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How I tried to compete with YouTube and Google with Livevideo.com

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Re: How I tried to compete with YouTube and Google with Livevideo.com

#91
My thoughts on this:

Did Livevideo offer anything new or different to what Youtube already had? Was it better than Youtube in any way?

We shouldn't forget Google couldn't compete with Youtube either. Google had to buy Youtube because Googlevideo was not as good.

Twitch found a way to compete just fine.

Re: How I tried to compete with YouTube and Google with Livevideo.com

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "the big tech companies don't really touch porn." Isn't that the case because mainstream American advertisers don't want anything to do with it? I don't think it's a matter of west coast tech companies being prudes, but rather tech companies appeasing big consumer goods companies that spend billions on advertising, like P&G, J&J, PepsiCo, etc. And those companies are in turn likely appeasing 'middle america' by try…

Anyone else find it mildly strange how such a huge portion of the economy functions solely on the production and consumption of terrible products such as soda?

Sugar and caffeine, it's addictive twice over.

Although that also describes another beverage, coffee. The difference between the coffee and soft drink industries is interesting though. Two massive corporations dominate almost the entire soft drink industry, with a handful of minor providers (notably Keurig Dr Pepper) and a long tail of much smaller 'boutique', novelty, or regional brands. Comparatively, no coffee company controls as much of the industry as either the Coca Cola Company or PepsiCo do.

(Also, PepsiCo in particular owns a ton of other non-beverage brands. Their subsidiary Frito-Lay produces the brands Lay's, Cheetos, Doritos, etc. PepsiCo is huge for American consumers. To your point though, snack food isn't much better than sugar water.)

Re: How I tried to compete with YouTube and Google with Livevideo.com

#93
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. First, Google isn't a monopoly on search. Popular? yes. Best product? For most use cases, yeah. The fact that the search competition is a click away makes it dominant in the market but not a monopoly or monopsony. Second, companies are doing fine in this regard by bypassing Google. There are online businesses that exist solely on Amazon and Instagram. Building out a strong social presence is one way to get…

I should rephrase my argument. What I really meant to highlight is you cannot have a business online that google does not approve of without great difficulty, given to be online you must use google in some extent. That is a problem and decidedly anti-competitive. Also I don't care too much about the OP's attitude or lack of strategy, actors don't have to be paragons of virtue in order to be wronged and their situatio…

> What I really meant to highlight is you cannot have a business online that google does not approve of without great difficulty

I disagree. I have worked at several companies with very successful sales and marketing departments where referrals from google were a noticeable but ultimately unimportant part of the revenue picture. I have also worked at a place that literally lived and died by the grace of a top ranking on google, once we hit the 2nd and then 3rd page, the business was basically dead. This sucked, but it was very nice for the company that replaced us. There is no inherent reason why one company should be entitled to the slot any more than any other (besides the google algorithm that determines ranking).

Re: How I tried to compete with YouTube and Google with Livevideo.com

#94
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. First, Google isn't a monopoly on search. Popular? yes. Best product? For most use cases, yeah. The fact that the search competition is a click away makes it dominant in the market but not a monopoly or monopsony. Second, companies are doing fine in this regard by bypassing Google. There are online businesses that exist solely on Amazon and Instagram. Building out a strong social presence is one way to get…

I should rephrase my argument. What I really meant to highlight is you cannot have a business online that google does not approve of without great difficulty, given to be online you must use google in some extent. That is a problem and decidedly anti-competitive. Also I don't care too much about the OP's attitude or lack of strategy, actors don't have to be paragons of virtue in order to be wronged and their situatio…

> no one in their right mind thinks Google isn't a monopoly on search, I think that is more or less an established fact at this point.

"A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity" [0]. Bing exists so by definition, you are wrong.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

Re: How I tried to compete with YouTube and Google with Livevideo.com

#95
I would think the interface/front-end would be the most obvious and important way to catch the attention of visitors when competing against any decent-sized online company; I have never heard of livevideo.com, but at very first glance, I am certain it was never a threat on google/youtube's radar even if you had the best backend system in the world.

No offense, but it looks like a 1990s yahoo.com version of youtube, and that introductory how-to video is already way more than enough to lose the attention of the majority viewers. A search engine landing page with more words/distractions from the search bar than google.com has (even a fraction of a second longer than what people expect) is already a red flag. Similarly, a streaming site must have extremely uniform, visually stimulating, well defined and relatable content for any hope of keeping visitors interested at a fraction of the rate youtube does. Consider how even the cheapest of porn websites (an industry with tens of millions of competing and ever-improving video streaming websites) know to float uniform rows of well tested, clickable video thumbnails as the first thing one sees, along with any and all instructions/options compressed onto a single dropdown button in the top corner— sometimes they don't even show the title unless you hover over it.

My point is you have to figure out a way to make it even more accessible to new visitors than google is to their non-new visitors; and the amount of front-end text, options, and non-uniform content on livevideo.com is several leagues behind where it would need to start to consider a plan of attack... even against YT or the googs 10 years ago, circa 2009

Re: How I tried to compete with YouTube and Google with Livevideo.com

#96
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should rephrase my argument. What I really meant to highlight is you cannot have a business online that google does not approve of without great difficulty, given to be online you must use google in some extent. That is a problem and decidedly anti-competitive. Also I don't care too much about the OP's attitude or lack of strategy, actors don't have to be paragons of virtue in order to be wronged and their situatio…

> no one in their right mind thinks Google isn't a monopoly on search, I think that is more or less an established fact at this point. "A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity" [0]. Bing exists so by definition, you are wrong. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

There is probably choice from an end-user's point of view, yes. On that front you are arguing about best search results.

But as site owner, you need traffic. SEO for some search engine built by your brother, used exclusively by your family, wont help you grow your business. You need eyeballs, and more than 90% of those are on google [0]. Pretending this is a perfectly functioning market and websites can just ignore google is... unrealistic.

[0] http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

Re: How I tried to compete with YouTube and Google with Livevideo.com

#98
I am not sure if the stories are accurate, but if they are this is exactly the kind of anti-trust activity that Microsoft was prosecuted for (under US law). This is extending market power (monopoly) from one area to another (search and ads to video streaming). I know it looks like some of the startups broke some 'rules' like porn or pedophilia, but really YouTube breaks the same rules and uses the same (flagging/review) technique used in some of the startups. It's hard to start anything web related without a good Google index. Google has 93% market share in search [http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share]

Re: How I tried to compete with YouTube and Google with Livevideo.com

#100

I wonder if a standard library or service could be written that detects search engine manipulation, in order to provide a mathematical confidence that it occurred of some kind. So for example, you make metube.com and it shows up on all the search engines. Off the top of my head, maybe it watches the rank over time, kind of like a stock ticker. If Google detects metube.com and buries your listing, but the listing stay…

Might have been possible back in the day, but now the search engine market is just Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo's upcoming crawler (their own bot indexes my website but I'm not certain if it's being used for results). Even Yahoo uses bing for results:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8174763.stm

https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/microsoft-and-yahoo-renew-...

You would need to go to the country-specific search engines like Yandex and Baidu, which may not be that great for english or US-based content.

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