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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

The service google and facebook provide is access to their captured audience. In the case of google that is the advertisement market with search and the platform of youtube. It is rather commonly known that many video producers are extremely unhappy using youtube but feel locked in since thats where the audience is, and the audience is equally locked in since youtube is where the producers are. New video platforms pop up all the time but with the captured market being what it is there is a huge wall for both producers and viewers to switch. A better video site have a hard time to compete with youtube, not based on merit but based on market capture.

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Vimeo has $1b market cap and was looking at $100m in revenue this year. [1]

Sure it's not YouTube (yet), but it's nothing to sneeze at either.

> many video producers are extremely unhappy using youtube

YouTube basically created an entire new market around video production. If it weren't for YouTube (or a similarly popular service), I'd hazard a guess that many of those video production jobs simply wouldn't exist.

It's hard to complain about a market with a too-big-player when the player basically created the entire market.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iac-interactive-vimeo/iac...

And yet Netflix seems to be doing fine delivering video and competing with Youtube for users?

Different markets. Film (90m+), TV (40m) and streaming (...) have all found their own markets and as such managed to not be captured to the youtube platform. Not to say that Youtube has not tried, with both youtube red and streaming existing on the site, but they have not been that competitive against established players in those markets.

Not sure how those two compete...at all. This point actually works against you, because using momentum as a good, Netflix beats YouTube on movies because of their momentum in that category.

Which is why a big service like YouTube can't just walk in and steal their thunder. Kind of proving the point that critical mass in internet technologies is a type of good or "moat" that could, in some views, count as a monopoly.

> not based on merit but based on market capture

I'm not sure about that distinction. Users prefer something about YouTube compared to it's competitors. That's merit, even if it's not the particular merits that content creators would prefer.

Users prefer something about YouTube compared to it's competitors

That something is the vast amount of copyrighted content...

That sounds like a definition of lock-in. Path dependence. Viewers prefer YouTube because that's where the content is. The content is there because that's what creators prefer. Creators prefer YouTube because that's where the viewers are.

It's a ratchet.

That's merit, even if it's not the particular merits that content creators would prefer.

It's quite a broken concept of merit. It's the kind of concept of "merit" where an offering with superior content and UX could come along, but it wouldn't matter because of network effects.

The fact that so many content creators so badly want a different platform than YouTube to come into being (or for YouTube to change their practices) but can't afford to move -- this circumstance is very telling. Likewise the number of users who despise Facebook, but can't afford to leave.

Replace YouTube with network TV vs cable in the early days. There is a way past YouTube but people must be willing to adapt and/or take the hit building the next thing. Most of the best TV shows have been from network and especially the premium ones like HBO, Showtime, and now Netflix.

However, it took many years to get here and most people probably can't afford to compete without net neutrality.

Nothing you mentioned is a replacement for Youtube, where on demand I can get a video on replacing the clutch on my car or a quick tutorial on promises in node.js

Now this actually raises an interesting question. Would you define a monopoly based on the service a platform offers, or the resulting combined services created by everyone utilizing the platform? One could argue that any service that allows you to upload and share video is a replacement for Youtube from the perspective of the platform's service. But you're auguring that unless another platform has a comparable amount of content, it is not a viable replacement.

I didn't mean to replace YouTube as a product specifically. I meant that this happened over 30 years ago between the networks and cable. Network TV dominated and cable had the same problem with attracting both views and content producers. The point of the matter was to not complain that it is impossible; it is just hard. However, others have already solved a similar issue so the lessons learned can be applied here too.

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