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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

#131

Post by Theodores »

nosefrog wrote: post #54

I have a hard time believing that their website was more popular than YouTube. I remember using loads of different video streaming services before YouTube was bought by Google (e.g. Vimeo, Google Videos, etc) and I've never heard of livevideo. Also, Google Videos was Google's own YouTube competitor from before they bought YouTube, which arguably was anti-competitive because it was much easier to search for Google Vid…

Never heard of them either.

YouTube was a simply better product. As was Facebook compared to mySpace.

The innovative features weren't the right ones. YouTube may not have had them but ultimately in the market today we haven't got those features that seemed such a good idea at the time. Just because you can do clever stuff, e.g. showing multiple streams, doesn't mean that is what people want.

The content was better on YouTube unless you really did want porn. It is not a problem Google paying people to do content for their platform in exclusive deals. They had pockets deep enough to do such things and this investment has paid off.

Sure the startup with $50 million isn't going to be able to just sign up all of the big names but they also were not going to be able to pay as well as Google when it came to monetisation since they were going with adSense. Had they developed something special when it came to ad sales then they could have been on to something.

Then in the search results there is no reason to believe Google were doing anything shady. The shadiest part could be the way Youtube was built for SEO. Every developer wants good SEO so it is only natural to try and excel in this area. Within YouTube they potentially had a better idea of how the Google search engine works so they could have written their front end to specifically game the system. I doubt they did that to a level beyond what outside developers can achieve.

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

#132

Post by belorn »

mrep wrote: post #94
noobermin wrote: post #88

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

If you have a problem with people using the word monopoly as synonymous with anti-trust then just interpret it as anti-trust and ignore the word.

For example, Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning:

Any abuse by one or more undertakings of a dominant position within the internal market or in a substantial part of it shall be prohibited as incompatible with the internal market in so far as it may affect trade between Member States. Such abuse may, in particular, consist in: (a) directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices or other unfair trading conditions; (b) limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers;

With Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 we get supreme court cases that states things like: The purpose of the [Sherman] Act is not to protect businesses from the working of the market; it is to protect the public from the failure of the market. The law directs itself not against conduct which is competitive, even severely so, but against conduct which unfairly tends to destroy competition itself.

And in an other supreme court case:

The goal was to prevent restraints of free competition in business and commercial transactions which tended to restrict production, raise prices, or otherwise control the market to the detriment of purchasers or consumers of goods and services, all of which had come to be regarded as a special form of public injury. For that reason the phrase "restraint of trade," which, as will presently appear, had a well understood meaning in common law, was made the means of defining the activities prohibited.

Not a word about monopoly but a lot about behavior which in common speech people call monopoly but actually refer to behavior which is illegal according to anti-trust.

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

#133

Post by billpg »

I had a LiveVideo account. I had made a (terrible) music video made from clips of my driving around and sped up. I put it on my YouTube, but they ended up over-compressing the video so it was all blurry. (Fast-moving clips don't compress very well.)

At the time, some fairly medium-to-high prominence YouTubers (back when Peter Oakley/Geriatric1927 was the most popular channel) had moved to LiveVideo so I tried uploading my video there. They didn't re-compress it all and it was still high quality.

Time passed, and YouTube changed their rules to not compress so much. I re-uploaded my video (having to make a small change to avoid the hash collision) and it stayed up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg2gjrUFx9c

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

#134

Post by codegladiator »

mrep wrote: post #109
Faark wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

It's definitely not a perfectly competitive market but this trope about GAFAM being monopolies is tiring. A monopoly can stagnate development on their product, raise prices and there's nothing customers can do because they have literally no other option. That is why monopolies are bad. If Google were to try and charge users for search, everyone would immediately switch to bing which keeps them in check from raising p…

Not if the "charge for search" is actually paid by the website. Google is indirectly charging the users

Google -> search results (for free) -> website (owner paid for seo/adwords and charge the customer)

Similar thing happened with google maps while they were never a monopoly by your definition because other solutions exist.

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

#135

Post by lumberingjack »

privateSFacct wrote: post #14

This article should say - you can't compete with google using google. The "final blow" was adsense being cutoff. Their revenue model to compete with google was ... adsense. OK. Their traffic model was google search. Ok. Between the lines it sounds like some aggressive SEO, and maybe the network click bounce thing (you click on one video, and then it clicks through to another site etc). Be curious what their content m…

>Checkout some of the reddit competitors, total disgusting trash.

These people where on reddit up until recently you just never visited the subs that got banned. It took some loud squealing to make the admins do something, then the result was way worse. It made the "disgusting trash sites" and the people that use them more vigilant that why none are really growing.

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

#136

Post by thinkingemote »

lumberingjack wrote: post #135
privateSFacct wrote: post #14

This article should say - you can't compete with google using google. The "final blow" was adsense being cutoff. Their revenue model to compete with google was ... adsense. OK. Their traffic model was google search. Ok. Between the lines it sounds like some aggressive SEO, and maybe the network click bounce thing (you click on one video, and then it clicks through to another site etc). Be curious what their content m…

>Checkout some of the reddit competitors, total disgusting trash. These people where on reddit up until recently you just never visited the subs that got banned. It took some loud squealing to make the admins do something, then the result was way worse. It made the "disgusting trash sites" and the people that use them more vigilant that why none are really growing.

Reddit has also changed how it wants it's users to use the site. Previously users would subscribe to a collection of subreddits and have a feed of them.

Then a bunch of subreddits got banned and more quarantined. They labelled those who subscribed to a quarantined as a "community" and not just something you subbed to.

Now any subreddit you "join" and "leave" and they have dropped the subscribe/unsubscribe wording further enforcing the isolated community angle of invested enthusiasts rather than the casual subscriber to random things. Now if you subscribe to some random subreddit you can be viewed as agreeing with all its postings and viewpoints where previously people wouldn't think this way about using the site.

Things won't grow as they are aopealing to the hardcore focus users rather than the casual ones. Any competition would do well to appeal to the more casual and disconnected users.

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

#137

Post by cryptica »

>> You know, I should be a multimillionaire right now like we should have been what YouTube is today or at least a major competitor of YouTube and we should be a multibillion dollar Unicorn Tech Company.

I find this statement extremely arrogant. It incorrectly assumes that the value and quality of a product is correlated with the financial success of the product. It hasn't been the case for decades. To everyone outside of the elite 'I used to go to MIT and was an early employee of MySpace' crowd, this was always the case and it's not news at all.

When I build a product, I assume that there is a 90% to 99% probability that it's going to fail and I know exactly why it's going to fail and it will have nothing to do with product quality or strategy. I just assume that I'll have to build many exceptional products to even get a shot at making a living out of one of them. I expect success to be completely random and inexplicable.

There are many superior products and technologies around but nobody talks about them and they are not being built upon. Everyone only talks about the mediocre tech that comes out of Google, Facebook, Amazon, or the elite Silicon Valley VC startup funnel.

I enjoy reading these kinds of articles about elites getting a dose of the highly centralized monopolistic reality that they and their friends helped to create (e.g. especially those about Foursquare founders whining about Google over and over) - They're getting a taste of their own poison IMO. And yes, if you used to go to MIT, Stanford or Harvard or were on the founding team of MySpace, you are part of the elite; you have no excuse to complain, you are in the 'in crowd'; you could just have called the right people to make your problems go away; you failed to do that. Most people don't even have the option to socially network their problems away.

But by all means keep whining; at least when elites whine, maybe other elites and politicians are more likely to listen.

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

#139

Post by Narishma »

defen wrote: post #42
tptacek wrote: post #6

From what I can tell, this is the story of a 2006-2008 Youtube also-ran that was outbid by Google for celebrity content, had copyright and inappropriate content problems, kept an adult content section on their website, and depended on AdSense for their revenue. I don't see where the concept of "deplatforming" fits into the narrative provided. You can check their old site out on Archive.org (the pages all seem to have…

I agree with most of your comment, but Youtube also had copyright problems at that time. Viacom sued them for $1 billion in 2007 (settled out of court for an undisclosed sum in 2014).

Now they have copyright problems in the other direction, with random companies claiming copyright over random videos and nothing to be done unless you're super-famous and can escalate the issue into the press.

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

#140

Post by sct202 »

nosefrog wrote: post #54

I have a hard time believing that their website was more popular than YouTube. I remember using loads of different video streaming services before YouTube was bought by Google (e.g. Vimeo, Google Videos, etc) and I've never heard of livevideo. Also, Google Videos was Google's own YouTube competitor from before they bought YouTube, which arguably was anti-competitive because it was much easier to search for Google Vid…

I looked at some of the webarchive screen shots and the live viewer counts on the videos seem kind of low, but that might just be my modern take on how many views is a lot.
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