any other video platform having.

sp332 5y ago

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.

jrm4 5y ago

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.

gwbas1c 5y ago
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?

deadalus 5y ago

Youtube Alternatives : Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube

jimmytucson 5y ago

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.

zuminator 5y ago

bilibili in China Niconico in Japan

michaelyuan2012 5y ago
bilibili is good. if anyone want, also can check the video of trailer, https://www.dreamtruegroup.com/diesel-tank-trailer/ https://www.dreamtruegroup.com/diesel-tank-trailer/

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

They were anticompetitive using multiple illegal tricks. Their competitors like dailymotion or vimeo couldn't compete for years. Now that google is under antitrust investigation around the world. They have started operating properly and that's why you get an ad every 12 seconds. Twitch only survived because big daddy amazon came in with the same deal as google. We will now see players like rumble finally taking off.

ageitgey 5y ago

YouTube is a huge technical achievement that would require billions of dollars to replicate: 1. It consumes nearly unlimited bandwidth. 2. It consumes nearly unlimited CPU for transcoding and serving media at different bitrates. 3. It consumes massive resources to police, from user moderation to appeasing content owners by building systems and databases like ContentID, etc. 4. It generates endless PR and legal headaches, which also costs a lot of money. 5. A huge amount of work has gone into getting users hooked through algorithms that seek to maximize watch time. 6. A huge amount of work has gone into building a network of advertisers who want to pay to put their ads on the platform. 7. And importantly, a huge amount of work has gone into building up an ecosystem of video producers who make their entire living off of YouTube and spend countless hours producing content for them at no cost to YouTube. Obviously YouTube isn't giving out Golden Play Button plaques out of the kindness of their heart. That's marketing. And despite all this, Youtube almost always works perfectly for almost all users. People click on their phones and the videos just play - all around the world, even while traveling on transit, etc. There are very few companies who have the resources to attempt to compete with that. Vimeo has obviously given up targeting the same mass market audience. Other competitors without unlimited deep pockets can't seem to make a dent. It's a lot like asking why doesn't someone just make "a better Google." Unless you have unlimited resources and an unlimited budget, it probably isn't possible. It's smarter to make something else tangental in video that can outcompete Google instead of facing them head on. See: Twitch, TikTok, etc.

jimmaswell 5y ago
Sounds like PornHub or similar could easily branch into providing a separate service for general videos if they wanted. They already have all this stuff down for the most part.
- Zanni 5y ago
  They may not have to even offer a separate service. There's a math tutor sharing his lessons on PornHub already: https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyp8wa/math-tutor-video-lessons-pornhub-changhsu https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyp8wa/math-tutor-video-less...

somesortofthing 5y ago

Because Youtube can only make sense to run within Google. Youtube's actual service of providing free HD streaming video in exchange for showing the viewers ads is not, has never been, and cannot be profitable. Totally free, unlimited HD video streaming is just too expensive. It can only exist as part of a huge conglomerate because the only purpose Youtube can serve is to attract people into the ecosystem it's part of. No other company has an ecosystem valuable enough to justify losing that much money on Youtube.

mohanmcgeek 5y ago
The day Google shows a split up between YouTube ad revenue vs the rest, it's going to be an AWS moment. I don't know why people believe YouTube is a loss maker. My guess is that it makes up 25% of the ad income
- zokier 5y ago
  Alphabet has been reporting youtube ad revenue separately since last year or so: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-alphabet-earnings-revenue-first-time-reveal-q4-2019 https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al... In their latest (Q3/21) report they are hairs breadth away from Netflix revenue figures: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/youtube-q3-2021-earnings-1235036727/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/youtube-q... Considering that Netflix is profitable with the immense cost of producing their own content, I don't find it far fetched that Youtube would be profitable too (albeit with very different cost structure).
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  Fixed expectations from before Google bought them/it was stand-alone profitable perhaps? Although people got over the image of Amazon not making any money.

handrous 5y ago

Because RSS/Atom subscriptions as the standard for following things you like, across websites, didn't really catch on, in part because no browsers (or mobile OS vendors) really championed the feature in their UX to make it better than having lots of interfaces on different sites (looking at you, Firefox—add it to the list of dropped balls). Because network effects let them pay creators more, so of course creators tend to stick around. Because people default to searching on Youtube for videos, and Youtube Search only searches Youtube, rather than being like Google Video Search. > What would a competitor need to take on them? A shitload of VC cash to burn on both data transfer / CDN buildout and paying prominent YouTubers way more than they're making you in exchange for exclusive videos (time limited would probably be fine, e.g. 1 year exclusivity). Also, maybe, integrate something like Patreon directly.

ARandumGuy 5y ago

1) Video hosting is very expensive, due to high bandwidth and storage requirements. This is made worse when emulating YouTube, with its "anyone can upload for free, and anyone can view for free" model. 2) YouTube is an entrenched platform with a huge audience and wide reach. This causes a positive feedback loop where creators upload to YouTube because that's where the viewers are, and viewers flock to YouTube because that's where the creators are. This means that any creator that wants to upload elsewhere will struggle to find an audience, and any viewer looking to switch will lack content to view. This means that few companies have the resources to even attempt to compete with YouTube, and those that do struggle to find consistent users. YouTube certainly has its issues, but there isn't an obvious way for a major competitor to enter the space.

jokoon 5y ago

Gfycat and imgur are pretty good alternative to post videos. Youtube is good for large videos, gfycat is good for short ones, but honestly, I would really favor video platforms who offer direct access to the file. And since it's pretty common knowledge that videos need to be short to get views (free content, short attention span), hosting longer videos is more appropriate for platforms like netflix (entertainment, paid). Youtube is dominating because it existed prior to html5 videos, since it used flash. Now, h264 is everywhere and easily accessible. Online, ubiquitous videos don't require 4K, that's mostly for entertainment. 4K is okay for short videos maybe. Youtube is really awful in many many ways, it has become so big it's acting like a news channel (removing content etc). It has become too big to fail, while I'm pretty sure there are terabytes of video that are almost never watched. When you compartmentalize the types of youtube videos, its competitors are spotify for music, netflix for youtube red, gfycat and cousins for shorts, etc. Platforms like patreon are much better suited to support creators. Not to mention the ecological impact of such a large platform.

bryanlarsen 5y ago

Any viable YouTube competitor is going to be considerably different from YouTube. I would argue that both TikTok and Netflix are very successful YouTube competitors.

pjfin123 5y ago

https://odysee.com https://odysee.com

bla3 5y ago

In addition to the other comments pointing out the moat, it's also just a good product. There's some controversy here or there, but the watching experience is fast and good, it's available almost everywhere (phones, laptop, smart tvs, consoles, ...), and it just works well. If someone hosts something on Vimeo, I always perceive that as giving users a worse experience just to make a point. Vimeo embeds don't sync how far I've watched across devices. It doesn't even remember it in a single tab on a single device. (Maybe that's because I don't have a Vimeo account but I do have a YouTube account. But that's part of the mount.)

ztauras 5y ago

Joe Rogan moved away, and it seems he is losing influence. https://www.sportskeeda.com/mma/news-monthly-listeners-joe-rogan-spotify https://www.sportskeeda.com/mma/news-monthly-listeners-joe-r...

clarge1120 5y ago
Spotify employees, not a tolerant group, has been pushing to have Rogan deplatformed since he moved to Spotify. Yet, his reach has increased dramatically even while the listener numbers, according to this source, had decreased.

iancmceachern 5y ago

It's interesting that many content producers are starting to create their own websites, complete with ad free and extended content. I predict YouTube will become like Pandora was. Used for discovery but when folks want to deep dive on a specific content producer you go to their site or content portal directly.

wastedhours 5y ago

What use-case of YouTube would you want a competitor to though? Personal video hosting? Independent creator video distribution? Social network for video? Music video streaming? One of the greatest achievements of YouTube is basically serving countless audiences and numerous use-cases under the guise of a single service. You'd need to roll-up WhatsApp video sharing, Vimeo, Facebook Watch/Tik Tok/IG Reels, MTV, and then throw the aspirational element of creator payments over the top of it. I'd question whether anyone would actually want to do all of that.

HamburgerEmoji 5y ago

All a competitor needs to do for me to prefer them is not be part of the Ministry of Truth, i.e., to not set itself up as the arbiter of whether information is correct. It should know its role: to store and play videos and such. Odysee, Rumble, Bitchute, Gab TV, NewTube, all of these fit the bill. All of these are very valuable in an era when censorship has been normalized.

ergonaught 5y ago

Because AMZN and maybe MSFT have not yet decided there is sufficient revenue potential attached to it. The other contenders don’t have the various resources or would do it “wrong enough” it wouldn’t matter.

ju-st 5y ago
AMZN has Twitch which is a competitor.

zitterbewegung 5y ago

YouTube is sort of like Craigslist for videos and their competitors generally target either something they can do like Twitch and Instagram or something they can’t do.

anderspitman 5y ago

I don't think we'll see a real competitor to YouTube until someone manages to decouple hosting from discovery. No startup can compete with free unlimited video hosting. But it would be relatively easy to make a better discovery algorithm. The problem is the network effects moat. But I think if you started in a specific community (say tech talks or ASMR) it might work.

kypro 5y ago
YouTube used to have a 10 minute video limit. While I like that 1,2 or even 3 hour podcasts can now be uploaded in a single YouTube video, other than that I honestly probably wouldn't even notice if suddenly every video on YouTube was under 10 minutes. Same with things like full-HD / 4k support. I'm fine with 720p 99% of the time. In most cases I suspect a video hosting service with a 10 minute video limit and a 420p / 720p resolution would suffice just fine. IMO what YouTube alternatives should focus on is being unique and different from YouTube in someway -- at least initially. Maybe focus on short-form video and build algorithms and moderation tools that ensure users are only served extremely high quality videos. Perhaps a video service providing something like a daily digest of the best daily / weekly videos that match your preferences could work. As the platform grows it could then increase the allowed video length and expand into a more general video hosting service like YouTube. We see this trend in social media all the time, Facebook has a lot of competitors, but non of them are competing directly with Facebook. They're all doing something a little different and a little better than Facebook.

baby 5y ago

Dailymotion? Youku? Fb watch?

PascLeRasc 5y ago

Youtube makes it pretty easy to search for videos and watch without an account, and the other big platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok go out of their way to make sure you can't do that.

silvershell 5y ago
About making it easy to search... Do you know if there's a way to limit your searches to only the channels you're subscribed to?

tonfreed 5y ago

Rumble just received a major investment, and has been the streaming alternative for when people got banned off YouTube. There's also LBRY/Odysee and Bitchute. I quite like Odysee and use it a lot.

webinvest 5y ago

Nebula is pretty good but they need downvote / upvote options or some method of curating bad videos from good videos.

wodenokoto 5y ago

There are some in the Chinese market, but I don't know which are left. There used to be a few real contenders, like Vimeo, but Vimeo simply couldn't afford to host videos to all markets. Japanese Nico Nico is the 34th most visited site in Japan, so I guess they are still doing okay. For certain things, I think Twitch is very much a real competitor, and I think the best example to answer your question, on what a competitor would need to get an in on the market - a unique twist on video hosting. Personally I consider Netflix, HBO and Disney+ the biggest competitors. It's basically the internet version of cable vs terrestrial TV, imho. Youtube isn't so much about sharing your vacation video, as it is a platform to turn amateur content creators into professional content creators (with an odd side hustles of hosting professional music videos).

bdcravens 5y ago

A time machine to travel back to 2005.

rognjen 5y ago

Other than a variety of technical reasons already mentioned, I think VEVO is an amazing moat that would be very difficult for even the most funded of competitors to cross.

mohanmcgeek 5y ago
This would have been a moat in 2013. But these days, at least where I live, I get music videos on my music app. And maybe it's just me but music videos don't have the same traction that they used to have. There are so many chart toppers that I've listened to often for which I hadn't watched the video for a very long time. Compare this to 2011 where we discovered songs, including Gangnam style, on YouTube charts.
- rognjen 5y ago
  In general, that's a good point. It's not as important as it used to be, you're right. But I'd definitely not discount it entirely simply because not everyone has access or can afford to pay for the music apps, particularly in developing countries.

motohagiography 5y ago

This question is framed to preclude the answer. The real competitor won't be a video hosting service, it will be a content monetization model competitive to advertising. Even content monetization is a weak way of thinking about it, because by abstracting it from the people who want a certain kind of content, you've pre-defined your solution as just another tech without a clear market (a non-product). The question of "I have all these videos, how do I sell them?" is completely different from, "How do I sell videos?" or "What will these people really pay for and how does video distribution get it to them?" The question isn't how to reinvent streaming, it's how to discover something someone will pay for. Youtube's product isn't content, their product is the distribution it provides to people who make it - and a combination of the data and channel it provides to advertisers. That's what they sell. So, do you really want to make another product for advertisers? Even if you really like advertisers and did, investing in another video streaming platform seems like the least smart way to do that right now. The next real competitor to youtube will look more like AppleTV than Rumble. Arguably, if I will pay $15.99 for a season of Ancient Aliens, I'll pay $7.99 for all of 3blue1brown. It's a different monetization model, and that's the real competition. If I wanted to make a video streaming product, I would pop up a level and find a market then determine whether their need was more for produced content, or for distribution, and then solve for the economics of that desire. The quesiton isn't how do I monetize this landfill of content, the real question is, who is this customer and what do they want? I've thought some of this through, and reach out via my profile if you are with a company that is serious about this.

mohanmcgeek 5y ago

Everybody here seems to be focusing on the YouTube the video hosting platform which has a lot of competitors: p2p video platforms, edtech websites, paid history YouTube streams, a gazillion VOD platforms in my country, all the tiktok clones that consume just enough bandwidth. Video hosting isn't hard, relatively speaking. Instead, YouTube the video search engine is the product without any competition. And since people search for a video on YouTube and not on odysee or peertube, these other platforms have poor video discoverablity. On these platforms I tend to watch creators that I already found using YouTube. The video search is what somebody building a competitor needs to be focusing on.

danielrhodes 5y ago

YouTube does have competitors: Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Netflix. YouTube is a clear winner in a few big categories, but video is a huge market and they haven’t gotten an edge on anything new in awhile, for example short form.

bullen 5y ago

Twitch is the evolution of YouTube and Twitch has an open-source competitor, the question is rather why is nobody using the competition? Look at Mixer, and in specific Shrouds transition to Mixer. Almost nobody followed him there. When he came back to Twitch he was the single biggest streamer they have ever had with 200K+ viewers. Technology is feature monopolistic as long as it's "free", the evolution always happens by constructive destruction. Eventually there will be something that replaces Twitch by being _fundamentally_ better at capturing our attention without needing OBS. People that haven't moved to Twitch from YouTube simply do not know Twitch exists or haven't tried it because they lack time. Or maybe the transition is going from passive to active and some people wish to stay passive? As for video anyone with a computer and a range capable HTTP server can distribute it, the problem is competing with bandwidth.

SahAssar 5y ago
I view twitch and youtube as two completely different types of content. Twitch is livestreaming and youtube is prepared, scripted content. Sorta like 24/7 cable news channels vs a documentary or drama series. A lot of people have a preference for one or the other and I definitely prefer the latter. Especially since the "news" that happens on twitch often seems to be twitch-specific drama.
- bullen 5y ago
  Twitch is not for news! It serves only two purposes: entertainment and community. Large streamers have humor, but chat is completely meaningless with them. Small streamers (mostly gamedev) are the community that is meaningful. It's surpisingly small still, only a few thousand viewers that all watch many of the same devs. Game development is really the only meaningful thing you can do today that does not involve energy (food, heat and water = electricity).
  - SahAssar 5y ago
    I didn't mean it was for news, I meant that the "live-ness" of it seems to be the main selling point for it. > Game development is really the only meaningful thing you can do today that does not involve energy I don't even know what you are trying to say with this. What makes game development more or less "meaningful" than other activities? How does game development not require energy?

dangoljames 5y ago

Youtube beeds a peer to peer competitor.

sharemywin 5y ago

Why compete with yesterday?

WheelsAtLarge 5y ago

It's mostly free and meets people's expectations. Also, one of the driving goals of silicon valley companies is to grow as large as possible as soon as possible so that it becomes a competitive advantage. At some point, it's impossible to complete against a giant even if the product is easy to replicate. Googles also has an ad network that finances the product's development and on going maintenance. So a competitor would have to compete against both giants to at least get a foothold. At this point, the only way to get competitors against YouTube is for the government to get involved and help the new companies in some way. One possible competitor is for a confederation of organizations to get together and produce a product. They would have to have a product that's at least as good and be willing to accept losses for a time. Also they have to stay together and act together as a force of one. It's unlikely to happen. I would say that a competitor would have to start by building an ad network first so that there's some money to finance a YouTube like product. The true competition is the one for people's attention. Find a product that can best get people's attention and you have chance to succeed against Google and YouTube.

cuddlybacon 5y ago

extra88 5y ago
> Users are going to upload copyrighted material, and the law says that's the platform's responsibility. The law says the opposite, this is what Section 230 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is about. The platform is responsible for acting upon takedown requests from copyright holders. Everything YouTube negotiated with major copyright holders is extralegal.

jfoster 5y ago

Viewers want to go where the content is. Content creators want to go where the users are.

laumars 5y ago

YouTube does have competition: TikTok (there is a reason YouTube released “shorts”), Twitch and Facebook (which also supports live streaming). Vimeo, Metacafe and Dailymotion used to be a lot more competitive with YouTube too. In some cases even having a larger market share than YT at one point. Plus there are plenty of adult streaming services too albeit they don’t directly compete due to YouTubes rules about video content. I think a large part of YouTubes success was because Google bought them back when Googles reputation was still top notch. I remember being indifferent about YouTube (even preferring Vimeo and Metacafe) but started using TouTube because of Google’s tie in. Now I use it in spite of Google.

Xorakios 5y ago

I am truly not trying to be snarky, but so it goes. Does anyone on HN actually still have YouTube videos playable on their machines? Why? Text is so much faster to learn from and without sound and video baggage that gets added. I understand people raised on MTV and Snapchat caring about video for fun and not caring about the wasted time. But isn't this a community focused on productivity and knowledge? YouTube is the opposite of that. Might as well watch sports or hanging out in bars. ;)

shaftway 5y ago
I'm unlikely to learn a new coding pattern on YouTube. But I have learned a ton of woodworking techniques from watching build videos. There are a ton of little techniques along the way that are innate to people who have been in the industry for years and thus wouldn't be in written instructions, but I can see them and pick them up from a video. It's really hard to describe the technique for some of the resin work out there too, like getting realistic looking waterlines. Or when I'm stuck at a certain point in a game it's a lot easier to see a video of someone doing it than read a half-assed description.
minimoose 5y ago
for me yt does podcast & music well. just download w/e for a jog. (really i would prefer to read a book but i need the exercise) as for tutorials sometimes it helps to see what's going on (like with painting or audio design), sometimes if I'm limiting to reading a book I can easily fool myself about what I know. solving pre-made problems help but is still limiting.

dazsnow 5y ago

Bilibili

hermitsings 5y ago

Apparently, Google's strategy is to target the middle class (Eric Scmhidt said in some interview) which is like the majority of population in any country. Then to give them incentives to use their platform. This worked for Youtube by giving creators money and in some countries when they wanted adoption for their payment apps, they gave back good cashbacks as rewards. The cashbacks diminished after sufficient adoption was attained.

bradgessler 5y ago

All I want is to be able to pay to remove ads without also having to pay for a YouTube music subscription.

nprateem 5y ago

It was first. Read Positioning by Reis for why this matters and why nothing will ever beat YouTube head on.