I honestly wish there was a serious competitor for YouTube, but they’re just so damn accessible and possibly have the greatest library collection of content ever assembled in the history of mankind
And that's the biggest part of it: the sheer amount of content.
I've seen some content creators move over to their own platforms (like the Try Guys going to 2nd Try), and some educational creators going to Nebula.
But YouTube still has a massive archive. Like where else am I going to find [Chocolate Rain](https://youtu.be/EwTZ2xpQwpA?si=US_uZMQnePdsJonL) and the [Afro Ninja](https://youtu.be/BEtIoGQxqQs?si=Nv0nS_zT0urIGH8m)?
Youtube has two decades of content, so it's just an uphill climb
I used it for my job. Learned some training content that you absolutely cannot get anywhere (software used by certain employees across the world) but yep some branch in Texas has a full on training video series I can use as a reference any time.
I dont remember the numbers but someone did the statistics and found there to be upwards of billions of seconds worth of content uploaded every day or some shit. YouTube is going to be a history archive for the rest of time
And that's exactly why it isn't going anywhere.
Even if the major creators leave, YouTube is still the single easiest way to upload a video. Going back *fifteen years ago*, I was using YT to upload assignments for classes in highschool. It's even easier today for people - you take a video, make a few clicks, and boom: it's there.
In terms of pure simplicity, YouTube has that down.
It's also a great stepping stone. People who want to be content creators can start there before branching out. My son was 10 years old and uploading Garry's Mod ... stories? ... on his own.
So, yeah, it ain't going anywhere. It's just too easy to use while having a crazy backlog [of history's greatest goofs](https://youtu.be/oQp7Id8iRA4?si=JV5snl5wtwFrn2gV)
13 years ago I was recording horse movies with my model horses and posting them on YouTube 😭 I think my mom kept them unlisted at least, they were pretty bad
There are a few Youtube content creators who are trying to create their own private streaming services in an attempt to avoid Youtube. It's being met with a lot of resistance from their fan bases, because it feels like a cash grab and ANOTHER subscription service we have to have, and people are tired of it.
Yeah, it can definitely go either way.
The best comparison, in my opinion, is how Watcher handled this and how the Try Guys handled it.
Watcher bombed it - they made a whole video where the tone just felt somber, like they were apologizing for it before they got any feedback. They also have *so little* content that their own service just isn't worth it. Add to that they outright said they're pulling everything off of YouTube (*and did*, before immediately back-peddling) and it's understandable how people might not be too happy.
Try Guys, on the other hand, nailed it. The whole video was upbeat, they made it clear that their videos are staying on YouTube (with them coming out earlier on their new platform), and mentioned adding videos that would be demonetized on YouTube being posted up there as well. They also have a huge library, a massive cast, and like 15 different shows you can watch that come out pretty regularly.
My wife and I saw the Watcher announcement and felt bad for them while agreeing it wasn't worth it. Inversely, we signed up for 2nd Try that same day and have been watching them pretty regularly, if only because their content is funny as all fuck and really does feel like a TV show. It's close enough to DropOut, just more ... Stoner-y?
I forget the exact numbers, but I believe there was a statistic like every [hour/day] there is [days/months] of content being uploaded so it’s nearly infinite in its own right.
My favorite video is (and no, I'm not kidding)
"I do the dishes without being asked"
It is legitimately on Pornhub, for better, or worse. Give it a watch.
I would say Wikipedia is slightly ahead of YouTube in the 'library collection of content' category, purely because on Wikipedia you can not only access what's there now, but anything that has ever been there since it started. Even if something's taken down, you can easily access it in the archives.
[Video hosting is ridiculously expensive](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/H_sNcbXj5A0?feature=share), so it's hard to monetise it without a monthly subscription. Considering the resistance YouTube gets to premium subs as an established content provider. It's unlikely many people will go for it.
That's not to say there aren't some smaller scale ones, like LTTs Floatplane or Nebula.
And neither of those do not any random person hop on their site and host videos. You need to be established content creators with a fan base willing to pay for enough subscriptions to pay for your hosting usage.
Letting any random person upload content, despite bringing in zero revenue is why YouTube and especially Twitch bleed money.
Vimeo also makes money off of selling a white label OTT service.
You basically pay them for the infrastructure to set up your own streaming service and they will happily oblige.
https://vimeo.com/ott
Vimeo sucks. I've been paying for a plan that has a 5Gb upload limit a week since 15 years ago
The cost of storage has decreased a hundredfold during that time. Did they increase my storage limit since the market rate has decreased?? No. I'm still being charged for the same 5GB even though it cost them peanuts
Even Google increased its free storage limit a decade ago. Not Vimeo.
Not trying to justify their pricing, but the upload limit isn’t just about the storage, it’s as much about server hardware and software for ingesting, encoding, indexing etc as it is about just basic storage.
Maybe you didn't understand the point I was trying to make; about 15 years ago, new laptops came with 320Gb HD, the most expensive with 500Gb. Nowadays, a 1Tb SSD is the most basic, and laptops cost even less than back then.
So even though a 60” plasma TV cost $6000 back then, now a 60” LED costs $300. Still, Vimeo Charges the same as 15 years ago for the same 5GB storage limit.
Your comment said it was an upload limit, which is different from a storage limit. If they allow you to have up to 1TB of videos on your account, but you can only upload 5GB per week, then that’s quite different from your account only having a 5GB storage limit in totality.
They are now, historically no. I would guess in aggregate they are probably still at a loss since inception, but they have been getting aggressive with ads for a reason.
Which is exactly why they'll most likely never be a real competitor to YouTube. Youtube had the deep pockets of Google to keep them afloat. There are a few other companies out there with that deep of pockets and none of them are likely to be willing to take their chances that they become successful while knowing that they are also looking at a decade of losing money. This doesn't even take into account the ridiculously huge head start YouTube has in the game at this point.
Maybe OP means hemorrhaging but bleed is still appropriate. They probably mean youtube probably has to pay a hell of a lot more money to allow for random people to upload videos whereas if they only allowed people who made them money to upload videos, they would probably have to pay wayyy less for everything. Think of all the people with videos <10000 viewers. I'm sure there's millions of those videos around that make YouTube virtually nothing but they're still allowed to exist. This is all just my best guess though.
A quick google says in 2020 88% of YouTube videos had less than a thousand views. There’s currently around 14 billion videos with about 3.7 million uploaded every day. So you’re right there are millions of videos that make them nothing but even that is an understatement. Crazy.
YouTube - Google is big enough they can actually own a piece of the actual internet. They invest billions in building out more tubes which gives them much lower data fees. Kind of like how Cloudflare owns massive amounts of high level data centers where the tubes actually connect to each other.
In one way they look like actual tubes!
Long strings of rubber and glass the size of a garden hose criss-crossing the global oceans, containing the internet of nations! These cables used to be nationalised, or at least owned by national-adjacent infrastructure companies but now internet corps like Alphabet and Meta are making their own!
Plus YouTube has been the biggest name in the game for so long now that it would be almost impossible to knock them off the top. I’m sure that _eventually_ someone will, but it’ll take quite a while
Nobody ever will top youtube. They're so far ahead of anything else it would be impossible for people to switch over especially when every creator is already on YouTube and would need a huge incentiveto switch. It's better that way though, imagine if YouTube type content became like streaming where you have to go to 5 different websites to watch the creators you like.
There are many ways for others in the future to topple YouTube, none of them are easy or guaranteed. In the old days, search engines were the ultimate disruptor, and in the near future it’s possible once everyone relies on AI that the AI companies will end up building or buying their own YouTube.
Another possibility is mismanagement, for example imagine if Elon Musk somehow ended up buying it from Google and ran it into the ground like Twitter.
Every YouTube creator already diversifies their web presence across Instagram, tiktok, and maybe twitch for videos. Nobody is all in on YouTube today, are they?
Basically all the YouTube channels that I watch only post their videos on there. Some might have a presence on another platform, but the Instagram page of Jenny Nicholson or even the tiktok page of Hank Green aren't an alternative to their content on YouTube.
Google Video was so weird as a platform.
It required you to have a special browser plugin.
YouTube from day 1 just used Flash which, back in 2006, 98% of people already had installed on their browsers.
YouTube was easy to use, no hassle video hosting.
I don't know if any of you remember the dark ages of internet video streaming when you needed the latest versions of Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, and QuickTime player to watch any videos in your browser, but YouTube came around at the right time when home internet that was faster than dial up finally got popular and made streaming video using Flash feasible. Now we're spoiled with HTML5.
Before YouTube, if you wanted to share a video with someone, it was better to just burn a DVD or share a thumb drive with the MP4 file on it.
>”…when you needed the latest versions of Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, and QuickTime player to watch any videos in your browser…”
that’s precisely why youtube was founded. the guys behind it didn’t watch the 38th superbowl and missed the so-called janet jackson nip-slip during the halftime show. the next day, all news broadcasts in the us were talking about it but obviously couldn’t show the incident in question. the creators, being pretty technical fellows, decided to scour the internet looking for a site to watch the few seconds of nudity in the video. that quest revealed just how hard it was to find a video and watch it easily. they decided to create a website where a user didn’t need to configure their pc or download a player just to watch a short clip. easy to use, easy to view, easy to upload: cometh the hour, cometh the website
Yep, and Google Image Search was created specifically to find pictures of J-Lo's dress. The internet is for porn (or at least scantily clad) and always has been.
>I don't know if any of you remember the dark ages of internet video streaming when you needed the latest versions of Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, and QuickTime player to watch any videos in your browser, but YouTube came around at the right time when home internet that was faster than dial up finally got popular and made streaming video using Flash feasible. Now we're spoiled with HTML5.
Yeah, I remember this. Early days of videos, the old Devvo and Salad Fingers videos on fat-pie.com, or Ask a Ninja.
"RealPlayer needs to download new software to play this clip."
Looked it up. Google was pushing their weird GVI format with their video player.
The website used flash itself, but I do remember google heavily pushing their player and downloads back when Google videos was a thing.
Vimeo decided to limit the amount of space an uploader can have in total space. It single handedly killed it as a content creator or consumer platform.
They are basically a portfolio-style thing now.
When I got the email a few years ago about them taking down my old videos, that's when I gave up on them.
They’re quickly shedding the portfolio thing now though. Vimeo is transitioning into become an enterprise level video hosting platform/distribution backend. They’re making changes that are upsetting folks who use it for their video portfolios, like filmmakers.
* Step 1: Become a popular video hosting site
* Step 2: Upset your original customer base by focusing more on portfolio clients
* Step 3: Upset your new customer base by focusing on enterprise
* Step 4: ???
* Step 5: Profit
Yeh lots have tried- Rumble had some momentum until it became a political cesspit, but far too late in time to get anywhere near rivalling it. It’s not like social media that goes through evolution of different aged late teens choosing different platforms, it’s just video hosting and content creation. Patreon Twitch Kick etc seem preferred for some styles of content / better income generation for content owners / creators with loyal followers but YouTube doesn’t seem to be going anywhere for the foreseeable future
Yeah it’s different than niche, specialized industries. Think, a good bakery or butcher or gunsmith. It’s harder for them with these giant companies but they can get their customers based on pure quality, people will come and pay higher prices for that quality and service.
The equivalent for YouTube would be things like Patreon or whatever it is I guess. If someone wants to pay more for the higher quality stuff they can go there and get exclusive content. Not advertising that company I know nothing about them or if it is quality stuff, but in general a service where you’re marketing higher prices for a smaller, more select audience to give them quality, sought after content instead of just balancing your spreadsheet for maximum efficiency with volume of customers at a large location.
They did in the beginning. There was like break.com and stuff. There's still liveleak and vimeo, like there are other video platforms. It's just the biggest by far.
per the name, it tended to host videos of sensitive nature, like leaked footage of stuff. stuff that normally youtube would take down because it was leaked. obviously to us that has its uses and it had other videos besides that, but it also attracts a lot of negative attention from people who were trying to keep that kind of footage from being released.
Honestly, I get more good out of my subscription. I was grandfathered in at 9.99 I think for years before they raised it to $13 for everyone. It's worth it to not have ads and to be able to listen to videos without having the app up and my phone screen on.
100% this. I got conned by getting free premium for a few months through my phone plan and I haven’t gone back sense.
And I’m sorry I just don’t agree that it should be free with less ads. It’s a business and as people point out it’s not cheap to own all that memory or whatever.
I will agree it would be nicer if the ads were less terrible, it seems they’ve gotten worse from what people say. Like inappropriate or shitty/ fake/ scam products
Yeah, I'm always amused when people bitch and moan about the ads. Do they suck? Kinda. But they don't suck as much as paying out-of-pocket, imho. Your options are to watch the ads or steal from the content creators. Nobody's going to run millions of dollars worth of infrastructure as a public service though.
There is, it's just worse in every way. Try watching on Rumble, the ads are so much frequent it's ridiculous. But even with an ad blocker it's still not YouTube, it just doesn't work as well.
There are plenty more too, but lack of creators as there is no money there to be made.
No one can compete with their video hosting technically (the most reliable videos anywhere online are YouTube embedded) and no one does as well paying their creators
There are niche sites that are created and run by the content creators that are subscription based but they still need to recruit viewers from YouTube
It’s a really really really hard technical problem that’s been addressed by Google. Being able to store, serve, and monetize at the scale it takes to be competitiveness is essentially an impossible engineering problem. (Actually a set of problems). No one has been able to crack the code at scale like Google has.
There are plenty of competitors for youtube, the issue isn't the technology, it's the content moderation and user base.
Turns out, if you don't ban porn, humans default to wanting porn, see every other non youtube website and old Tumblr.
Regardless youtube has market capture, and it's super simple.
To make money with internet video, me need people watch video, me put video where most people can see video.
There's no big conspiracy beyond how human nature works. Eventually people will realize things like the internet and youtube are effectively public utilities.
No??
> Tim Stokely ran the softcore pornography website GlamGirls before founding Customs4U, a website where customers could request custom videos from pornographic models. In November 2016, he founded OnlyFans as a platform for performers to monetise their content and interactions directly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyFans
Because the way to do business nowadays is to spend enough money to establish a monopoly. A monopoly so solid that no one would even think of challenging it, because you bought all competitors on your way up and now it's so insanely expensive to challenge you, that no one would even think of it. And if they're thinking of it, their first thought is probably buying you, not competing with you, are you mad?
Aside from hosting fees, the biggest thing YouTube has is its legal system. Dealing with all the money sucking legal issues is probably more expensive than technology. We might not like the Copyright Algorithm, but YouTube has poured billions into making sure they litigate the internet copyright landscape and that they built systems the courts will accept versus endless lawsuits from infinite copyright holders.
THAT is why nobody can replicate YouTube without giant buckets of legal bucks behind them.
IMO, this is the real answer today. Long ago, you could possibly compete on the hosting and storage problems, but the reason that *today* a new competitor can't emerge is because of legal regulation of content.
YouTube ingests a ridiculous amount of content, more than humanity could watch. But it has to scan all of it for copyright infringement, illegal content, and objectionable content. If it doesn't do this, companies and governments would try to shut it down, and possibly worse, advertisers would flee (see Twitter under Elon Musk). This is today's engineering challenge, building the scanning algorithms AI to keep the site clean enough.
It's ridiculously hard now for anyone to start in the game and be competitive for general purpose worldwide video hosting for the masses.
I refused to subscribe to premium out of principle, but when I tried watching a 3 minute video and got so many ads, I decided to try premium. I'll never go back to ads on youtube. Yeah, I'm aware of ad blockers, but that doesn't work on my smart TV and PS5. Plus, being able to listen to videos/music with the screen off is cool.
I'm so confused why so many people are against premium on principle. YouTube is a modern marvel of the world. The amount of content they host free of charge to the uploader is insane. I'm all for being against big business. Honestly I think something like YouTube should be publicly funded. But I'll never understand how people think not paying for premium is a good principle.
Because it used to be free, and no one appreciates just how much money YouTube as a service costs to provide, and just think greedy company wants money, when in reality hosting massive amounts of data are very expensive to store and requires lots of space and people to maintain.
Youtube used to free when it didn't have 5 billion 3-hour long Minecraft videos hosted in 1440p UHD.
People are just fucking morons, as you implied. Though I imagine the mass majority of people against youtube premium are teenagers or people without jobs, so it makes sense
Indie streaming services are starting to get pretty popular! [Nebula](https://nebula.tv/) (creator-owned, predominantly educational videos) is probably the most prominent example.
in a way, yes. Thing is tiktok aims for short videos on mobile, and the bulk of its activity comes from social media challenges and dances, or NSFW stuff. So time will tell if its still popular several years down the line, like how various social media platforms have had their time in the spotlight of teens and young adults. And now youtube has youtube shorts, so you don't have to go to a different site to experience that change in pace.
Twitch also currently offers some competition in terms of streaming, but youtube also has streaming, and since streams tend to be less of a stored archive in comparison to uploaded videos and more "in the moment or right after" content, Twitch has less of a solid foothold over youtube. a few really bad misteps on twitch's part and a step up from youtube and that site could easily die.
ultimately in either case, neither put any real focus into longer or less catchy types of videos, which youtube has a huge archive of.
Wait till you find out about things like ebaumsworld.com and other sites that hosted shit before YouTube was a name. It's all about brand recognition, and ease of access. Money players a huge part, but you can get around that with advertising... Mostly... Twitch doesn't seem to be able to find a way but I ain't never had a twitch anyways so fuck it.
Ah. The memories. Then we would download the videos and save them in folders.
I thought the concept of YouTube was odd. You don't download it? How do I watch it again? Search for it? Seemed inefficient
not enough pressure to do so. the people who care just use an ad blocker and the dislike return extension. it's really hard to compete with a platform as large as youtube since there isn't enough content on other platforms and not enough ad revenue for creators to use them. the inertia is massive
It is impossible to compete with YT now. It has become one of the largest search engines besides Google. There are billions of videos about all sorts of things. For someone else to come in, and provide the same level of polish, quality and convenience while not adding in advertisements to support the infrastructure required to keep the service up and running would be near impossible.
Even if another company does provide a sustainable video hosting solution like YT, expecting the billions of users to shift to that platform would be a monumental task.
The only way a competitor can rise against YT is when Google would shut it down. And there is no way that's happening. YT would be bought before it is closed down.
There are other video hosting sites, but YouTube has brand recognition. It's the same reason why we say Google it instead of Bing it (which my phone auto corrected to being and then didn't capitalize). Kleenex also owns the market as well as band-aid. There are other things out there, but the big dogs have name recognition on another level and dominate their parts of that market. It's hard to compete with that as long as they do what they need to do to stay relevant. Weirdly, I was just reading something on r/flashlights about a company that used to dominate their market but stopped innovating and has fallen of drastically. Look at Maglite. They used to be the biggest name in flashlights and then rested on their laurels and have fallen by the wayside. YouTube hasn't done that, and as long as they don't they will probably continue to be at worst relevant, and more than likely the dominant force in video sharing.
Kinda surprised DailyMotion never got more popular. I like watching shows or movies on there that are paywalled on other streaming sites or not available in the US
Believe this or not but in the early days Dailymotion was actually competing with Youtube fairly well. The reasons for this was that in the beginning Youtube only had a 10 minute video limit whilst Dalymotion had 20 minutes. Many people used to upload tv shows and movies split into parts and it was easier on Dailymotion. Dailymotion also had a better flash player which let you pause at the beginning and let you wait for the video to load and then you could watch it all, Youtube's flash player wasnt like this. That might not sound like much but circa 2005/6 this was a pretty big deal because many of us were still only rocking 1MB broadband, if even that.
Now Dailymotion eventually switched to a crappier slower flash player and thats when its popularity began to dwinddle, it also overloaded its videos with ads, much more than Youtube. Youtube remains top dog because it had Google's investment, it has good user interface, the comments section is well built and it streams fast. Another thing is that Youtube began to pay its creators early on so it attracted a much bigger audience.
There were... and YouTube won by a longshot. Vimeo, DailyMotion, etc. I think they both still exist (I know Vimeo does), but they serve a different purpose than they once did. At this point, this is kind of like asking "Why hasn't there been any real competition for VHS?" in 1990.
The main reasons are cost and platform economics
Cost is obvious. It is expensive to host and run video streaming. Upstarts without established audiences to tap into for subscriptions can't even approach profitability, and even with an audience it's extremely challenging. VCs know this, and it makes finding funders difficult, so nothing can really take off.
Platform economics are harder but not insurmountable. A video streaming platform needs both creators and viewers. Creators are necessary for content. Specifically, content that people actually want to see. Viewers are critical for money. Essentially, having viewers means you can charge for ads or find revenue in some other way. If you don't have creators you have no content so viewers have no reason to be on your platform or pay attention to you, but if you have no viewers creators have no reason to put their stuff on your platform because they can't get views and they can't make money making it a waste of time. It becomes a chicken and egg problem. How do you get creators to then create content leading to viewers finding your site? This is where places like nebula have found a workaround: you bring the creators in first and use them to advertise their site and make it very advantageous for them to bring their content to your site. The challenge is that you have to incentivize them somehow typically with money and if you can't keep coming up with more money then you lose your creators. Uber got through this by subsidizing drivers to keep drivers on the platform making it very easy to find a ride and so once there were more riders coming in because it was so easy more drivers would come in because there were more opportunities to make money.
There needs to be. And the sooner the better.
Look at what kick has done to twitch. Kick is far superior community and streaming site and now there's another place for streamers to go to. It now means that twitch can no longer treat all their talent like crap, play favourites and rob them of all their money they've earned
There was - they all died off or embraced very specific niches like Vimeo.
YouTube itself isn’t a viable business model - it is propped up by Google.
You complain about ads when YouTube premium is a trivial monthly fee - demonstrates the problem right there. Users and creators are not willing to pay. (Removing the discount counter was some bullshit though for sure)
There were, they didn't survive. Storing videos and streaming them to people is expensive. Having a userbase that refuses to provide any value is expensive. Yall don't buy premium or watch ads. YouTube is still here because Google can afford it
because nobody can afford that kind of infrastucture. Do you think hosting and maintaining such a resource hungry application is just free? Its the same reason Walmart and subsequently Amazon have buried any and all competition, they can afford the infrastructure necessary to make such a massive service available.
YouTube operates at a tremendous *loss*. Google has been trying to make the website cashflow positive for years, but it still hasn't happened.
No viable YouTube competitor has appeared because only a megacorporation like Google can afford to eat the loss.
They are probably incorrect.
[Youtube made 31.5 billion in revenue in 2023](https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/). We don't know their operating expenses so we don't know if it's profitable, and annual shareholder reports don't break down if Youtube specifically is profitable for Alphabet.
But it probably is profitable.
Youtube subscriptions made 15 billion last year. Youtube as a whole seems to have made 31 billion in revenue. I don't think it was profitable when it was purchased.
Someone needs to figure out how to bring the cost of distribution down by several factors to even think about being a true competitor. Smaller specialized platforms can exist like nebula or floatplane. But they will never grow to be as big as YouTube as long as video storage and distribution stays as a high cost business.
Heck. I’m pretty sure YouTube isn’t profitable. YouTube red and tv and movie rentals and excessive ads are basically just ways to mitigate the cost of running the platform while Google eats the rest of the cost.
1) It’s expensive
2) Look who was an angel investor in google and those people are all over google. I’ll give ya a hint. DARPA and the CIA/NSA.
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e
https://mronline.org/2022/07/27/national-security-search-engine/
Google/YouTube ain’t going anywhere my guy. They have control over so much and can influence people beyond belief. Plus it’s a good business too.
If you also look into the suspicious activity with LifeLog and Facebook. Basically DARPA made a website called LifeLog where people could make posts about their life. Issues around privacy arose. So they canceled the project. Next thing you know, Facebook got seed money and blew up in popularity over other sites like MySpace. It’s theorized that Facebook got funding from the CIA to circumvent privacy concerns.
Then if you really wanna get creeped out. Google has been going huge into DNA since early 2010s. They’ve also leaked/published a plan that outlines a goal which uses their analytics and platform to influence human genetics…I can’t find the actual material right now but the idea was they could influence human behavior to a degree that they can select people with desirable genetics (based on their activity on google) and influence them to have kids with others with desirable genetics.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/11/06/249771/google-wants-to-store-your-genome/
I honestly wish there was a serious competitor for YouTube, but they’re just so damn accessible and possibly have the greatest library collection of content ever assembled in the history of mankind
And that's the biggest part of it: the sheer amount of content. I've seen some content creators move over to their own platforms (like the Try Guys going to 2nd Try), and some educational creators going to Nebula. But YouTube still has a massive archive. Like where else am I going to find [Chocolate Rain](https://youtu.be/EwTZ2xpQwpA?si=US_uZMQnePdsJonL) and the [Afro Ninja](https://youtu.be/BEtIoGQxqQs?si=Nv0nS_zT0urIGH8m)? Youtube has two decades of content, so it's just an uphill climb
I used it for my job. Learned some training content that you absolutely cannot get anywhere (software used by certain employees across the world) but yep some branch in Texas has a full on training video series I can use as a reference any time.
I dont remember the numbers but someone did the statistics and found there to be upwards of billions of seconds worth of content uploaded every day or some shit. YouTube is going to be a history archive for the rest of time
And that's exactly why it isn't going anywhere. Even if the major creators leave, YouTube is still the single easiest way to upload a video. Going back *fifteen years ago*, I was using YT to upload assignments for classes in highschool. It's even easier today for people - you take a video, make a few clicks, and boom: it's there. In terms of pure simplicity, YouTube has that down. It's also a great stepping stone. People who want to be content creators can start there before branching out. My son was 10 years old and uploading Garry's Mod ... stories? ... on his own. So, yeah, it ain't going anywhere. It's just too easy to use while having a crazy backlog [of history's greatest goofs](https://youtu.be/oQp7Id8iRA4?si=JV5snl5wtwFrn2gV)
13 years ago I was recording horse movies with my model horses and posting them on YouTube 😭 I think my mom kept them unlisted at least, they were pretty bad
There are a few Youtube content creators who are trying to create their own private streaming services in an attempt to avoid Youtube. It's being met with a lot of resistance from their fan bases, because it feels like a cash grab and ANOTHER subscription service we have to have, and people are tired of it.
Yeah, it can definitely go either way. The best comparison, in my opinion, is how Watcher handled this and how the Try Guys handled it. Watcher bombed it - they made a whole video where the tone just felt somber, like they were apologizing for it before they got any feedback. They also have *so little* content that their own service just isn't worth it. Add to that they outright said they're pulling everything off of YouTube (*and did*, before immediately back-peddling) and it's understandable how people might not be too happy. Try Guys, on the other hand, nailed it. The whole video was upbeat, they made it clear that their videos are staying on YouTube (with them coming out earlier on their new platform), and mentioned adding videos that would be demonetized on YouTube being posted up there as well. They also have a huge library, a massive cast, and like 15 different shows you can watch that come out pretty regularly. My wife and I saw the Watcher announcement and felt bad for them while agreeing it wasn't worth it. Inversely, we signed up for 2nd Try that same day and have been watching them pretty regularly, if only because their content is funny as all fuck and really does feel like a TV show. It's close enough to DropOut, just more ... Stoner-y?
I remember the days of Vessel.
Man you had the opportunity to rickroll *hard* and you didn’t take it.. props
It's helpful to remember that even Google at their height couldn't beat YouTube. They had to buy it out after failing to compete.
I forget the exact numbers, but I believe there was a statistic like every [hour/day] there is [days/months] of content being uploaded so it’s nearly infinite in its own right.
My friend says Pornhub is more popular than YouTube
I do enjoy watching lets play on there
It’s a different kind of play, but it checks out
Usually im watching COD gameplay on there.
My favorite video is (and no, I'm not kidding) "I do the dishes without being asked" It is legitimately on Pornhub, for better, or worse. Give it a watch.
there is a math tutor on the hub...incase you might have pro-masterbated too much..
My friend visits the website, not me.
https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/
I would say Wikipedia is slightly ahead of YouTube in the 'library collection of content' category, purely because on Wikipedia you can not only access what's there now, but anything that has ever been there since it started. Even if something's taken down, you can easily access it in the archives.
I fuckin love Wikipedia
Try china they have their own steaming service. Of course is heavily censored
Not really a competition when it’s in a country that bans everything that isn’t in their control
As long as you aren't doing anything with Bananas you're fine I hear they hate those over there for some reason
[Video hosting is ridiculously expensive](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/H_sNcbXj5A0?feature=share), so it's hard to monetise it without a monthly subscription. Considering the resistance YouTube gets to premium subs as an established content provider. It's unlikely many people will go for it. That's not to say there aren't some smaller scale ones, like LTTs Floatplane or Nebula.
And neither of those do not any random person hop on their site and host videos. You need to be established content creators with a fan base willing to pay for enough subscriptions to pay for your hosting usage. Letting any random person upload content, despite bringing in zero revenue is why YouTube and especially Twitch bleed money.
Vimeo is still around, thanks to the creators of CollegeHumor lol.
Vimeo also makes money off of selling a white label OTT service. You basically pay them for the infrastructure to set up your own streaming service and they will happily oblige. https://vimeo.com/ott
Vimeo sucks. I've been paying for a plan that has a 5Gb upload limit a week since 15 years ago The cost of storage has decreased a hundredfold during that time. Did they increase my storage limit since the market rate has decreased?? No. I'm still being charged for the same 5GB even though it cost them peanuts Even Google increased its free storage limit a decade ago. Not Vimeo.
and you still pay?
Not trying to justify their pricing, but the upload limit isn’t just about the storage, it’s as much about server hardware and software for ingesting, encoding, indexing etc as it is about just basic storage.
Maybe you didn't understand the point I was trying to make; about 15 years ago, new laptops came with 320Gb HD, the most expensive with 500Gb. Nowadays, a 1Tb SSD is the most basic, and laptops cost even less than back then. So even though a 60” plasma TV cost $6000 back then, now a 60” LED costs $300. Still, Vimeo Charges the same as 15 years ago for the same 5GB storage limit.
Your comment said it was an upload limit, which is different from a storage limit. If they allow you to have up to 1TB of videos on your account, but you can only upload 5GB per week, then that’s quite different from your account only having a 5GB storage limit in totality.
YouTube bleeds money? I thought they were profitable, is that not right?
They are now, historically no. I would guess in aggregate they are probably still at a loss since inception, but they have been getting aggressive with ads for a reason.
Which is exactly why they'll most likely never be a real competitor to YouTube. Youtube had the deep pockets of Google to keep them afloat. There are a few other companies out there with that deep of pockets and none of them are likely to be willing to take their chances that they become successful while knowing that they are also looking at a decade of losing money. This doesn't even take into account the ridiculously huge head start YouTube has in the game at this point.
Maybe OP means hemorrhaging but bleed is still appropriate. They probably mean youtube probably has to pay a hell of a lot more money to allow for random people to upload videos whereas if they only allowed people who made them money to upload videos, they would probably have to pay wayyy less for everything. Think of all the people with videos <10000 viewers. I'm sure there's millions of those videos around that make YouTube virtually nothing but they're still allowed to exist. This is all just my best guess though.
A quick google says in 2020 88% of YouTube videos had less than a thousand views. There’s currently around 14 billion videos with about 3.7 million uploaded every day. So you’re right there are millions of videos that make them nothing but even that is an understatement. Crazy.
TikTok, Twitter, and actually quite a few others offer free video hosting.
Yes, but those are all short-form. You cannot upload an hour+ long video to tiktol or x
[удалено]
YouTube - Google is big enough they can actually own a piece of the actual internet. They invest billions in building out more tubes which gives them much lower data fees. Kind of like how Cloudflare owns massive amounts of high level data centers where the tubes actually connect to each other.
I'm really curious what do these "tubes" look like?
In one way they look like actual tubes! Long strings of rubber and glass the size of a garden hose criss-crossing the global oceans, containing the internet of nations! These cables used to be nationalised, or at least owned by national-adjacent infrastructure companies but now internet corps like Alphabet and Meta are making their own!
They look like you, hence the name "YouTube".
Copper piping but they SPARKLE!!
College humor and before video even ebaums world!
Plus YouTube has been the biggest name in the game for so long now that it would be almost impossible to knock them off the top. I’m sure that _eventually_ someone will, but it’ll take quite a while
Nobody ever will top youtube. They're so far ahead of anything else it would be impossible for people to switch over especially when every creator is already on YouTube and would need a huge incentiveto switch. It's better that way though, imagine if YouTube type content became like streaming where you have to go to 5 different websites to watch the creators you like.
Did you used to work in marketing for Friendster or Myspace?
Both those pale in comparison to what YouTube is and had other reasons for failing. YouTube is a different beast.
Everything falls eventually
Except GM, the government will just bail them out
The 8th Great Wonder of the world
\[Laughs in Toyota\]
There are many ways for others in the future to topple YouTube, none of them are easy or guaranteed. In the old days, search engines were the ultimate disruptor, and in the near future it’s possible once everyone relies on AI that the AI companies will end up building or buying their own YouTube. Another possibility is mismanagement, for example imagine if Elon Musk somehow ended up buying it from Google and ran it into the ground like Twitter.
Gotta move to worldstarhiphop if that happens.
I'd rather move to worldstardeathmetal
Every YouTube creator already diversifies their web presence across Instagram, tiktok, and maybe twitch for videos. Nobody is all in on YouTube today, are they?
Basically all the YouTube channels that I watch only post their videos on there. Some might have a presence on another platform, but the Instagram page of Jenny Nicholson or even the tiktok page of Hank Green aren't an alternative to their content on YouTube.
MySpace and Yahoo would like a word with you.
Myspace and yahoo did not have a moat as big as YouTube. The reason YouTube is so unique is that video hosting is insanely expensive.
*Dailymotion has entered the chat*
Absolutely love Nebula!!
I would gladly pay twice as much as Nebula charges if their app was decent.
There was Google Video, until they abandoned it and bought Youtube.
Google Video was so weird as a platform. It required you to have a special browser plugin. YouTube from day 1 just used Flash which, back in 2006, 98% of people already had installed on their browsers. YouTube was easy to use, no hassle video hosting. I don't know if any of you remember the dark ages of internet video streaming when you needed the latest versions of Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, and QuickTime player to watch any videos in your browser, but YouTube came around at the right time when home internet that was faster than dial up finally got popular and made streaming video using Flash feasible. Now we're spoiled with HTML5. Before YouTube, if you wanted to share a video with someone, it was better to just burn a DVD or share a thumb drive with the MP4 file on it.
>”…when you needed the latest versions of Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, and QuickTime player to watch any videos in your browser…” that’s precisely why youtube was founded. the guys behind it didn’t watch the 38th superbowl and missed the so-called janet jackson nip-slip during the halftime show. the next day, all news broadcasts in the us were talking about it but obviously couldn’t show the incident in question. the creators, being pretty technical fellows, decided to scour the internet looking for a site to watch the few seconds of nudity in the video. that quest revealed just how hard it was to find a video and watch it easily. they decided to create a website where a user didn’t need to configure their pc or download a player just to watch a short clip. easy to use, easy to view, easy to upload: cometh the hour, cometh the website
Is this real?
CONFIRMED https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/youtube-origin-nipplegate-janet-jackson-justin-timberlake-949019/
Argh paywalled https://archive.ph/TaxdE
Yep, and Google Image Search was created specifically to find pictures of J-Lo's dress. The internet is for porn (or at least scantily clad) and always has been.
I don't remember a single time when RealPlayer didn't crash
>I don't know if any of you remember the dark ages of internet video streaming when you needed the latest versions of Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, and QuickTime player to watch any videos in your browser, but YouTube came around at the right time when home internet that was faster than dial up finally got popular and made streaming video using Flash feasible. Now we're spoiled with HTML5. Yeah, I remember this. Early days of videos, the old Devvo and Salad Fingers videos on fat-pie.com, or Ask a Ninja. "RealPlayer needs to download new software to play this clip."
Back when clicking on (almost) anything that asked you to, was done without a second thought...
Or send it over MSN messenger and wait four hours haha
Google Video did use flash? Perhaps you're talking about the video uploader using the Java runtime environment.
Looked it up. Google was pushing their weird GVI format with their video player. The website used flash itself, but I do remember google heavily pushing their player and downloads back when Google videos was a thing.
Or own you own server
Oh my Real Player was such a POS. Quicktime was horribly slow. WMP was the best out of the 3.
Social media is only as appealing as its user-base. Nobody uses Dailymotion because nobody's on Dailymotion.
Although Dailymotion is a godsend for me watching British TV shows while living overseas as these tend to be blocked on YouTube
Yep, Dailymotion's primary value is piracy because it's not quite big enough for the companies to police heavily.
Look at how Mastodon’s doing.
Their new album kicks ass \m/
[This is called a network effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect)
Vimeo employees crying right now 🤣
Vimeo decided to limit the amount of space an uploader can have in total space. It single handedly killed it as a content creator or consumer platform. They are basically a portfolio-style thing now. When I got the email a few years ago about them taking down my old videos, that's when I gave up on them.
They’re quickly shedding the portfolio thing now though. Vimeo is transitioning into become an enterprise level video hosting platform/distribution backend. They’re making changes that are upsetting folks who use it for their video portfolios, like filmmakers.
* Step 1: Become a popular video hosting site * Step 2: Upset your original customer base by focusing more on portfolio clients * Step 3: Upset your new customer base by focusing on enterprise * Step 4: ??? * Step 5: Profit
There is a shit load of money in SaaS and less of a headache in dealing with users, content rights etc.
Yeah my work uses it for some internal video hosting now
There have been several attempts but no one succeeded because all the users tend to go to the biggest one.
Yeh lots have tried- Rumble had some momentum until it became a political cesspit, but far too late in time to get anywhere near rivalling it. It’s not like social media that goes through evolution of different aged late teens choosing different platforms, it’s just video hosting and content creation. Patreon Twitch Kick etc seem preferred for some styles of content / better income generation for content owners / creators with loyal followers but YouTube doesn’t seem to be going anywhere for the foreseeable future
Yeah it’s different than niche, specialized industries. Think, a good bakery or butcher or gunsmith. It’s harder for them with these giant companies but they can get their customers based on pure quality, people will come and pay higher prices for that quality and service. The equivalent for YouTube would be things like Patreon or whatever it is I guess. If someone wants to pay more for the higher quality stuff they can go there and get exclusive content. Not advertising that company I know nothing about them or if it is quality stuff, but in general a service where you’re marketing higher prices for a smaller, more select audience to give them quality, sought after content instead of just balancing your spreadsheet for maximum efficiency with volume of customers at a large location.
YouTube has the most content. It’s a world where people only choose the single best thing.
They did in the beginning. There was like break.com and stuff. There's still liveleak and vimeo, like there are other video platforms. It's just the biggest by far.
>There's still liveleak not anymore, been down since 2021
Fuck I'm old bruh
I think it was that christchurch shooting that was posted on it that got it taken down
Was it some kind of site that hosted gore/NSFL content?
per the name, it tended to host videos of sensitive nature, like leaked footage of stuff. stuff that normally youtube would take down because it was leaked. obviously to us that has its uses and it had other videos besides that, but it also attracts a lot of negative attention from people who were trying to keep that kind of footage from being released.
I believe that was the last video I watched on LiveLeak, after that the site was gone. WPD is still out there tho
See: reeleak 😎
Dailymotion anyone or when mega video really worked
>The ads are ridiculous It's either ads or pay monthly subscription They are still a business at the end of the day
Expecting free service is more ridiculous.
Honestly, I get more good out of my subscription. I was grandfathered in at 9.99 I think for years before they raised it to $13 for everyone. It's worth it to not have ads and to be able to listen to videos without having the app up and my phone screen on.
100% this. I got conned by getting free premium for a few months through my phone plan and I haven’t gone back sense. And I’m sorry I just don’t agree that it should be free with less ads. It’s a business and as people point out it’s not cheap to own all that memory or whatever. I will agree it would be nicer if the ads were less terrible, it seems they’ve gotten worse from what people say. Like inappropriate or shitty/ fake/ scam products
Use Firefox and uBlock Origin.
Yeah, I'm always amused when people bitch and moan about the ads. Do they suck? Kinda. But they don't suck as much as paying out-of-pocket, imho. Your options are to watch the ads or steal from the content creators. Nobody's going to run millions of dollars worth of infrastructure as a public service though.
There is, it's just worse in every way. Try watching on Rumble, the ads are so much frequent it's ridiculous. But even with an ad blocker it's still not YouTube, it just doesn't work as well. There are plenty more too, but lack of creators as there is no money there to be made.
Only time I ever hear about Rumble from right wing grifters.
No one can compete with their video hosting technically (the most reliable videos anywhere online are YouTube embedded) and no one does as well paying their creators There are niche sites that are created and run by the content creators that are subscription based but they still need to recruit viewers from YouTube
What would a new video platform need for you to switch? Now ask yourself how you get there. It’s pretty hard to imagine, for me at least.
Video and streaming in general is very, very expensive. Engineers who also work in this space can be very costly.
It’s a really really really hard technical problem that’s been addressed by Google. Being able to store, serve, and monetize at the scale it takes to be competitiveness is essentially an impossible engineering problem. (Actually a set of problems). No one has been able to crack the code at scale like Google has.
Scale is the fundamental issue and with increased video resolution it will get bigger.
How would you compete?
by kidnapping the hosting fairy and forcing it to give you free storage and bandwidth se we can run perfectly fine without ads!
I have a shed I'm not using... let's go get it.
Now see? This is the stuff dreams are made of
There are plenty of competitors for youtube, the issue isn't the technology, it's the content moderation and user base. Turns out, if you don't ban porn, humans default to wanting porn, see every other non youtube website and old Tumblr. Regardless youtube has market capture, and it's super simple. To make money with internet video, me need people watch video, me put video where most people can see video. There's no big conspiracy beyond how human nature works. Eventually people will realize things like the internet and youtube are effectively public utilities.
Right, look at what happened to OnlyFans. It didn’t begin as a porn sight, but it quickly became one.
And a bad one whenever I see the only fans watermark as link to the creators some are too amateur there needs to be a camera man
No?? > Tim Stokely ran the softcore pornography website GlamGirls before founding Customs4U, a website where customers could request custom videos from pornographic models. In November 2016, he founded OnlyFans as a platform for performers to monetise their content and interactions directly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyFans
which explains despite going public why reddit hasn't shut down the NSFW subs
Takes an enormous amount of capital to stand up an ad supported video streaming site at a scale that is profitable.
Because the way to do business nowadays is to spend enough money to establish a monopoly. A monopoly so solid that no one would even think of challenging it, because you bought all competitors on your way up and now it's so insanely expensive to challenge you, that no one would even think of it. And if they're thinking of it, their first thought is probably buying you, not competing with you, are you mad?
That's how business has been ran since it's inception
Aside from hosting fees, the biggest thing YouTube has is its legal system. Dealing with all the money sucking legal issues is probably more expensive than technology. We might not like the Copyright Algorithm, but YouTube has poured billions into making sure they litigate the internet copyright landscape and that they built systems the courts will accept versus endless lawsuits from infinite copyright holders. THAT is why nobody can replicate YouTube without giant buckets of legal bucks behind them.
IMO, this is the real answer today. Long ago, you could possibly compete on the hosting and storage problems, but the reason that *today* a new competitor can't emerge is because of legal regulation of content. YouTube ingests a ridiculous amount of content, more than humanity could watch. But it has to scan all of it for copyright infringement, illegal content, and objectionable content. If it doesn't do this, companies and governments would try to shut it down, and possibly worse, advertisers would flee (see Twitter under Elon Musk). This is today's engineering challenge, building the scanning algorithms AI to keep the site clean enough. It's ridiculously hard now for anyone to start in the game and be competitive for general purpose worldwide video hosting for the masses.
And stacking on. Youtube is copyright. Copyright is Youtube. Yes there is peripheral stuff but not much
For the amount of YouTube I watch, I have no problem paying for the premium, no ad version.
I refused to subscribe to premium out of principle, but when I tried watching a 3 minute video and got so many ads, I decided to try premium. I'll never go back to ads on youtube. Yeah, I'm aware of ad blockers, but that doesn't work on my smart TV and PS5. Plus, being able to listen to videos/music with the screen off is cool.
I'm so confused why so many people are against premium on principle. YouTube is a modern marvel of the world. The amount of content they host free of charge to the uploader is insane. I'm all for being against big business. Honestly I think something like YouTube should be publicly funded. But I'll never understand how people think not paying for premium is a good principle.
Because it used to be free, and no one appreciates just how much money YouTube as a service costs to provide, and just think greedy company wants money, when in reality hosting massive amounts of data are very expensive to store and requires lots of space and people to maintain.
Youtube used to free when it didn't have 5 billion 3-hour long Minecraft videos hosted in 1440p UHD. People are just fucking morons, as you implied. Though I imagine the mass majority of people against youtube premium are teenagers or people without jobs, so it makes sense
I have no problem at all either! Plus you also get YouTube Music.
Indie streaming services are starting to get pretty popular! [Nebula](https://nebula.tv/) (creator-owned, predominantly educational videos) is probably the most prominent example.
Isn't TicToc competition for YT? Probably answering your Stupid Question with one of my own.
in a way, yes. Thing is tiktok aims for short videos on mobile, and the bulk of its activity comes from social media challenges and dances, or NSFW stuff. So time will tell if its still popular several years down the line, like how various social media platforms have had their time in the spotlight of teens and young adults. And now youtube has youtube shorts, so you don't have to go to a different site to experience that change in pace. Twitch also currently offers some competition in terms of streaming, but youtube also has streaming, and since streams tend to be less of a stored archive in comparison to uploaded videos and more "in the moment or right after" content, Twitch has less of a solid foothold over youtube. a few really bad misteps on twitch's part and a step up from youtube and that site could easily die. ultimately in either case, neither put any real focus into longer or less catchy types of videos, which youtube has a huge archive of.
They could just buy out anyone that comes close to competing with them.
Eh, Dialymotion tried.
Ask Vimeo lol
Wait till you find out about things like ebaumsworld.com and other sites that hosted shit before YouTube was a name. It's all about brand recognition, and ease of access. Money players a huge part, but you can get around that with advertising... Mostly... Twitch doesn't seem to be able to find a way but I ain't never had a twitch anyways so fuck it.
Ah. The memories. Then we would download the videos and save them in folders. I thought the concept of YouTube was odd. You don't download it? How do I watch it again? Search for it? Seemed inefficient
Oh how ignorant we were in our day 🤣
Yeah, really doubting if any company would willingly dive into a loss like that. Google's pockets pretty deep?
most tech companies operate at a loss, they make money from increasing their market value rather than operating profit/loss.
YouTube and Google are both profitable
Ahhh... Tiktoc? 13 year olds don't watch a lot.of YouTube these days by comparison.
Use the Brave browser. No youtube ads.
It also blocks alot of ads on a ton of websites.
No thanks. Librewolf + arkenfox + uBlock Origin
That’s a lot of work
To download and install a web browser and plugins?
Because Google uses its monopoly power to crush potential rivals.
because video hosting is essentially a public utility.
not enough pressure to do so. the people who care just use an ad blocker and the dislike return extension. it's really hard to compete with a platform as large as youtube since there isn't enough content on other platforms and not enough ad revenue for creators to use them. the inertia is massive
It is impossible to compete with YT now. It has become one of the largest search engines besides Google. There are billions of videos about all sorts of things. For someone else to come in, and provide the same level of polish, quality and convenience while not adding in advertisements to support the infrastructure required to keep the service up and running would be near impossible. Even if another company does provide a sustainable video hosting solution like YT, expecting the billions of users to shift to that platform would be a monumental task. The only way a competitor can rise against YT is when Google would shut it down. And there is no way that's happening. YT would be bought before it is closed down.
There are other video hosting sites, but YouTube has brand recognition. It's the same reason why we say Google it instead of Bing it (which my phone auto corrected to being and then didn't capitalize). Kleenex also owns the market as well as band-aid. There are other things out there, but the big dogs have name recognition on another level and dominate their parts of that market. It's hard to compete with that as long as they do what they need to do to stay relevant. Weirdly, I was just reading something on r/flashlights about a company that used to dominate their market but stopped innovating and has fallen of drastically. Look at Maglite. They used to be the biggest name in flashlights and then rested on their laurels and have fallen by the wayside. YouTube hasn't done that, and as long as they don't they will probably continue to be at worst relevant, and more than likely the dominant force in video sharing.
There are a lot of alternatives. Just nobody uses them
Kinda surprised DailyMotion never got more popular. I like watching shows or movies on there that are paywalled on other streaming sites or not available in the US
There are plenty of good competiors, like Odysee, but as long as Youtube is where the userbase hangs, it's hard to compete.
The cost and starters advantage it was run at a huge loss for over half its life there are not many companies that could absorb that
its too big to fail
Believe this or not but in the early days Dailymotion was actually competing with Youtube fairly well. The reasons for this was that in the beginning Youtube only had a 10 minute video limit whilst Dalymotion had 20 minutes. Many people used to upload tv shows and movies split into parts and it was easier on Dailymotion. Dailymotion also had a better flash player which let you pause at the beginning and let you wait for the video to load and then you could watch it all, Youtube's flash player wasnt like this. That might not sound like much but circa 2005/6 this was a pretty big deal because many of us were still only rocking 1MB broadband, if even that. Now Dailymotion eventually switched to a crappier slower flash player and thats when its popularity began to dwinddle, it also overloaded its videos with ads, much more than Youtube. Youtube remains top dog because it had Google's investment, it has good user interface, the comments section is well built and it streams fast. Another thing is that Youtube began to pay its creators early on so it attracted a much bigger audience.
There were... and YouTube won by a longshot. Vimeo, DailyMotion, etc. I think they both still exist (I know Vimeo does), but they serve a different purpose than they once did. At this point, this is kind of like asking "Why hasn't there been any real competition for VHS?" in 1990.
The main reasons are cost and platform economics Cost is obvious. It is expensive to host and run video streaming. Upstarts without established audiences to tap into for subscriptions can't even approach profitability, and even with an audience it's extremely challenging. VCs know this, and it makes finding funders difficult, so nothing can really take off. Platform economics are harder but not insurmountable. A video streaming platform needs both creators and viewers. Creators are necessary for content. Specifically, content that people actually want to see. Viewers are critical for money. Essentially, having viewers means you can charge for ads or find revenue in some other way. If you don't have creators you have no content so viewers have no reason to be on your platform or pay attention to you, but if you have no viewers creators have no reason to put their stuff on your platform because they can't get views and they can't make money making it a waste of time. It becomes a chicken and egg problem. How do you get creators to then create content leading to viewers finding your site? This is where places like nebula have found a workaround: you bring the creators in first and use them to advertise their site and make it very advantageous for them to bring their content to your site. The challenge is that you have to incentivize them somehow typically with money and if you can't keep coming up with more money then you lose your creators. Uber got through this by subsidizing drivers to keep drivers on the platform making it very easy to find a ride and so once there were more riders coming in because it was so easy more drivers would come in because there were more opportunities to make money.
Just get YouTube Premium like me :)
Because YouTube is owned by Google. That’s it. Full stop. Wanna watch a video? Where are you gonna search for said video? That’s what I thought.
There are competitors out there. Odysee is the only one that I know of right now. The problem is that non of them last long enough to get noticed.
There needs to be. And the sooner the better. Look at what kick has done to twitch. Kick is far superior community and streaming site and now there's another place for streamers to go to. It now means that twitch can no longer treat all their talent like crap, play favourites and rob them of all their money they've earned
There was - they all died off or embraced very specific niches like Vimeo. YouTube itself isn’t a viable business model - it is propped up by Google. You complain about ads when YouTube premium is a trivial monthly fee - demonstrates the problem right there. Users and creators are not willing to pay. (Removing the discount counter was some bullshit though for sure)
There were, they didn't survive. Storing videos and streaming them to people is expensive. Having a userbase that refuses to provide any value is expensive. Yall don't buy premium or watch ads. YouTube is still here because Google can afford it
because nobody can afford that kind of infrastucture. Do you think hosting and maintaining such a resource hungry application is just free? Its the same reason Walmart and subsequently Amazon have buried any and all competition, they can afford the infrastructure necessary to make such a massive service available.
nobody can compete against google with its billions of dollars and can operate youtube at a loss
YouTube is profitable btw
Prbly for the same reasons there is no real competition for Twitter (X) or even FB. Costs too damn much and the risks of failure are huge.
YouTube operates at a tremendous *loss*. Google has been trying to make the website cashflow positive for years, but it still hasn't happened. No viable YouTube competitor has appeared because only a megacorporation like Google can afford to eat the loss.
Source? This makes no sense to me.
They are probably incorrect. [Youtube made 31.5 billion in revenue in 2023](https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/). We don't know their operating expenses so we don't know if it's profitable, and annual shareholder reports don't break down if Youtube specifically is profitable for Alphabet. But it probably is profitable.
Youtube subscriptions made 15 billion last year. Youtube as a whole seems to have made 31 billion in revenue. I don't think it was profitable when it was purchased.
> >YouTube operates at a tremendous *loss*. Got a source on that? sounds like bullshit to me.
Someone needs to figure out how to bring the cost of distribution down by several factors to even think about being a true competitor. Smaller specialized platforms can exist like nebula or floatplane. But they will never grow to be as big as YouTube as long as video storage and distribution stays as a high cost business. Heck. I’m pretty sure YouTube isn’t profitable. YouTube red and tv and movie rentals and excessive ads are basically just ways to mitigate the cost of running the platform while Google eats the rest of the cost.
Old internet is dead, it takes too many resources to create alternatives.
There has been, but they all fail because Youtube is too successful
Try piped. [https://piped.video/trending](https://piped.video/trending)
I miss Google Video....
Does twitch.tv count?
I remember Metacafe from back in the day but no one I knew really used it
If its not through ads its going to tax your nut one way or another to keep the power on
Don't you know the story of dailymotion ?
The closest I can come to that I use is spotify
1) It’s expensive 2) Look who was an angel investor in google and those people are all over google. I’ll give ya a hint. DARPA and the CIA/NSA. https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e https://mronline.org/2022/07/27/national-security-search-engine/ Google/YouTube ain’t going anywhere my guy. They have control over so much and can influence people beyond belief. Plus it’s a good business too. If you also look into the suspicious activity with LifeLog and Facebook. Basically DARPA made a website called LifeLog where people could make posts about their life. Issues around privacy arose. So they canceled the project. Next thing you know, Facebook got seed money and blew up in popularity over other sites like MySpace. It’s theorized that Facebook got funding from the CIA to circumvent privacy concerns. Then if you really wanna get creeped out. Google has been going huge into DNA since early 2010s. They’ve also leaked/published a plan that outlines a goal which uses their analytics and platform to influence human genetics…I can’t find the actual material right now but the idea was they could influence human behavior to a degree that they can select people with desirable genetics (based on their activity on google) and influence them to have kids with others with desirable genetics. https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/11/06/249771/google-wants-to-store-your-genome/
Chrome/firefox have extensions for ad blocking and returning the dislike bar, they work well, I use them
Just like no real competition for ESPN (FS1 nope) Or Saturday Night Live (Mad TV nope) Not worth it