4 ms·

No one is asking how Youtube got there. The question is, how can you complete with it and I believe the above commenter gave a very reasonable answer. Your sid

by sushid 5y ago

No one is asking how Youtube got there. The question is, how can you complete with it and I believe the above commenter gave a very reasonable answer. Your side point about it supposedly being an anti-trust violation isn't even a proper answer to the question.

clairity 5y ago
the parent comment was a list of technical attributes about how youtube got there (used as rationale for why it's impossible to compete). i countered that that's not how it got there, as it's emphasizing tactics, not strategy. it's hard to formulate a coherent competitive strategy if you entirely misunderstand your competitor's successful (if anti-competitive) strategy. it's like playing chess by focusing on taking all the pawns rather than the king.
- ageitgey 5y ago
  I think you misinterpreted my original post. My post was a list of some of the capital intensive challenges a competitor would have to solve now to operate a similar business to YouTube as it exists now (many of which aren't even technical, like growing an ad market and getting creators on board). The point was that unless you already have a money printing business in another area that you can use to chase this for years without budgetary constraints, it would be very difficult to build something of a similar scale. I think you are arguing a point that my post largely already agrees with.
  - clairity 5y ago
    agreed, but your takeoff point was the technical/tactical, whereas i'm advising a wider perspective, as that perspective easily and commonly leads to mistaken conclusions in isolation (particularly by technologists in this context). to be clear, i tend to agree with the individual points made, but even together, they don't articulate youtube's strategy. that was the missing, and the most relevant, element, even if you allude to it otherwise.
  - posix86 5y ago
    You're explaining what youtube's edge is in the market, but not why nobody else has it; it's an important distinction. Any company has an edge on any non existent company, because they exist - they have the tools, the infrastructure, the knowledge needed to run the business, all things that the non existent company first has to aquire. Doesn't explain why nobody else can do it! Because things, in general, can be aquired. But clarity did: Youtube has Google. Youtube was able to aquire things nobody else could. Example: You said youtube needs near unlimited bandwidth. This argument doesn't show me why there can't be a competitor. Youtube's business model seems to pay off, so you should be able to convince an investor to pay you, too, unlimited bandwidth, right? Money is immaterial if you can show that you can make more of it at a later stage.
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  The strategy you describe is functionally "provide features that competitors cannot". You ascribe nefarious means to all of those features, but that isn' the only (or in many cases even the likeliest) motivation for providing those features.
  - clairity 5y ago
    no, it's absolutely not. it's an end-run strategy to subvert competitiveness in a market. practically every dominant company has engaged in these sorts of anti-competitive practices, but that doesn't make it right or defensible. that youtube also provides useful features has little to do with how it came to dominate. it's simply not a product-led outcome.
    - joshuamorton 5y ago
      Well no. For example, you claim that Vimeo "vimeo has all of those [features] to some degree". But it doesn't. Vimeo isn't ad supported (this is literally their main differentiator from youtube). Doesn't appear to do algorithmic curation/recommendation (again, they consider this a differentiator), and has a tiny fraction of the upload rate and watchtime of youtube (so bandwidth and transcoding cost are lower). Those are related to their distinct strategies: Youtube aims to be the product where anyone can share video for free (that's youtube's strategy!). Vimeo doesn't aim to do that. Doing the first invites challenges of scale that the second doesn't. Youtube operates at a scale where it makes sense to hire silicon engineers to build custom video transcoding chips. That doesn't make sense for vimeo. You can maybe argue that Youtube was only successful because of Google's existing ad business (although I don't know how true/organizationally valid this argument is), but the idea that the "strategy" behind Youtube was to be illegal is sort of ridiculous. And heck, OP of the thread even offers examples of successful competitors in the broad video media space: Twitch and TikTok (and arguably also Instagram via Reels). Youtube does have competitors in terms of video social media. It also has competitors in terms of video hosting. What it doesn't have is competitors in terms of scale (Reels and Tiktok limit content size, Twitch stores only a small fraction of streamed videos, vimeo makes you pay for the storage and bandwidth you use). That's due to a lot of technical optimizations that are difficult to replicate.
SpelingBeeChamp 5y ago
The original question was not asking how you can compete with YouTube. It asked why YouTube doesn't have competition.

by sushid 5y ago

clairity 5y ago

the parent comment was a list of technical attributes about how youtube got there (used as rationale for why it's impossible to compete). i countered that that's not how it got there, as it's emphasizing tactics, not strategy. it's hard to formulate a coherent competitive strategy if you entirely misunderstand your competitor's successful (if anti-competitive) strategy. it's like playing chess by focusing on taking all the pawns rather than the king.

ageitgey 5y ago
I think you misinterpreted my original post. My post was a list of some of the capital intensive challenges a competitor would have to solve now to operate a similar business to YouTube as it exists now (many of which aren't even technical, like growing an ad market and getting creators on board). The point was that unless you already have a money printing business in another area that you can use to chase this for years without budgetary constraints, it would be very difficult to build something of a similar scale. I think you are arguing a point that my post largely already agrees with.
- clairity 5y ago
  agreed, but your takeoff point was the technical/tactical, whereas i'm advising a wider perspective, as that perspective easily and commonly leads to mistaken conclusions in isolation (particularly by technologists in this context). to be clear, i tend to agree with the individual points made, but even together, they don't articulate youtube's strategy. that was the missing, and the most relevant, element, even if you allude to it otherwise.
- posix86 5y ago
  You're explaining what youtube's edge is in the market, but not why nobody else has it; it's an important distinction. Any company has an edge on any non existent company, because they exist - they have the tools, the infrastructure, the knowledge needed to run the business, all things that the non existent company first has to aquire. Doesn't explain why nobody else can do it! Because things, in general, can be aquired. But clarity did: Youtube has Google. Youtube was able to aquire things nobody else could. Example: You said youtube needs near unlimited bandwidth. This argument doesn't show me why there can't be a competitor. Youtube's business model seems to pay off, so you should be able to convince an investor to pay you, too, unlimited bandwidth, right? Money is immaterial if you can show that you can make more of it at a later stage.
joshuamorton 5y ago
The strategy you describe is functionally "provide features that competitors cannot". You ascribe nefarious means to all of those features, but that isn' the only (or in many cases even the likeliest) motivation for providing those features.
- clairity 5y ago
  no, it's absolutely not. it's an end-run strategy to subvert competitiveness in a market. practically every dominant company has engaged in these sorts of anti-competitive practices, but that doesn't make it right or defensible. that youtube also provides useful features has little to do with how it came to dominate. it's simply not a product-led outcome.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    Well no. For example, you claim that Vimeo "vimeo has all of those [features] to some degree". But it doesn't. Vimeo isn't ad supported (this is literally their main differentiator from youtube). Doesn't appear to do algorithmic curation/recommendation (again, they consider this a differentiator), and has a tiny fraction of the upload rate and watchtime of youtube (so bandwidth and transcoding cost are lower). Those are related to their distinct strategies: Youtube aims to be the product where anyone can share video for free (that's youtube's strategy!). Vimeo doesn't aim to do that. Doing the first invites challenges of scale that the second doesn't. Youtube operates at a scale where it makes sense to hire silicon engineers to build custom video transcoding chips. That doesn't make sense for vimeo. You can maybe argue that Youtube was only successful because of Google's existing ad business (although I don't know how true/organizationally valid this argument is), but the idea that the "strategy" behind Youtube was to be illegal is sort of ridiculous. And heck, OP of the thread even offers examples of successful competitors in the broad video media space: Twitch and TikTok (and arguably also Instagram via Reels). Youtube does have competitors in terms of video social media. It also has competitors in terms of video hosting. What it doesn't have is competitors in terms of scale (Reels and Tiktok limit content size, Twitch stores only a small fraction of streamed videos, vimeo makes you pay for the storage and bandwidth you use). That's due to a lot of technical optimizations that are difficult to replicate.

SpelingBeeChamp 5y ago

The original question was not asking how you can compete with YouTube. It asked why YouTube doesn't have competition.