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> Hard to understand why no company has directly taken on YouTube Up until recent history, it was a money losing business. I’m sure that’s turned around now bu
by xigency 4y ago
> Hard to understand why no company has directly taken on YouTube
Up until recent history, it was a money losing business. I’m sure that’s turned around now but mainly through heavily injecting ads. It would be difficult to disrupt them because of the network effects of all the content, viewers, and creators. And it would be hard to compete on price (whether subscription cost or amount of ads) without having the kind of infrastructure Google has.
It might be done in the future, but it will be anything but easy.
- omeysalvi 4y agoExactly, it is the same philosophy with which VCs will pour billions of dollars into a business to prioritize growth over everything. When all competition is eliminated, there is no one left to challenge you and you get all the benefits of a monopoly.
- smcl 4y ago> mainly through heavily injecting ads HNers are more likely to use an ad blocker so they may not quite appreciate how severe this has become. I recently switched my casual/kitchen computer from an old MacBook Air (where I’d browse with Firefox and uBlock Origin) to an iPad (where I use the YouTube app) so I got to experience the difference first hand. The amount of adverts is horrendous - two sometimes-skippable ads every three minutes. I guess they want me to go for YouTube premium, but I have simply been put off from using YT altogether. So that’s now Twitter and YouTube who have lost me as a user just through sabotaging their own product :-)