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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why Microsoft or Amazon don't try to launch a YouTube competitor. Vimeo probably has the most reach for an acquisition, but those are more artsy/professional focused. I suppose Facebook is YouTube's largest competitor, but it's such a closed system that it's impossible to use in any manner that isn't strictly personal.

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Because even today youtube barely breaks even and its backed by the biggest ad network in the world.

I know it wasn't profitable 3-4 years ago, but I believe it's fairly profitable now. But I'm not sure, I suppose the cost of running a video service can shift so drastically it's hard for it to be steady. I don't think Alphabet breaks out YouTube revenues/profit anymore.

Last year the initial event of the "adpocalypse" happened, which both demonetized a lot of channels, and at the same time roughly halved what advertisers were willing to pay, even for complying channels. Since then a few additional waves of demonetization happened.

Every time Youtube demonetizes a creator they are also demonetizing themselves. The combined effect of all that could have held back profitability significantly, especially considering that they are shooting for comparatively low-margin advertising business model compared to other platforms.

Isn't it the advertisers that are pushing for demonetisation?

The advertisers are only pushing for only being able to advertise on clean, family-friendly channels. And of course the big TV-like channels.

No, they are just taking an advantage of the waves of outrage, that happen for just about any reason, to push their bill lower. Why wouldn't they?

I thought the whole reason for adpocalypse was to ensure advertisers remained paying the same price, by getting rid of content they don’t like?

It was to stop them from fleeing the service altogether I think. Google at least kneejerked enough to make it appear that was the case to me.

Many accounts near the top are earning 10X what they earned before. Adpocalypse, IMO, is about consolidation of the ad rev firehose.

Which?

could've said [first part] for every social networking, video/image sharing startup, yet... they still exist.

Yes, because most of them still get regular cash injections from investors, or they charge for it.

And thats why we see a lot fewer new social networks starting out today. in the late aughts, everyone and their grandma was starting a social network, google started 3, heck even apple started one, everyone was trying to replicate the perceived success of facebook, when even that wasn't yet clear as a viable business. Now that most people know just getting lots of eyeballs doesn't translate to cash in the bank people have cooled off.

youtube is an even bigger issue because video is so expensive to support, so on top of the possibility of not making any money, you also need to front huge costs in infrastructure.

They'd probably make a hell of a lot more if they didn't aggressively demonetize known safe content from their flagship creators.

blame the ad companies for having peanut sized gall on pulling out on smallest things they dislike

Except that Facebook video is crappy at best. It's not even in the same league or the content is of very good quality.

Vimeo is most suitable competition IMO.

Well instagram TV is launching so that might be Facebook's play

IGTV has vertical videos, it's a completely different product than YouTube.

Amazon has Twitch.

And Microsoft has Mixer, but they aren't YouTube competitors. Maybe for LiveStreams, but nothing else. Amazon is more strict than Microsoft on what can stream and what can't.

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