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I don't really care about their bottom line. They're the middle-men. Virtual landlords. They're there to squeeze the lemon. Not to say that the service they pr

I don't really care about their bottom line. They're the middle-men. Virtual landlords. They're there to squeeze the lemon. Not to say that the service they provide isn't useful. It's obviously more economical to operate media platforms at scale, and obviously most content creators don't have the technical ability to do it themselves. When you look at say, podcasts for instance, you have this giant shared wealth of free content and you can pick a number of creators to support depending on your budget. You usually get extra episodes or perks as an incentive for doing so. Imagine if, instead of paying YouTube X dollars or watching Y ads and letting them choose out how to spread that money around, you pay the people you actually watch and the platform vendors, who ought to be the least important and most replaceable factor in this transaction, gets the cut they actually deserve. Before they were ruined by copyright trolls, streaming services like Netflix demonstrated that charging everyone a reasonable amount of money for access to the entire park was a viable business model.

Bakary 4y ago
YouTube sounds replaceable or unimportant in an ethical sense but in a practical sense it's certainly not that simple from the POV of someone trying to build an audience for their videography or even the audience itself.
- disintegore 4y ago
  Total chicken and egg scenario. That's often the case with monopolies. However, to my knowledge Youtube doesn't force its content creators into exclusivity deals (like, say, Amazon with Kindle Direct) so there may be some leeway there seeing as posting your content on another platform isn't a major risk.
  - Bakary 4y ago
    I don't have a definite view on this, but my intuition tells me that there is more to it than just the monopoly effect. If YouTube had developed with additional competitors, it might not necessarily have lead to a better market/space for videographers since having a single platform has its own advantages for the development of the medium/culture/etc. YouTube is getting more heavy-handed as time goes on, but one reason for this is that they were operating at a loss for so long, and in doing so provided extra utility that we might take for granted. GP comment mentioned Netflix, but that is in fact a good example of what I mean. They started to struggle because competitors moved into the space. Unlike YouTube, they did not have an unassailable position. Unlike Spotify, they did not have a market that allowed sharing catalogues across platforms. In a sense, what we interpreted as Netflix showing a viable business model was rather Netflix showing early mover advantage on borrowed time. Having an ecosystem with multiple mediocre services such as what streaming is becoming now would not necessarily have been in the advantage of videographers if it had happened to video-sharing platforms. It would almost certainly have lead to a smaller and less engaged overall audience.

Bakary 4y ago

YouTube sounds replaceable or unimportant in an ethical sense but in a practical sense it's certainly not that simple from the POV of someone trying to build an audience for their videography or even the audience itself.

disintegore 4y ago
Total chicken and egg scenario. That's often the case with monopolies. However, to my knowledge Youtube doesn't force its content creators into exclusivity deals (like, say, Amazon with Kindle Direct) so there may be some leeway there seeing as posting your content on another platform isn't a major risk.
- Bakary 4y ago
  I don't have a definite view on this, but my intuition tells me that there is more to it than just the monopoly effect. If YouTube had developed with additional competitors, it might not necessarily have lead to a better market/space for videographers since having a single platform has its own advantages for the development of the medium/culture/etc. YouTube is getting more heavy-handed as time goes on, but one reason for this is that they were operating at a loss for so long, and in doing so provided extra utility that we might take for granted. GP comment mentioned Netflix, but that is in fact a good example of what I mean. They started to struggle because competitors moved into the space. Unlike YouTube, they did not have an unassailable position. Unlike Spotify, they did not have a market that allowed sharing catalogues across platforms. In a sense, what we interpreted as Netflix showing a viable business model was rather Netflix showing early mover advantage on borrowed time. Having an ecosystem with multiple mediocre services such as what streaming is becoming now would not necessarily have been in the advantage of videographers if it had happened to video-sharing platforms. It would almost certainly have lead to a smaller and less engaged overall audience.