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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

It's just incredibly hard to compete with Youtube. In a way that's Google's greatest achievement: they convinced everybody that they're entitled to host and stream 4K videos forever not only for free, but the creators get a share of the ad revenue despite fronting none of the hosting costs. It's an incredibly good deal. The amount of infrastructure and human resources required to merely keep a system like Youtube running is mind boggling.

That makes people reasonably annoyed when Youtube decides to semi-arbitrarily pull the plug on a channel, but it also means that competition is very hard. If a competitor decides to start charging for hosting or streaming, they're doomed to be niche.

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And this is why Google needs to be split up. No other enterprise can burn so many billions of dollars for so many years to corner the market.

Google uses profits from search to napalm everything remotely looking like a threat.

Does google make or lose money on youtube? Based on the number of ads I see, I'd imagine they break even?

Hard to say for sure, since YT uses shared Google infrastructure, and effectively cost of some things can’t be calculated. (Basically it’s much cheaper than you or me can do ourselves).

But from what I understand, they burned money for many years and only very few years ago became profitable. But in some sense YT doesn’t really have to be profitable - for Google it’s more important to prop search itself, then to make money on YT.

I' m guess Google gets a ton of side benefits for having YouTube, like the usage of Google Accounts or the data they get from people's watch habits.

They don't tell about profitability, but revenue was $15B so chances are they at least break even.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...

> No other enterprise can burn so many billions of dollars for so many years to corner the market.

No other enterprise, besides Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and all the streaming companies (Netflix, Disney, ...).

I'm not sure any of those companies entering this space would help.

Please everyone don’t forget google search positioning too. This is massive. Google have pushed YouTube into their search for a long time, basically building YouTube doing it. That brought insane traffic to YouTube videos and makes YouTube the place for videos.

THIS is the antitrust of google, and where authorities should strike them. They built a video platform and destroyed others using their 90% market power in another market.

How are you so sure the videos are at the top of Google results because they're artificially pushing YouTube and not just because that's where the relevant/popular videos are?

Actually I find Google video search is still the best place to find non-YouTube videos. Of course YouTube dominates if the content is there, but when it's not, Google is still great at returning relevant results on tons of other sites.

Are you sure about this? Search on Bing, they show as many YouTube results as Google, if not more.

The thing with the resource sharing is that it's peanuts compared to what youtubers earn off of other sources of income; sponsorship and product placement deals (which I'm sure is a thorn in Youtube's eye, unless they get a slice of that cake), Patreon is a really big one, and merchandise sales. I'm sure that Youtube ad revenue is in 4th place with regards to income for youtubes, especially since the 'adpocalypse' wherein advertisers pulled out of youtube and stronghanded them into a strict demonetization practice.

Anyway that said, there's enough competition for youtube to ensure that these channels don't have to die; it's just discoverability that is the issue. Youtube does not have exclusive rights to any video uploaded (although I'm sure they have negotiated exclusivity contracts with some), so anyone is free to mirror their uploads elsewhere, just in case. I'm sure there's software out there that makes cross-posting videos easy.

This is also the reason why every potential 5 minute read time blog post is turned into a 30 minute monotonous video.

Monetising. Youtube does it automatically, with a blog you need to manage the ads yourself and the audience is a lot smaller.

There is also a generational gap at some point. To me, it seems that 20-somethings turn to Youtube for every issue (phone setup, toilet clogged whatever) instead of looking for a text resource.

With the major cloud providers charging upwards of $0.10 per GB of outbound traffic, it's no wonder that few even attempt to compete with Youtube.

Tip: look for offers that say "Bandwidth: x Gbps" rather than ones saying "$x / GB"

The real cost of a CDN, is, $0.5 TB, probably even lower (EU/US regions). If you want to build a competitor you need to build the CDN yourself.

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