Hacker News Reader

Comment by TameAntelope | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, but I simply can't believe that "no one is particularly happy with YouTube" while so many people still use it, including the vast majority of the people who are supposedly "not particularly happy" with it.

When people ask, "Why hasn't someone disrupted YouTube?" I think the more boring answer that keeps getting overlooked is that it still meets the expectations of enough users, and the dissatisfied constitute a small percentage.

> Many have started seeking alternative revenue streams to mitigate platform risk.

What's wild about this is that the content creators doing this still use YouTube! Even after fully acknowledging the problems, and actively mitigating those negative consequences, they still return to the platform.

I just don't see how that'd happen if it were actually a "bad" service.

View on HN

Youtube being a place to put videos for free is pretty hard to casually compete with when your pockets need to match google's. I've been surprised to see YouTube actually partially out-compete twitch for streaming and entrench itself as a place where a lot of old media places its broadcast (from PBS to the Colbert Report).

For the first time I think they've got a real competitor though - Nebula has managed to somehow eek out a year long survival and is now scooping up a lot of creators on the educational/informational side of things - and it looks like the platform is essentially a co-op structurally where everyone involved is getting a much larger share of the take home. I think the big question coming up for Nebula is what it will do about "The Algorithm" - will they try and create a suggested feed and invest into that sort of algorithmic video promotion or entrench harder into the "see what you subscribe" approach that will end up hurting small creator discoverability - oh also their platform needs some UX work but I don't think that will be a serious concern.

The interesting long term view for me is that I think subscription based services are going to win out over the freemium ones as those freemium ones continue to dig deeper and deeper into the dark magics of advertiser based revenue - freemium services aren't free, instead of demanding cash for your product they're devaluving their product to recoup their costs.

Nebula is in a rough place. It’s essentially subsidized by CuriosityStream and many of their founding creators have pulled out of the project. More fundamentally, Nebula is explicitly curated, which isn’t an inherently bad thing but it does mean they’re unlikely to solve any “freedom of expression” issues with YouTube. I see Nebula less as a YouTube alternative and more as a premium monetization mechanism for the small clique of YouTubers who are involved in it.

> When people ask, "Why hasn't someone disrupted YouTube?" I think the more boring answer that keeps getting overlooked is that it still meets the expectations of enough users, and the dissatisfied constitute a small percentage.

I've seen a couple of attempts come and go. The ones that wrote a post-mortem after closing often emphasised how many resources—human, software, and hardware—video hosting websites consume. Not even because of the storage or the reencoding, but the sheer amount of bandwidth one needs to run such things globally. And it won't get profitable until a few years later, if ever. The goog is simply one of the few companies that can actually afford doing that.

I personally have been glad that alternatives like Nebula[1] are popping up still. Even if their model is different.

[1]: https://watchnebula.com/

> I simply can't believe that "no one is particularly happy with YouTube" while so many people still use it

Are you familiar with cable television?

More troll posts... I guess people haven't seen your username enough yet to realize what your game is, so on behalf of those who haven't picked up on it:

The reason YouTube has no competitor yet is because you'd need $10 billion just to get the platform off the ground - that's servers, developers, datacenters, peering agreements, etc.

Very few people have $10 billion lying around, and no one is interested in tackling Google on their home turf.

You wouldn't need anywhere near that to launch a comparable competitor, unless the plan is to be at youtube scale on day one, which of course would not be realistic.

At the moment, in Silicon Valley, if you're not first, you're last.

YouTube's brand and network effects are a huge moat, in a market that is massively expensive to build a competitor in. There are only a handful of companies in the world with the available tech talent and capital to create a serious competitor and they apparently aren't interested in trying to attack that moat at this time.

YouTube can absolutely be widely disliked and keep chugging along for the foreseeable future. All it needs to do is not be so bad that people would rather spend their time on something completely different. There is no BingTube with a robust ecosystem that users can easily jump to.

From the user's perspective, these are the same benefits the parent poster was referring to however. Giving people the most value for their money is indeed a huge moat for competition.

It's not an objectively bad service, in a vacuum. It's a bad service compared to itself from the past.

Where are they going to go? It’s the only decently monetized platform.

Content creators _can_ go to other platforms like Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok etc; All these platforms allow for monetization

I think people often overstate just how locked into Youtube they are

Youtube has operated at best break even revenue, but mostly at a loss for years. Who has the money necessary to do that for years and years?

Alphabet does. Most of their services run at a loss but they make so much from ad revenue it doesn’t matter.

If they make so much from ad revenue, how are most services run at a loss?

Microsoft could - along with Apple - but I think both of those companies are way too smart to try and enter the market now.

Youtube gets a sort of pass for the crap it's pulling since it's pretty much alone (Sorry - who's this Vimeo fellow you're talking about?) but any other major video service would be held up in comparison against Youtube, as is the way with society, the negative will shine through. If you start writing video suggestion algorithms today how long will it take you to be confident that "Pussy cat strolling across the back porch on a wet afternoon" isn't immediately followed up by WAP?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com