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I doubt there will ever be an alternative to YouTube. "Disrupting" YouTube is difficult because the social conditions that created YouTube do not exist anymore.

I doubt there will ever be an alternative to YouTube. "Disrupting" YouTube is difficult because the social conditions that created YouTube do not exist anymore. Before you get into cdns, bandwidth, advertisers, and social features, you need to have content - and a steady flow of content. What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free. Any new competitor eventually runs into the fact that * Your largest users eventually stop posting if you don't pay them (because they can go elsewhere after using your platform as a springboard: see Vine) * In order to actually pay creators you need to have the capital, legal, and advertising side completely figured out. So on top of building a giant cdn, you need gobs of money to pay people to stay on your platform, and another gob of money because you will be sued to death (especially because once you start paying people, people will cheat, and pirate content). All this means is YouTube has an incredible moat. If YouTube dies, I doubt there will ever be a replacement.

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shadowtree 1y ago
Youtube relies on human creators. Youtube will be disrupted by AI created, better content. Who builds AITube? AITok?
- nine_k 1y ago
  Why the AI-wielding creators would choose to use a new, different service, and not an existing service with a colossal audience?
  - Rohansi 1y ago
    In a theoretical future The Algorithm would include content generation so that the platform can generate content for you instead of just suggesting it. Could apply to TikTok, Spotify, etc. if the generated content is good enough.
- eqvinox 1y ago
  This is incredibly funny considering AI generated content is currently endemic thrash on YouTube. AI generated fake trailers, universally hated zombodubbing, weird "touches" on shorts… Which to be clear isn't a contradiction to your comment at all. It'll take work and time though, at minimum.
- pjc50 1y ago
  Hundreds of people are probably building those at the moment. The more relevant question is why would anyone watch it?
charcircuit 1y ago
TikTok disrupted YT and gained over a billion MAU.
- CharlesW 1y ago
  Absolutely. TikTok and Instagram are usurping the social video space with 3,590M MAUs between them (compared to YouTube's 2,530M MAUs). Although YouTube continues to do fine, it's far from a monopoly, and I personally don't think it can be assumed that it will retain its flagship position.
  - n4r9 1y ago
    There are aspects of YT that I simply cannot see TikTok or Instagram disrupting. Music is one of them. I just searched for one of my favourite musicians Lisa O'Neill on TikTok. There are literally 6 videos in the results, mostly just short clips of her singing live. On YouTube she has her own channel with 16k subscribers, all her official music videos, and several live performances, plus countless other channels like BBCMusic or TradTG4 with videos of her doing live performances. There's no comparison.
- djtango 1y ago
  Does TikTok have the long form content that YT is also associated with? Otherwise I would say "disrupted" is a generous term Long form YT is a gold mine of - documentaries (hobbyist and professional) - informative content (literally any hobby you can imagine from gardening to warhammer to free diving) - educational content, similar to above but world class institutions hosting their lectures for free - musical content, live performances ranging from tiny amateur bands to top names and performances of now dead artists - sports events, the entire 6 hour+ Wimbledon 08 final is there I can go on but for a while now I have seen YouTube as the Video Internet (where web 1.0 was the Document Internet).
  - tremarley 1y ago
    Yes
non_aligned 1y ago
> What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free. They still do. The vast majority of YT content is not monetized by creators, often not even eligible for it in the first place. Further, some big-ticket content creators hedge their bets, uploading to backup platforms, trying to shift to Patreon, etc. The main thing is that viewers only ever go to YouTube, a learned habit. This is where they listen to music, where they get their news, where the algorithm suggests them related videos, where they can search for tutorials and reviews for gear, etc. But TikTok shows that you can disrupt that simply by offering a video format that is different in some way and thus not gated by the same muscle memory.
- nemothekid 1y ago
  Almost every reply has pointed to TikTok as some sort of counterfactual. 1. TikTok exists today, and the author still feels like YouTube is a monopoly. If TikTok was actually a viable alternative to YouTube, this article wouldn't exist. 2. Futhermore, TikTok is not a substitute for YouTube, especially for the kinds of content that the author is watching. People don't treat TikTok as a video library - how many TikTok videos are posted straight to HN? TikTok does not have the same diversity of content as YouTube. 3. TikTok addressed point (2) of my post - ByteDance launched in the US with the acquisition of Musically, and even then still had to pay for content. The creator fund, and now also the TikTok shop is a huge part of TikTok's content strategy. >The vast majority of YT content is not monetized by creators, often not even eligible for it in the first place. This is a social quirk, not something that a newcomer can replicate. The problem is, for a new platform, your best content creators will quickly defect to other more monetizable platforms once they get the eyeballs. This is what happened to Vine. If you want to have a sustainable platform you have to keep your creators. YouTube doesn't have the existential threat of the next PewDiePie defecting off the platform. TikTok paid AlixEarle millions to ensure they didn't lose her.
  - starfallg 1y ago
    TikTok is a fluke, created by the condition of how it was originally born as Douyin in China. It is also the only app that translated well from the domestic China market to international markets. Being backed by lots of VC cash and Bytedance's revenues in China is a key factor in getting TikTok established overseas.
wodenokoto 1y ago
YouTube has recently have had massive, competitive attacks on their business and have had to quite drastically amend their offerings. TikTok, SnapChat and instagram has all had huge success in their short form formats. It’s not unheard of, that even millennial couples, will spend and evening together in bed scrolling TikTok instead of watching tv together. While the battle is far from over, had YouTube not reacted, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these mobile first competitors would have started experimenting with long form content by now.
- nine_k 1y ago
  TikTok, SnapChat, and Instagram had the capital and the advertising parts completely figured out. They sidestepped a lot of legal troubles by limiting the length and by insisting on the vertical video format, unsuitable for pirated movies, shows, and most musical clips.
- bawolff 1y ago
  I feel like that is a different niche. Most of the videos i watch on youtube are long form, although i have no idea how much that is the norm.
  - pmontra 1y ago
    A data point: I watch highlights of sport events, videos that explain how to do things, some music videos (rarely.) Those are only on YT at scale. The silly funny videos I see people looking at on TikTok all day long? Not interested.
    - bawolff 1y ago
      There are also lot of experts (obviously its the internet so anyone could be anyone) who post educational content on their field of expertise in the 20min - 1 hour length video format. I don't see that type of content anywhere else. It truly is amazing the sort of learning resources on the internet you can find if you are really truly interested in a topic.
glitchc 1y ago
I don't know. TikTok was able to take on Youtube. May have even won by now if the government hadn't intervened.
pharrington 1y ago
There will always be a new kid on the block.
bawolff 1y ago
I disagree, the internet is full of websites who were on the top of the world until they weren't. Its easy for content creators to post their content on multiple sites. The main moat is the critical mass of users. /. Used to be the goto tech forum, but now we are all at hn. Digg was the place to be, now its reddit. Audiences can shift surprisingly suddenly.
- p0w3n3d 1y ago
  I confirm. I used to be subscribing RSS on slashdot but it's been rubbish only appearing there since a few years ago.
WA 1y ago
I love YouTube, so many things to learn. But their recent push to just ignore people capable of speaking two or more languages with their auto-translated bullshit and no way to turn it off makes me use YouTube way less. It’s a bummer that nobody there seems to realize this. They only see a very dumb metric. Probably something like "did this German dude watch at least one Spanish videos, because we auto-translate titles and voice". It feels disrespectful.
- nyjah 1y ago
  If I click I’m not interested on every short presented to me and I’ve never watched a short, why can’t YouTube get the point? At least give us the option to remove them. I don’t deal with the translation issue but not giving you the option is what is beyond frustrating for me.
  - Magnesium0226 1y ago
    if your on firefox or one of its clones, firefox can auto run javascript scripts to remove shorts with the extension Greasemonkey, scripts can be found at 'the greasy fork'. there is also a decent youtube abdroid app called litube which can be found on f-droid which has a built in option to remove shorts (among other great options)
  - baud147258 1y ago
    If you're using ublock, you can remove elements on webpages, including the area where shorts are on the YT pages. It's what I did on my mobile to stop watching them.
  - coded_monkey 1y ago
    It took a little while but YouTube has stopped recommending shorts after doing exactly this. They still appear in my subscription feed but it’s less bothersome because they’re from channels I actually watch.
  - kelvinjps10 1y ago
    You can use unhook or similar extension
safety1st 1y ago
The replacement may be AI generated content or something. Let me go into wild eyed futurist speculative mode here, 1- AI/LLMs are basically a response to the enshittification of Google. The reason this tech is so good and useful is because for years Google rewarded SEO optimized content a.k.a. long winded articles that repeat the same words over and over again and take ten years to make a point, which after training on all that gunk, your LLM can now do in one paragraph. The Google search monopoly gave rise to this lengthy word salad web content and blanketed the earth with it. The AI summarizer arose as a natural response. The web as we know it may now die. 2- The software industry seems to gravitate toward a layer cake of monopolies. E.g. we have Microsoft monopolize the OS and app platform, it becomes so awful the government even tries to put the brakes on it, partially succeeds, then we get the Web application platform. Sitting in a browser on top of Windows and others. Which Google goes on to monopolize. One may suppose that another platform will be built on top of this, which will be unmonopolized for a few years, and then someone will monopolize and enshittify that too, paving the way for the next cycle. It's turtles all the way down. 3- How this pertains to YouTube, well in the near future I suppose someone could ingest all of YouTube, and create AI versions of it, exactly like what was done with the web. And they might even get away with it once we set a bunch of legal precedents that this is not a thing you can get sued for. Presumably the AI platform would need to be different or better in some way, so perhaps we'll see a video platform where all the content is generated on the fly by AI, and you can get exactly what you want because it was trained on the videos that humans made. E.g. you can simply tell the AI you want to watch a comedy show called Three and a Half Horses where all the characters are reverse centaurs, and it will spin up as many episodes as you want until you get bored. And YouTube will continue to be an aging monopoly for decades, like Windows, but no one will really care because we'll be watching horses deliver Seinfeld quality jokes [1] [1] It's not horses and it's not as good as Seinfeld, but someone's already doing this. So all that remains for my prognostication to come true is for a financial crisis to happen, at which point the government can use it as an excuse to print a random $500B and give it to a politically connected billionaire intermediary who will invest a fraction of it into the engineering, and history will continue to march forward as it does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever
amelius 1y ago
Maybe it can be replaced by something like Anna's archive, but for videos.
tebbers 1y ago
I remember reading a history of YouTube once, and early on they were about to go under from the sheer weight of music industry copyright lawsuits and the cost of bandwidth. Google had the technology, heft and resources to do infringement detection at scale to really save them, not to mention their global bandwidth.
alerighi 1y ago
A lot of creators that started with a YouTube channel nowadays have moved a lot of content to social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram reels. To me YouTube risk to be replaced (or it has already been replaced) by short videos, because a lot of people is no longer interested in watching a 20 minutes long video nowadays, especially new generations tend to spend a lot of time on just TikTok.
- j45 1y ago
  Instead of one or the other, think about it like both have their purpose with the same topic. Shorts have been shown to cause more issues in the brain than not. Long slows the brain down to actually be able to sit with an idea.
- aunty_helen 1y ago
  Or, as the algorithm seemed to be rewarding 10min+ videos at one point and a bunch of creators put out filler content, people no longer enjoy forced long form content. This has been a huge thing in car YouTube, a drag race that’s over in 11 seconds stretched out to a 19 minute video. Realistically 5-7 minutes would’ve been heaps of time.
skywal_l 1y ago
If the US government was a function body, it would force Youtube to separate the hosting business and the website itself. The hosting would be a low margin low risk business which doesn't care about traffic either way. It's just selling infrastructure the way telecom companies do. It would be paid by websites to offer a frontend to users. This way there is real competition on what matters, the user experience and still a economy of scale on what costs a lot which is actually storing and delivering videos. Some frontend would be free with ads, some with a paywall but without ads. Some low quality, some high quality, some both. The user would have a choice. Each creator would be free to choose its licensing model. The hosting company would then only provide the video to frontends following the creator's wish. The creator would pay by the bytes stored and the frontend by the bytes transferred. No incentive for the hosting provider to favor either of them. Not perfect as the hosting company is still a monopoly, but it could be regulated to be neutral and behave like a utility. The frontend has to cater to users and nobody else. They have competition and disappear if they enshittify. Creators are free from the tyranny of google. They become the clients of the hosting company which makes steady money whatever the content. Everybody wins, except google, which is fine by me.
account42 1y ago
On the other hand, an alternative without all the "content creators" that are just in it for the money sounds really great to me.
berkes 1y ago
YouTube as a whole has a giant moat. But niches within YouTube can be disrupted. We've seen it with short form (TikTok etc), music (Spotify etc). We see it with specific niches of content creators (nebula etc). It's happened with livestreams. I'm bad at predicting future, but could imagine niches like "publicly funded content" from e.g. EU public broadcasters moving away (e.g. NPOstart in NL) because of privacy issues or because they legally can't monetize their content anyway. Maybe university lectures? Or sports video? Game reviews by a specialized platform by steam? Video between 4 and 10 minutes? Podcast videos? So YouTube as a whole will stay, but it can be chipped away at. Some chips may prove in themselves a small, but still good business model.
- kelvinjps10 1y ago
  I agree with this. For example some tech creators are using peertube or similar. University Lectures now posting in other websites as backup and people that do courses also have them in their website. What I think what will happen it's that YouTube will still be used for discovery to drive the traffic to these other sites until people finally migrate to the smaller ones.
orbital-decay 1y ago
> "Disrupting" YouTube is difficult because the social conditions that created YouTube do not exist anymore. That simply means that the alternative to YouTube will look nothing like YouTube.
p0w3n3d 1y ago
Currently many YouTube creators request additional money on patreon-style platforms. It either means that YouTube's paycheck sucks OR they are greedy. In both cases this reverts your arguments on paying to creators, because if some platform would be better in some meaningful property, it could steal the user base. For example - background playing, less commercials, less distractions etc.
hopelite 1y ago
I do not see that as inherently correct. There have been and are several alternatives to YouTube and every single one has been actively sabotaged for primarily political/ideological reasons that have nothing to do with any of what you are talking about. There is quite literally a conspiracy to suppress alternatives to YouTube because they do not align with the ideological parameters of the pernicious system. If you let that boot up from humanity’s neck, there would be many competitors to YouTube that would immediately atrophy YouTube. You seem to simply not be aware of what is going on outside of the authorized narrative. You will never be able to see the reality of things if you limit yourself to only the confines of the illusion matrix created for you by the system. But yes, YouTube has a moat and like all moats it is built and maintained by the tyrannical monarch who believes himself to be chosen by God, but must hide away behind it from reality.
cyanydeez 1y ago
All this means is its a public good and should be made a utility. Either directly or strip mined and mirrored.
jjani 1y ago
> "Disrupting" YouTube is difficult For a company, it's impossible. For any country except for the US, it's very easy: you use any of the million different protectionist measures available. Such as tarriffs, as the US itself has taken a liking to - in this case it would be their digital equivalent, namely digital service taxes.
- b800h 1y ago
  The US government is extremely active in going after governments which attempt to impose digital service taxes. It was proposed in the UK, and quickly vanished without a trace.
  - jjani 1y ago
    Indeed they are, IMO this is the real number 1 reason behind the US tariffs, as well as behind his anger against Brazil, even more so than the prosecution of his fash club buddy. What you do is get together with a bunch of other countries and announce it as a block. The US can only keep shooting itself in the foot so much. The thing they should've done is, very soon after the US tariffs were announced, say "We think this is a fantastic idea by Mr. Trump. Aligned with his views, we are instituting accompanying digital tariffs to fix the digital trade deficit. We're sure he'll agree that the trade balance should be corrected in both the physical as well as digital worlds". The UK is effectively a colony of the US so them backing out is entirely expected. Luckily, other countries aren't. I think Brazil, Vietnam (?), Thailand (?) are ones that have already set a date for when it's being instated, and I haven't heard of them backing out. There's probably more. The EU has also confirmed today that they won't be cancelling the Google fine, though we'll have to wait and see what happens to their DST proposals. Given their serious lack of spine as well as how far the EU has gone to the right, I do expect them to cancel it, but who knows. And again, there's a hundred other protectionist barriers that can be put up. This is the smartest way, salami slicing, as China has figured out decades ago. You begin very small and just ramp it up. You begin with something like banning Twitch because of moral concerns. Maybe even just from 8 to 8, when kids are up. Then you say national security concerns mean data centers of critical infrastructure all have to be hosted in the country. Then you expand that. Then you make Whatsapp (or whatever is the most popular messaging app) do a JV with a local player because it's a national security risk. And so on. But Western governments don't have the wit to execute this, in which case a cruder measure such as a digital tariff is what's left.
8474_s 1y ago
So if you succeed, how the terabytes of content and bandwidth will be sponsored - by what? The only way i can think of it is some super-efficient neural codec with extreme video compression ratio that runs on mobile devices. Othewise Youtube wins by sheer scale google invested in it.
- fsflover 1y ago
  > how the terabytes of content and bandwidth will be sponsored - by what? How does it work in the Internet itself? By decentralization, i.e., different servers serve their own small part. The same can work with the videos: see PeerTube.
- kelvinjps10 1y ago
  Majors CDN already exists. They can build on top of cloudfare or Amazon services. If you think about it Amazon it's on a good position to build an alternative,they already have experience with ads and hosting video content
  - 8474_s 1y ago
    AWS-based youtube would be astronomically expensive and much slower than dedicated video servers. Youtube shapes the entire internet total bandwidth.
dilap 1y ago
YouTube is incredible, YouTube is poorly run. If I were making the laws, I'd do something similar to mandatory licensing of songs for radio: mandate that YouTube, as a sort de-facto content monopilist, provide third-party access to its database (upload, discovery, view counts, recommendations, etc). Devil is in the details, but well-done it would strictly improve the world. Independent competitive companies are great, but things tend to devolve into de-facto mini-governments once things stabilize, and from there I think the (real) government using its power to force a little more competition could really improve things.
NuclearPM 1y ago
Counterpoint: TikTok
gwbas1c 1y ago
> Your largest users eventually stop posting if you don't pay them (because they can go elsewhere after using your platform as a springboard: see Vine) I don't think that's as big as a problem as you do, as long as you don't care about exclusivity. Think of the streaming music market: Youtube Music, Spotify, Tidal, Amazon Music, ect, generally have mostly the same content and little exclusivity. For example, you could have a feature where all uploaded videos are automatically uploaded to YouTube and all of your competitors.
- deleted 1y ago
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mlinsey 1y ago
Those are very hard but also very solvable problems with a lot of capital. It's the same basic idea as creating a new media company, albeit a lot more costly to build. This is way too expensive to do in a seed round, but one of the other FAANG giants could try if they wanted to. The even harder problem is just answering the basic question of why the viewer side should care, and why they should change their deeply-ingraned habit of going to YouTube to find something to watch. "YouTube isn't fair and transparent to creators" is not going to be compelling to very many people, if the experience of the likes of Tidal competing with Spotify is any indication. YouTube is valuable to creators because it aggregates a huge audience of viewers, those viewers stick around because it's addictive and there is a content flywheel already. But if you actually had a truly good answer for why the average person should switch their YouTube habit to watching some other site instead, the resulting payoff is huge enough (and there's enough crazy risk-hungry investors in the world) that the capital and the moat problems could theoretically be overcome.
RicoElectrico 1y ago
> What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free. What if I told you it did? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Original_Channel_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Original_Channel_Initi... https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/investing-in-future-of-video-youtube/ https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/investing-in-future-of-...
Workaccount2 1y ago
The main reason youtube has no competitors is because people want free (no ads, no subscription) content. And people will gleefully ad-block your service. Look up the story of Vid.me It exploded in popularity around 2015-17. Many youtube creators moved to it. Then they went bankrupt because no one wanted to pay a subscription, and no one wanted to view ads. Internet users desperately need to look in the mirror to figure out why so many services have strangleholds and why so many services plain suck for users - the users aren't paying for anything in any form, and they celebrate that fact.
- eloisant 1y ago
  On Youtube you also have a choice between watching ads or subscription, I don't see the difference. Yes you can use an ad-blocker, but they're making it harder and harder. Youtube has no competition because it's a winner-takes-all market, and they won. Creators go where viewers are. Viewers go where creators are. Rinse and repeat, and sooner or later you end up with a monopoly.
- dh2022 1y ago
  There is no paying by users - which is replaced by ads. But in my experience the number of ads on YouTube sky-rocketed. I had no problem watching 15 seconds of an ad, skipping and then watching the rest of the video. But I used to watch long-form videos - and now I have skip ads every 7-8 minutes. I almost stopped watching YT. In the few instances I watch I will for a8 minutes or so and at the first ad I am leaving. I am wondering if behavior like this explains the drop in views, but the fact that revenue stayed the same....
braza 1y ago
> Disrupting" YouTube is difficult because the social conditions that created YouTube do not exist anymore. I think the Zero Interest Rate era made a lot of business like this. I can think about YouTube, Uber, several food delivery apps, Fintechs, and so on.
johannes1234321 1y ago
The big thing with content: They were really relaxed to care about copyright, till they had agreements (and content id etc.) in place. A competitor needs a good legal department willing to take up that fight.
dec0dedab0de 1y ago
If YouTube dies, I doubt there will ever be a replacement. Meta, Bytedance, Snap, and even X could fill the void relatively easily. a few new views focussing specifically on video, and video focussed apps that don't require a login for all the platforms.
jlarocco 1y ago
> People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free. It also helped that tons of copyrighted content was uploaded and the policing and take down was originally pretty lax.
9rx 1y ago
What was unique about Youtube is that it got to claim the first search result for "Lazy Sunday", a popular SNL skit at the time. That is how everyone came to learn of it. The "homemade" videos that followed were also necessary for its longevity, but initial discovery was critical. Disrupting YouTube is difficult because the rampant piracy isn't as easy to pull off anymore.
SilverElfin 1y ago
This is why YouTube should be treated, like all large social media, as a utility. There isn’t a real path to competition here. Things like censorship or Google having exclusive rights to train their AI on YouTube data have a lot of negative impact on the world.
elAhmo 1y ago
TikTok emerged very quickly as an alternative to Youtube. Different kind and form of content, but something that Youtube ended up replicating. I am sure if YouTube somehow died overnight, TikTok or some other player would work very quickly to get the alternative out there.
afpx 1y ago
I never understood why an upstart couldn't just identify the top revenue producers on YouTube and compensate them extra for moving to their platform.

deleted 1y ago

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shadowtree 1y ago

Youtube relies on human creators. Youtube will be disrupted by AI created, better content. Who builds AITube? AITok?

nine_k 1y ago
Why the AI-wielding creators would choose to use a new, different service, and not an existing service with a colossal audience?
- Rohansi 1y ago
  In a theoretical future The Algorithm would include content generation so that the platform can generate content for you instead of just suggesting it. Could apply to TikTok, Spotify, etc. if the generated content is good enough.
eqvinox 1y ago
This is incredibly funny considering AI generated content is currently endemic thrash on YouTube. AI generated fake trailers, universally hated zombodubbing, weird "touches" on shorts… Which to be clear isn't a contradiction to your comment at all. It'll take work and time though, at minimum.
pjc50 1y ago
Hundreds of people are probably building those at the moment. The more relevant question is why would anyone watch it?

charcircuit 1y ago

TikTok disrupted YT and gained over a billion MAU.

CharlesW 1y ago
Absolutely. TikTok and Instagram are usurping the social video space with 3,590M MAUs between them (compared to YouTube's 2,530M MAUs). Although YouTube continues to do fine, it's far from a monopoly, and I personally don't think it can be assumed that it will retain its flagship position.
- n4r9 1y ago
  There are aspects of YT that I simply cannot see TikTok or Instagram disrupting. Music is one of them. I just searched for one of my favourite musicians Lisa O'Neill on TikTok. There are literally 6 videos in the results, mostly just short clips of her singing live. On YouTube she has her own channel with 16k subscribers, all her official music videos, and several live performances, plus countless other channels like BBCMusic or TradTG4 with videos of her doing live performances. There's no comparison.
djtango 1y ago
Does TikTok have the long form content that YT is also associated with? Otherwise I would say "disrupted" is a generous term Long form YT is a gold mine of - documentaries (hobbyist and professional) - informative content (literally any hobby you can imagine from gardening to warhammer to free diving) - educational content, similar to above but world class institutions hosting their lectures for free - musical content, live performances ranging from tiny amateur bands to top names and performances of now dead artists - sports events, the entire 6 hour+ Wimbledon 08 final is there I can go on but for a while now I have seen YouTube as the Video Internet (where web 1.0 was the Document Internet).
- tremarley 1y ago
  Yes

non_aligned 1y ago

> What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free. They still do. The vast majority of YT content is not monetized by creators, often not even eligible for it in the first place. Further, some big-ticket content creators hedge their bets, uploading to backup platforms, trying to shift to Patreon, etc. The main thing is that viewers only ever go to YouTube, a learned habit. This is where they listen to music, where they get their news, where the algorithm suggests them related videos, where they can search for tutorials and reviews for gear, etc. But TikTok shows that you can disrupt that simply by offering a video format that is different in some way and thus not gated by the same muscle memory.

nemothekid 1y ago
Almost every reply has pointed to TikTok as some sort of counterfactual. 1. TikTok exists today, and the author still feels like YouTube is a monopoly. If TikTok was actually a viable alternative to YouTube, this article wouldn't exist. 2. Futhermore, TikTok is not a substitute for YouTube, especially for the kinds of content that the author is watching. People don't treat TikTok as a video library - how many TikTok videos are posted straight to HN? TikTok does not have the same diversity of content as YouTube. 3. TikTok addressed point (2) of my post - ByteDance launched in the US with the acquisition of Musically, and even then still had to pay for content. The creator fund, and now also the TikTok shop is a huge part of TikTok's content strategy. >The vast majority of YT content is not monetized by creators, often not even eligible for it in the first place. This is a social quirk, not something that a newcomer can replicate. The problem is, for a new platform, your best content creators will quickly defect to other more monetizable platforms once they get the eyeballs. This is what happened to Vine. If you want to have a sustainable platform you have to keep your creators. YouTube doesn't have the existential threat of the next PewDiePie defecting off the platform. TikTok paid AlixEarle millions to ensure they didn't lose her.
- starfallg 1y ago
  TikTok is a fluke, created by the condition of how it was originally born as Douyin in China. It is also the only app that translated well from the domestic China market to international markets. Being backed by lots of VC cash and Bytedance's revenues in China is a key factor in getting TikTok established overseas.

wodenokoto 1y ago

YouTube has recently have had massive, competitive attacks on their business and have had to quite drastically amend their offerings. TikTok, SnapChat and instagram has all had huge success in their short form formats. It’s not unheard of, that even millennial couples, will spend and evening together in bed scrolling TikTok instead of watching tv together. While the battle is far from over, had YouTube not reacted, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these mobile first competitors would have started experimenting with long form content by now.

nine_k 1y ago
TikTok, SnapChat, and Instagram had the capital and the advertising parts completely figured out. They sidestepped a lot of legal troubles by limiting the length and by insisting on the vertical video format, unsuitable for pirated movies, shows, and most musical clips.
bawolff 1y ago
I feel like that is a different niche. Most of the videos i watch on youtube are long form, although i have no idea how much that is the norm.
- pmontra 1y ago
  A data point: I watch highlights of sport events, videos that explain how to do things, some music videos (rarely.) Those are only on YT at scale. The silly funny videos I see people looking at on TikTok all day long? Not interested.
  - bawolff 1y ago
    There are also lot of experts (obviously its the internet so anyone could be anyone) who post educational content on their field of expertise in the 20min - 1 hour length video format. I don't see that type of content anywhere else. It truly is amazing the sort of learning resources on the internet you can find if you are really truly interested in a topic.

glitchc 1y ago

I don't know. TikTok was able to take on Youtube. May have even won by now if the government hadn't intervened.

pharrington 1y ago

There will always be a new kid on the block.

bawolff 1y ago

I disagree, the internet is full of websites who were on the top of the world until they weren't. Its easy for content creators to post their content on multiple sites. The main moat is the critical mass of users. /. Used to be the goto tech forum, but now we are all at hn. Digg was the place to be, now its reddit. Audiences can shift surprisingly suddenly.

p0w3n3d 1y ago
I confirm. I used to be subscribing RSS on slashdot but it's been rubbish only appearing there since a few years ago.

WA 1y ago

I love YouTube, so many things to learn. But their recent push to just ignore people capable of speaking two or more languages with their auto-translated bullshit and no way to turn it off makes me use YouTube way less. It’s a bummer that nobody there seems to realize this. They only see a very dumb metric. Probably something like "did this German dude watch at least one Spanish videos, because we auto-translate titles and voice". It feels disrespectful.

nyjah 1y ago
If I click I’m not interested on every short presented to me and I’ve never watched a short, why can’t YouTube get the point? At least give us the option to remove them. I don’t deal with the translation issue but not giving you the option is what is beyond frustrating for me.
- Magnesium0226 1y ago
  if your on firefox or one of its clones, firefox can auto run javascript scripts to remove shorts with the extension Greasemonkey, scripts can be found at 'the greasy fork'. there is also a decent youtube abdroid app called litube which can be found on f-droid which has a built in option to remove shorts (among other great options)
- baud147258 1y ago
  If you're using ublock, you can remove elements on webpages, including the area where shorts are on the YT pages. It's what I did on my mobile to stop watching them.
- coded_monkey 1y ago
  It took a little while but YouTube has stopped recommending shorts after doing exactly this. They still appear in my subscription feed but it’s less bothersome because they’re from channels I actually watch.
- kelvinjps10 1y ago
  You can use unhook or similar extension

safety1st 1y ago

The replacement may be AI generated content or something. Let me go into wild eyed futurist speculative mode here, 1- AI/LLMs are basically a response to the enshittification of Google. The reason this tech is so good and useful is because for years Google rewarded SEO optimized content a.k.a. long winded articles that repeat the same words over and over again and take ten years to make a point, which after training on all that gunk, your LLM can now do in one paragraph. The Google search monopoly gave rise to this lengthy word salad web content and blanketed the earth with it. The AI summarizer arose as a natural response. The web as we know it may now die. 2- The software industry seems to gravitate toward a layer cake of monopolies. E.g. we have Microsoft monopolize the OS and app platform, it becomes so awful the government even tries to put the brakes on it, partially succeeds, then we get the Web application platform. Sitting in a browser on top of Windows and others. Which Google goes on to monopolize. One may suppose that another platform will be built on top of this, which will be unmonopolized for a few years, and then someone will monopolize and enshittify that too, paving the way for the next cycle. It's turtles all the way down. 3- How this pertains to YouTube, well in the near future I suppose someone could ingest all of YouTube, and create AI versions of it, exactly like what was done with the web. And they might even get away with it once we set a bunch of legal precedents that this is not a thing you can get sued for. Presumably the AI platform would need to be different or better in some way, so perhaps we'll see a video platform where all the content is generated on the fly by AI, and you can get exactly what you want because it was trained on the videos that humans made. E.g. you can simply tell the AI you want to watch a comedy show called Three and a Half Horses where all the characters are reverse centaurs, and it will spin up as many episodes as you want until you get bored. And YouTube will continue to be an aging monopoly for decades, like Windows, but no one will really care because we'll be watching horses deliver Seinfeld quality jokes [1] [1] It's not horses and it's not as good as Seinfeld, but someone's already doing this. So all that remains for my prognostication to come true is for a financial crisis to happen, at which point the government can use it as an excuse to print a random $500B and give it to a politically connected billionaire intermediary who will invest a fraction of it into the engineering, and history will continue to march forward as it does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever

amelius 1y ago

Maybe it can be replaced by something like Anna's archive, but for videos.

tebbers 1y ago

I remember reading a history of YouTube once, and early on they were about to go under from the sheer weight of music industry copyright lawsuits and the cost of bandwidth. Google had the technology, heft and resources to do infringement detection at scale to really save them, not to mention their global bandwidth.

alerighi 1y ago

A lot of creators that started with a YouTube channel nowadays have moved a lot of content to social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram reels. To me YouTube risk to be replaced (or it has already been replaced) by short videos, because a lot of people is no longer interested in watching a 20 minutes long video nowadays, especially new generations tend to spend a lot of time on just TikTok.

j45 1y ago
Instead of one or the other, think about it like both have their purpose with the same topic. Shorts have been shown to cause more issues in the brain than not. Long slows the brain down to actually be able to sit with an idea.
aunty_helen 1y ago
Or, as the algorithm seemed to be rewarding 10min+ videos at one point and a bunch of creators put out filler content, people no longer enjoy forced long form content. This has been a huge thing in car YouTube, a drag race that’s over in 11 seconds stretched out to a 19 minute video. Realistically 5-7 minutes would’ve been heaps of time.

skywal_l 1y ago

If the US government was a function body, it would force Youtube to separate the hosting business and the website itself. The hosting would be a low margin low risk business which doesn't care about traffic either way. It's just selling infrastructure the way telecom companies do. It would be paid by websites to offer a frontend to users. This way there is real competition on what matters, the user experience and still a economy of scale on what costs a lot which is actually storing and delivering videos. Some frontend would be free with ads, some with a paywall but without ads. Some low quality, some high quality, some both. The user would have a choice. Each creator would be free to choose its licensing model. The hosting company would then only provide the video to frontends following the creator's wish. The creator would pay by the bytes stored and the frontend by the bytes transferred. No incentive for the hosting provider to favor either of them. Not perfect as the hosting company is still a monopoly, but it could be regulated to be neutral and behave like a utility. The frontend has to cater to users and nobody else. They have competition and disappear if they enshittify. Creators are free from the tyranny of google. They become the clients of the hosting company which makes steady money whatever the content. Everybody wins, except google, which is fine by me.

account42 1y ago

On the other hand, an alternative without all the "content creators" that are just in it for the money sounds really great to me.

berkes 1y ago

YouTube as a whole has a giant moat. But niches within YouTube can be disrupted. We've seen it with short form (TikTok etc), music (Spotify etc). We see it with specific niches of content creators (nebula etc). It's happened with livestreams. I'm bad at predicting future, but could imagine niches like "publicly funded content" from e.g. EU public broadcasters moving away (e.g. NPOstart in NL) because of privacy issues or because they legally can't monetize their content anyway. Maybe university lectures? Or sports video? Game reviews by a specialized platform by steam? Video between 4 and 10 minutes? Podcast videos? So YouTube as a whole will stay, but it can be chipped away at. Some chips may prove in themselves a small, but still good business model.

kelvinjps10 1y ago
I agree with this. For example some tech creators are using peertube or similar. University Lectures now posting in other websites as backup and people that do courses also have them in their website. What I think what will happen it's that YouTube will still be used for discovery to drive the traffic to these other sites until people finally migrate to the smaller ones.

orbital-decay 1y ago

> "Disrupting" YouTube is difficult because the social conditions that created YouTube do not exist anymore. That simply means that the alternative to YouTube will look nothing like YouTube.

p0w3n3d 1y ago

Currently many YouTube creators request additional money on patreon-style platforms. It either means that YouTube's paycheck sucks OR they are greedy. In both cases this reverts your arguments on paying to creators, because if some platform would be better in some meaningful property, it could steal the user base. For example - background playing, less commercials, less distractions etc.

hopelite 1y ago

I do not see that as inherently correct. There have been and are several alternatives to YouTube and every single one has been actively sabotaged for primarily political/ideological reasons that have nothing to do with any of what you are talking about. There is quite literally a conspiracy to suppress alternatives to YouTube because they do not align with the ideological parameters of the pernicious system. If you let that boot up from humanity’s neck, there would be many competitors to YouTube that would immediately atrophy YouTube. You seem to simply not be aware of what is going on outside of the authorized narrative. You will never be able to see the reality of things if you limit yourself to only the confines of the illusion matrix created for you by the system. But yes, YouTube has a moat and like all moats it is built and maintained by the tyrannical monarch who believes himself to be chosen by God, but must hide away behind it from reality.

cyanydeez 1y ago

All this means is its a public good and should be made a utility. Either directly or strip mined and mirrored.

jjani 1y ago

> "Disrupting" YouTube is difficult For a company, it's impossible. For any country except for the US, it's very easy: you use any of the million different protectionist measures available. Such as tarriffs, as the US itself has taken a liking to - in this case it would be their digital equivalent, namely digital service taxes.

b800h 1y ago
The US government is extremely active in going after governments which attempt to impose digital service taxes. It was proposed in the UK, and quickly vanished without a trace.
- jjani 1y ago
  Indeed they are, IMO this is the real number 1 reason behind the US tariffs, as well as behind his anger against Brazil, even more so than the prosecution of his fash club buddy. What you do is get together with a bunch of other countries and announce it as a block. The US can only keep shooting itself in the foot so much. The thing they should've done is, very soon after the US tariffs were announced, say "We think this is a fantastic idea by Mr. Trump. Aligned with his views, we are instituting accompanying digital tariffs to fix the digital trade deficit. We're sure he'll agree that the trade balance should be corrected in both the physical as well as digital worlds". The UK is effectively a colony of the US so them backing out is entirely expected. Luckily, other countries aren't. I think Brazil, Vietnam (?), Thailand (?) are ones that have already set a date for when it's being instated, and I haven't heard of them backing out. There's probably more. The EU has also confirmed today that they won't be cancelling the Google fine, though we'll have to wait and see what happens to their DST proposals. Given their serious lack of spine as well as how far the EU has gone to the right, I do expect them to cancel it, but who knows. And again, there's a hundred other protectionist barriers that can be put up. This is the smartest way, salami slicing, as China has figured out decades ago. You begin very small and just ramp it up. You begin with something like banning Twitch because of moral concerns. Maybe even just from 8 to 8, when kids are up. Then you say national security concerns mean data centers of critical infrastructure all have to be hosted in the country. Then you expand that. Then you make Whatsapp (or whatever is the most popular messaging app) do a JV with a local player because it's a national security risk. And so on. But Western governments don't have the wit to execute this, in which case a cruder measure such as a digital tariff is what's left.

8474_s 1y ago

So if you succeed, how the terabytes of content and bandwidth will be sponsored - by what? The only way i can think of it is some super-efficient neural codec with extreme video compression ratio that runs on mobile devices. Othewise Youtube wins by sheer scale google invested in it.

fsflover 1y ago
> how the terabytes of content and bandwidth will be sponsored - by what? How does it work in the Internet itself? By decentralization, i.e., different servers serve their own small part. The same can work with the videos: see PeerTube.
kelvinjps10 1y ago
Majors CDN already exists. They can build on top of cloudfare or Amazon services. If you think about it Amazon it's on a good position to build an alternative,they already have experience with ads and hosting video content
- 8474_s 1y ago
  AWS-based youtube would be astronomically expensive and much slower than dedicated video servers. Youtube shapes the entire internet total bandwidth.

dilap 1y ago

YouTube is incredible, YouTube is poorly run. If I were making the laws, I'd do something similar to mandatory licensing of songs for radio: mandate that YouTube, as a sort de-facto content monopilist, provide third-party access to its database (upload, discovery, view counts, recommendations, etc). Devil is in the details, but well-done it would strictly improve the world. Independent competitive companies are great, but things tend to devolve into de-facto mini-governments once things stabilize, and from there I think the (real) government using its power to force a little more competition could really improve things.

NuclearPM 1y ago

Counterpoint: TikTok

gwbas1c 1y ago

> Your largest users eventually stop posting if you don't pay them (because they can go elsewhere after using your platform as a springboard: see Vine) I don't think that's as big as a problem as you do, as long as you don't care about exclusivity. Think of the streaming music market: Youtube Music, Spotify, Tidal, Amazon Music, ect, generally have mostly the same content and little exclusivity. For example, you could have a feature where all uploaded videos are automatically uploaded to YouTube and all of your competitors.

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mlinsey 1y ago

Those are very hard but also very solvable problems with a lot of capital. It's the same basic idea as creating a new media company, albeit a lot more costly to build. This is way too expensive to do in a seed round, but one of the other FAANG giants could try if they wanted to. The even harder problem is just answering the basic question of why the viewer side should care, and why they should change their deeply-ingraned habit of going to YouTube to find something to watch. "YouTube isn't fair and transparent to creators" is not going to be compelling to very many people, if the experience of the likes of Tidal competing with Spotify is any indication. YouTube is valuable to creators because it aggregates a huge audience of viewers, those viewers stick around because it's addictive and there is a content flywheel already. But if you actually had a truly good answer for why the average person should switch their YouTube habit to watching some other site instead, the resulting payoff is huge enough (and there's enough crazy risk-hungry investors in the world) that the capital and the moat problems could theoretically be overcome.

RicoElectrico 1y ago

> What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free. What if I told you it did? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Original_Channel_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Original_Channel_Initi... https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/investing-in-future-of-video-youtube/ https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/investing-in-future-of-...

Workaccount2 1y ago

The main reason youtube has no competitors is because people want free (no ads, no subscription) content. And people will gleefully ad-block your service. Look up the story of Vid.me It exploded in popularity around 2015-17. Many youtube creators moved to it. Then they went bankrupt because no one wanted to pay a subscription, and no one wanted to view ads. Internet users desperately need to look in the mirror to figure out why so many services have strangleholds and why so many services plain suck for users - the users aren't paying for anything in any form, and they celebrate that fact.

eloisant 1y ago
On Youtube you also have a choice between watching ads or subscription, I don't see the difference. Yes you can use an ad-blocker, but they're making it harder and harder. Youtube has no competition because it's a winner-takes-all market, and they won. Creators go where viewers are. Viewers go where creators are. Rinse and repeat, and sooner or later you end up with a monopoly.
dh2022 1y ago
There is no paying by users - which is replaced by ads. But in my experience the number of ads on YouTube sky-rocketed. I had no problem watching 15 seconds of an ad, skipping and then watching the rest of the video. But I used to watch long-form videos - and now I have skip ads every 7-8 minutes. I almost stopped watching YT. In the few instances I watch I will for a8 minutes or so and at the first ad I am leaving. I am wondering if behavior like this explains the drop in views, but the fact that revenue stayed the same....

braza 1y ago

> Disrupting" YouTube is difficult because the social conditions that created YouTube do not exist anymore. I think the Zero Interest Rate era made a lot of business like this. I can think about YouTube, Uber, several food delivery apps, Fintechs, and so on.

johannes1234321 1y ago

The big thing with content: They were really relaxed to care about copyright, till they had agreements (and content id etc.) in place. A competitor needs a good legal department willing to take up that fight.

dec0dedab0de 1y ago

If YouTube dies, I doubt there will ever be a replacement. Meta, Bytedance, Snap, and even X could fill the void relatively easily. a few new views focussing specifically on video, and video focussed apps that don't require a login for all the platforms.

jlarocco 1y ago

> People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free. It also helped that tons of copyrighted content was uploaded and the policing and take down was originally pretty lax.

9rx 1y ago

What was unique about Youtube is that it got to claim the first search result for "Lazy Sunday", a popular SNL skit at the time. That is how everyone came to learn of it. The "homemade" videos that followed were also necessary for its longevity, but initial discovery was critical. Disrupting YouTube is difficult because the rampant piracy isn't as easy to pull off anymore.

SilverElfin 1y ago

This is why YouTube should be treated, like all large social media, as a utility. There isn’t a real path to competition here. Things like censorship or Google having exclusive rights to train their AI on YouTube data have a lot of negative impact on the world.

elAhmo 1y ago

TikTok emerged very quickly as an alternative to Youtube. Different kind and form of content, but something that Youtube ended up replicating. I am sure if YouTube somehow died overnight, TikTok or some other player would work very quickly to get the alternative out there.

afpx 1y ago

I never understood why an upstart couldn't just identify the top revenue producers on YouTube and compensate them extra for moving to their platform.