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Comment by hnbreak | Hacker News Reader

Yang says that breaking up tech monopolies won't help (with giving a very weak example) but he doesn't give a proper answer how to get competition back. Why does China have 20 different kind of Youtubes and the western world just one?

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Yang wants to give everyone legal ownership of their own data. That is going to be more disruptive to the tech industry than antitrust rulings against a few companies.

What does that actually mean in practice? From a technical perspective, thanks to GDPR, Facebook and other sites now let you download your data (even outside EU), but it hasn't led to a resurgence of competition in social networks. From a legal perspective, you do own the content you provide to Facebook, you only provide them a non-exclusive license to use it.

Do the Chinese YouTube’s have positive cash flow? I don’t even know if youtube has positive cash flow.

I was curious about Youtube too, apparently around 2015 they started breaking even.

I couldn't find any more recent articles, although there were a whole bunch in 2009 about how much money it was losing.

https://www.itproportal.com/2015/02/26/youtube-still-loss-le...

I think an obvious but interesting thing about video-based business models in general is how their storage costs per video are basically indefinitely constant, but their revenue per video declines dramatically. 20 years from now Youtube might have 100x more content to store on their servers but it probably won't be getting 100x the views. I think the internet hasn't been around quite long enough for these kinds of things to become a real problem just yet.

There's no law of nature that data/eyeballs-based monetization (including advertising) has to remain viable everywhere that it is today. I find it entirely plausible that 10 years from now people will have to directly pay for more of the services that they use.

You're already seeing this with the increased number of paywalls around publication content. I expect we'll see more subscriptions and services just shutting down if people aren't willing to pay.

> 20 years from now Youtube might have 100x more content to store on their servers but it probably won't be getting 100x the views.

Why can't they start deleting old videos?

Certainly one plausible future is that, if your video isn't making them money after some period, you either pay them some ongoing fee to keep it live or they delete it. After all, that's the model for most other hosted content.

That YouTube is a free hoster for video content wasn't inevitable and isn't guaranteed going forward into the indefinite future.

I feel like because he's new and trying to shake things up that people are holding him to way higher of a standard than other candidates. Other candidates have been throwing things out there like wanting to provide healthcare to everyone (just one example) and as far as I've seen they've provided no plans for how they will make this happen. Yet for Yang everyone wants to see every detail of it. I also feel like this may be lead by organizations that don't like that he's shaking things up (apparently the DNC told him not to even mention the threat of automation because they don't want to scare people, as if putting our heads in the sand gets anything done).

> the western world just one?

* Dailymotion (France)

* Flickr (United States)

* Metacafe (United States)

* IGTV (United States)

* Photobucket (United Sates)

* Twitch (United States)

* Veoh (United States/Israel)

* Vevo (United States)

* Vimeo (United States)

Vimeo in particular has about one-quarter the "market share" as Youtube [1]

[1] https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/online-video/youtube-m...

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