I made my Reddit account in Nov 2005, and remember for the first half of that period, YT was just one of several competing video sites, particularly in the shadow of one called throwawayyourtv.com (see https://www.reddit.com/domain/throwawayyourtv.com/ )
Then suddenly by the end of the summer, YT was pulling away from the pack, seemingly unstoppable.
Or was it just “luck” and better content being uploaded?
YT beat sites founded earlier (and there were many) because browser, codec, and bandwidth technology just wasn’t ready yet to support decent web video.
YT beat contemporaneous sites, perhaps, because they were (as far as I know) the only one around in early 2006 with serious funding. ThrowAwayYourTV.com, for instance, was just one dude in his 20’s who had another day job.
Additionally, some turned on ads right away, which people hated. There was also YouTube embeds. The site just felt fun.
By contrast, Google Video had very little good content. There wasn’t anything fun about it. Whereas YouTube had a social aspect to it, Google Video felt like a VCR.
Also you could just name a song and Youtube had the music video - it was the "napster" of video.
YouTube was so popular on MySpace (that just allowed you to add random HTML… yeah that was a thing) that MySpace panicked for a while and added some javascript to make youtube videos not “clickable”; you could not click through to the YouTube page, just to play the video.
1. They took full advantage of DMCA and pirated videos made easy home there until copyright notice came in. No technology to try and do it before upload, no pre publish human intervention.
2. YouTube player was just better, especially with most of the globe on dial up. It would let videos buffer for hours until 100%, even if you had a disconnection it would just restart downloading as it should. Won’t just stop after some time to preserve bandwidth. Once downloaded, videos won’t restream and you could easily move on timeline so long as you kept the browser window open. None of their competitors did this as I recall and were preserving bandwidth they would never get to use.
All online video players did this (continue buffer until 100%) at the time. It's the simpler and more naive option.
In fact, YouTube was the first to introduce the feature that it didn't pre-buffer the whole thing to save bandwidth many years later, and it was HUGELY controversial in the geek community.
MySpace.
People would upload music videos and embed them on their profile, back when the "Embed HTML" feature was still novel. The player made it easy for users to copy/paste to their own profile, and then network effects kicked and the rest is history.
I was at the parent company at the time and through the News Corp acquisition, and remember the shit show when MySpace first banned YT embeds in late 2005 and again in 2006 ("for security"). Lot of internal bitterness that YT was riding their coattails.
The embedding market was huge.
It’s funny how people forget history so quickly. Even Facebook’s story is simply forgotten. Fb does what google can’t … copy features and products, and cannibalize their own audience when a product is obsolete/outdated.
Google usually tries to copy, but launches as a separate product.
Or they buy and mess it up.
Facebook is good at both integrating acquisitions, and at copying features and leveraging their userbase.
It's always struck me as a classic early example of someone coming up with a solution that I'm sure they thought was technically better, but users don't care about that.