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Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

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Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#31

Post by mrschultz93 »

WJW wrote: post #14

> Apart from network effect, and Google's Ad Monopoly This is like asking "why don't we live on the moon except that there is no atmosphere there and it's pretty far away?". Those two reasons are the main reasons Youtube is the clear winner in its field, saying "apart from that" does not make a lot of sense. If you'd want to start a competitor to take on Youtube, you either need to focus on a tiny niche not well serv…

Not everyone is a Graduate at the Internet University of I Am Very Smart. Great discussion can start from the simplest questions, no need to show off around here.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#32

Post by mattl »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #3

for me personally Peertube checks all the boxes because it is in the fediverse and can be selfhosted. you can do whatever the hell you want and that is quite a big thing for people who have been burned by youtube. edit: Tilvids.com is a good example of the power of peertube

How does the experience compare for the average user? I’ve put things on Peertube only for the instance to shut down.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#33

Post by hknapp »

1cvmask wrote: post #2

There is a new "free speech" alternative called Rumble emerging. Rumble for now promises Not to become a censorship platform like YouTube is now currently. https://rumble.com/ Even though some high profile civil libertarian and free speech advocates like Glenn Greenwald and Zaid Jilani have chosen Rumble as home, YouTube is still lights years ahead. But if they continue to censor, alternative free speech platform wil…

i'm impressed with how fast that site loads

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#34

Post by gdudeman »

If you’re talking about sites that host videos for creators and stream videos to end users, YouTube has some very strong competitors who have eaten into YouTube’s percentage of online video watched: - Facebook - Twitch - TikTok

While you might not think of them as competitors, they provide a very similar service.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#35

Post by 1cvmask »

formerly_proven wrote: post #17
1cvmask wrote: post #2

There is a new "free speech" alternative called Rumble emerging. Rumble for now promises Not to become a censorship platform like YouTube is now currently. https://rumble.com/ Even though some high profile civil libertarian and free speech advocates like Glenn Greenwald and Zaid Jilani have chosen Rumble as home, YouTube is still lights years ahead. But if they continue to censor, alternative free speech platform wil…

The problem with media platforms that market themselves as pro-free-speech is that they attract alt-right content - and their hyper-toxic followers - like a warm pile of shit attracts flies, even if that's not the intent of the platform operators.

They also have removed many leftists as well. My favorite story is an advocate of censorship, the British leftist media group Novara Media, got itself deleted by YouTube. Once there was an uproar on twitter it reinstated them saying it was a mistake:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59052155

Censorship advocates always get hit by the divine justice boomerang.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#37

Post by sp332 »

Video hosting is a perfect storm of expensive things: lots of egress bandwidth, lots of storage, and lots of compute for transcoding. And most of the effort is wasted because most videos get watched only a few times, and only in a few of those transcoded formats. So they're not going to pull their weight even if you slap ads all over them.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#38

Post by tw04 »

WJW wrote: post #14

> Apart from network effect, and Google's Ad Monopoly This is like asking "why don't we live on the moon except that there is no atmosphere there and it's pretty far away?". Those two reasons are the main reasons Youtube is the clear winner in its field, saying "apart from that" does not make a lot of sense. If you'd want to start a competitor to take on Youtube, you either need to focus on a tiny niche not well serv…

>or porn

I'm quite confident you'll find Mindgeek/Pornhub has a Youtube-esque unassailable position in that market segment. Unless you're catering to illegal content, but I think you'll find that market isn't the greatest for building a profitable business on.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#39

Post by betwixthewires »

mgamache wrote: post #15

Network effect, and Google's Ad Monopoly account for 99.9% of the dominance of YouTube. Only Facebook could launch a competing product (maybe Twitter). It would take millions (or Billions) to build a platform just to end up like one of the many competitors (Vimeo). There will be something that kills YouTube, but it will look different (or work differently).

Is it really network effect though? I think with regard to YouTube the influence of network effect is overstated.

The easy monetization capability is unrivaled, this is a big reason people that make videos choose YouTube. This is where their network effects come from. People don't really choose where to watch videos, people choose where to upload them though.

But as far as a viewer is concerned, do you care what video host a video is on before you watch it? Probably not. You'll click a vimeo or dailymotion or whatever link if the video you want to watch is on one of those sites. YouTube by and large is not a social platform, so it's network effects are very limited.

IMO the reasons YouTube has basically a monopoly is they have what amounts to embedded google search that only searches their site, and their app comes preinstalled on almost all mobile phones. Think about it, as a user, you want to search for a video, you click the video searching app on your phone, oh it only searches YouTube? Oh well, the video is probably on YouTube anyway.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

#40

Post by jrm4 »

You mean like a company? I mean, this has been answered a million times over. It's scale, it's always scale.

Yes, Youtube needs a real competitor, and it's the sort of thing that would be very difficult to do as a for-profit company. I'd begin by asking Jimmy Wales and the like. Peertube's a great start.

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