Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

134 pointsash110221 comments

Apart from network effect, and Google's Ad Monopoly, what does YT have that has made it a clear winner in this field? What would a competitor need to take on them?

View on HN

YouTube is a huge technical achievement that would require billions of dollars to replicate:

1. It consumes nearly unlimited bandwidth.

2. It consumes nearly unlimited CPU for transcoding and serving media at different bitrates.

3. It consumes massive resources to police, from user moderation to appeasing content owners by building systems and databases like ContentID, etc.

4. It generates endless PR and legal headaches, which also costs a lot of money.

5. A huge amount of work has gone into getting users hooked through algorithms that seek to maximize watch time.

6. A huge amount of work has gone into building a network of advertisers who want to pay to put their ads on the platform.

7. And importantly, a huge amount of work has gone into building up an ecosystem of video producers who make their entire living off of YouTube and spend countless hours producing content for them at no cost to YouTube. Obviously YouTube isn't giving out Golden Play Button plaques out of the kindness of their heart. That's marketing.

And despite all this, Youtube almost always works perfectly for almost all users. People click on their phones and the videos just play - all around the world, even while traveling on transit, etc.

There are very few companies who have the resources to attempt to compete with that. Vimeo has obviously given up targeting the same mass market audience. Other competitors without unlimited deep pockets can't seem to make a dent.

It's a lot like asking why doesn't someone just make "a better Google." Unless you have unlimited resources and an unlimited budget, it probably isn't possible. It's smarter to make something else tangental in video that can outcompete Google instead of facing them head on. See: Twitch, TikTok, etc.

Sounds like PornHub or similar could easily branch into providing a separate service for general videos if they wanted. They already have all this stuff down for the most part.

They may not have to even offer a separate service. There's a math tutor sharing his lessons on PornHub already: https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyp8wa/math-tutor-video-less...

Sure, but, assuming it's not already blocked by IT, are you going to be sending out a link to your colleagues/students/professor with the name "pornhub" in the URL?

Brilliant.

That was a marketing strategy though. It says in the article that he doesn't post their anymore and only did it to attract attention.

You're right that Netflix and Pornhub have both been able to replicate this.

IMO, it might be wise for Netflix to start their own YouTube-like service. For example, subscribe to Netflix, get access to user-created videos on a separate app. The best part is that users would then generate content for a fraction of what they currently pay to produce content, and they could have basically what YouTube has, but ad-free.

Netflix only provides one very static huge library.

As long as you move a few PB around the globe on your video release date, Netflix is fine.

It's very easy to build a Netflix in comparison to yt.

I would argue that for Netflix going into yt direction would eat up there revenue baseline fast.

Netflix could square the circle by offering "YT for indie filmmakers."

More static content than YT. Better viewer:creator ratio. Fewer content headaches. Content moderation is lower volume and amounts to watching the film. And closer to their existing product fit.

It's actually kind of mind-boggling that Netflix hasn't pivoted into a turnkey solution (standard deal + optional financing support + broadcast platform) for mass-market film-making. Everyone's content starved, it's an obvious weakness that Amazon / Disney / ATT are blind to, and somehow Reed Hastings hasn't pushed in that direction. It's literally what Netflix is famous for doing (twice!): be the platform.

> Everyone's content starved

I've been mostly hearing the opposite, most people feel like they have more content they want to watch than they have time to.

great idea, however I think they would become more like a hosting company with more overheads - so probably better for them to stick to their higher margin service they offer now. also, i bet they doo offer something like "(standard deal + optional financing support + broadcast platform) for mass-market film-making." just not to everyone

what is mean by "PB"?

PB stands for petabyte.

I think "petabytes"

Netflix doesn't own it's own infrastructure.

Which means its hosting infrastructure is not even as cost-efficient as it could be.

For their use-case it's probably as cost effective as it needs to be. Bring all that cloud hosted infrastructure in house and then you've a whole new set of costs to deal with that aren't present in their current arrangement.

Netflix runs a CDN for the video nodes, but runs on AWS for everything else (eg login microservices). The CDN, which includes hardware deployed inside of ISP), represents a huge capital outlay (over decades) and is a competitive advantage for delivering large amounts of data around the world.

They own their own CDN for content, they don't own their own general web hosting (they famously use AWS).

Surely the CDN for that huge streaming library is the expensive part of their infra.

https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

I don't think ph has any relevant similarity to yt.

Video quality is low.

Video amount should probably be 1000 if not 10000 smaller than yt.

I'm not aware of millions uploading hour and hours of high quality videos to their platform.

I myself only go there for a short period of time.

I know plenty of people who keep streams from yt running in parallel.

Pornhubs parent-company MindGeek can only be described as shady. [0] As a privately held company, they might also have problems raising the necessary funds for such a large expansion. And of course, there is still a pretty large stigma attached to pornography, so content creators might be a bit shy to associate with them.

[0] MindGeek operates under a complex structure of multiple companies in countries such as the British Virgin Islands, Canada, Curaçao, Cyprus, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mauritius, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.[60][8] Its structure has been described as mostly a way to avoid corporate tax by a de facto Canadian company;[8][3][61] with billing companies in Ireland,[62] subsidiaries in Curaçao and holding ones in Cyprus and Luxembourg, all countries that have been identified as tax havens or having lax tax regulations. Canada also has special tax treaties with Luxembourg, the legal headquarters of MindGeek, where a Canadian subsidiary is exempt from taxes paid on royalties to its Luxembourg parent.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek

> Sounds like PornHub or similar could easily branch into providing a separate service for general videos if they wanted. They already have all this stuff down for the most part.

The key part there is "if they wanted."

Any upstart would have to burn who knows how much capital to try and ramp up, hosting videos for free and getting only a tiny fraction of the ad revenue that Google can extract from a video due to their smaller scale. Even if somebody wanted to subsidize this with reserves or VC funding, the endgame is that they're competing directly against Google, and if faced with actual competition Google can always afford to undercut them until they ran out of reserves or VC funding.

Far better for these sites to claim a niche that Google has no interest in and just fly below the radar.

This is the least informative hyperbole I've read on HN. It's a bunch of smoke and mirrors, everything is unlimited, cannot be replicated, forget about it. Let's accept defeat.

I thought HN was the opposite of this - finding ways to upend fat companies from occupying monopoly positions. "Hacker" news.

More reasons to break up Big Tech from a government regulations perspective - The only democratic politician talking about it is Elizabeth Warren. But many are upending large incumbents without gov reg - Stripe ("Increase the GDP of the internet") and Square in payments/ecommerce space. Tesla taking on Big 4. I would like to see a real competitor for Google search. Perhaps Algolia? Their search is incredible on HN.

It's a two-sided coin. It's not a very smart bet to say "I can out-compete a US$182.53 billion revenue company... by doing things that require massive amounts of capital."

Are Stripe, Square, and Tesla not big tech? They have market caps of $95B, $88B, and $1.05T, respectively. And is YouTube not upending the incumbents (TV and traditional media) in the same way that they are?

>YouTube is a huge technical achievement that would require billions of dollars to replicate.

YouTube achieved this in 15 years time with the help of Google's enormous resources. YouTube competitor would need to have some innovation that is hard for YouTube to replicate.

Funny enough TikTok was able to replicate YouTube in a few years time but only for short videos so it shows you don't need all that what you mentioned. Innovation is what you need.

Not to downplay the tech, but you could replicate majority of the tech nowadays with proper engineering effort, proper timeline and a budget. YouTube competitor would need to beat them in the business side of things, which is extremely hard, however not unachievable. The company would need to have proper monetization, proper support with proper appeal system and to enable producers to create high quality content without the fear of their accounts being banned. I believe this would be sufficient enough to start making a dent in the YouTube creator base.

> to enable producers to create high quality content

Isn't this the MO of vimeo? Target higher quality content, and allow pay-per-hosting to avoid ads?

"proper engineering effort, proper timeline and a budget"

Like all things? The proper engineering effort is hard to find in such a capacity and a budget to do all of this is overwhelming for most tech companies to attempt where an ROI can be seen within tolerable risk.

It's like saying we could live on mars if we had "proper engineering effort, timeline and budget".

you offer a largely technical[0] answer to a business (and a politicoeconomic) problem. this is a common perspective bias of tech-focused folks of all stripes, and leads to incorrect, or at least incomplete, solutions to the problems faced by businesses. some of those technical aspects support youtube's strategy of dominating the online video provider market, but none of them are (even collectively) the reason why youtube dominates. for instance, vimeo has all of those to some degree and doesn't dominate the market.

youtube's strategy (e.g., 'the reason') was to leverage google's resources to undermine the revenue-making opportunities of the whole market so that it could outlast them to domination. it used google's (monopolistic) advantages in search and online advertising, as well as its capital warchest, to effect this strategy. that warchest, for instance, allowed it to offer free hosting/streaming, something that was difficult for smaller players to do. google's dominance in search allowed it to offer premium advertising to youtube videos. google's dominance in online advertising (again, monopolistically) gave youtube an advantage in monetization and targeting.

in short, this wasn't a story of a scrappy competitor overcoming the odds to become the market leader. it was hoarded capital and monopoly advantage being deployed to corner another market. that is, it was an (unprosecuted) anti-trust violation.

[0]: note the broader connotation of 'technical', not limited to just technology

No one is asking how Youtube got there. The question is, how can you complete with it and I believe the above commenter gave a very reasonable answer.

Your side point about it supposedly being an anti-trust violation isn't even a proper answer to the question.

the parent comment was a list of technical attributes about how youtube got there (used as rationale for why it's impossible to compete). i countered that that's not how it got there, as it's emphasizing tactics, not strategy. it's hard to formulate a coherent competitive strategy if you entirely misunderstand your competitor's successful (if anti-competitive) strategy. it's like playing chess by focusing on taking all the pawns rather than the king.

I think you misinterpreted my original post. My post was a list of some of the capital intensive challenges a competitor would have to solve now to operate a similar business to YouTube as it exists now (many of which aren't even technical, like growing an ad market and getting creators on board).

The point was that unless you already have a money printing business in another area that you can use to chase this for years without budgetary constraints, it would be very difficult to build something of a similar scale. I think you are arguing a point that my post largely already agrees with.

agreed, but your takeoff point was the technical/tactical, whereas i'm advising a wider perspective, as that perspective easily and commonly leads to mistaken conclusions in isolation (particularly by technologists in this context). to be clear, i tend to agree with the individual points made, but even together, they don't articulate youtube's strategy. that was the missing, and the most relevant, element, even if you allude to it otherwise.

You're explaining what youtube's edge is in the market, but not why nobody else has it; it's an important distinction.

Any company has an edge on any non existent company, because they exist - they have the tools, the infrastructure, the knowledge needed to run the business, all things that the non existent company first has to aquire. Doesn't explain why nobody else can do it! Because things, in general, can be aquired. But clarity did: Youtube has Google. Youtube was able to aquire things nobody else could.

Example: You said youtube needs near unlimited bandwidth. This argument doesn't show me why there can't be a competitor. Youtube's business model seems to pay off, so you should be able to convince an investor to pay you, too, unlimited bandwidth, right? Money is immaterial if you can show that you can make more of it at a later stage.

The strategy you describe is functionally "provide features that competitors cannot". You ascribe nefarious means to all of those features, but that isn' the only (or in many cases even the likeliest) motivation for providing those features.

no, it's absolutely not. it's an end-run strategy to subvert competitiveness in a market. practically every dominant company has engaged in these sorts of anti-competitive practices, but that doesn't make it right or defensible. that youtube also provides useful features has little to do with how it came to dominate. it's simply not a product-led outcome.

Well no.

For example, you claim that Vimeo "vimeo has all of those [features] to some degree".

But it doesn't. Vimeo isn't ad supported (this is literally their main differentiator from youtube). Doesn't appear to do algorithmic curation/recommendation (again, they consider this a differentiator), and has a tiny fraction of the upload rate and watchtime of youtube (so bandwidth and transcoding cost are lower).

Those are related to their distinct strategies: Youtube aims to be the product where anyone can share video for free (that's youtube's strategy!). Vimeo doesn't aim to do that. Doing the first invites challenges of scale that the second doesn't. Youtube operates at a scale where it makes sense to hire silicon engineers to build custom video transcoding chips. That doesn't make sense for vimeo.

You can maybe argue that Youtube was only successful because of Google's existing ad business (although I don't know how true/organizationally valid this argument is), but the idea that the "strategy" behind Youtube was to be illegal is sort of ridiculous.

And heck, OP of the thread even offers examples of successful competitors in the broad video media space: Twitch and TikTok (and arguably also Instagram via Reels). Youtube does have competitors in terms of video social media. It also has competitors in terms of video hosting. What it doesn't have is competitors in terms of scale (Reels and Tiktok limit content size, Twitch stores only a small fraction of streamed videos, vimeo makes you pay for the storage and bandwidth you use). That's due to a lot of technical optimizations that are difficult to replicate.

you're too focused on product here, which is not strategy. it's exactly the common sort of myopia that needs conscientious correction to understand how markets and market distortions operate.

You're trying really hard to ascribe ill motives to the actual strategy of "let's build a cool thing and figure out how to monetize it later, and I'm not sure why. Doing so makes you do weird things like insist that product strategy isn't strategy, and that real strategy is "be anticompetitive". I don't get it.

your goal seems not to understand but to defend, which is why you seem to avoid engaging in the substance of the argument, but rather resorting to an ad hominem. no one owes you feel-good esteem or deference for choosing google's hoards of cash over ethics.

When I engaged on the substance of the argument you said "you're too focused on product here, which is not strategy", which isn't a statement that can be engaged with. It's an unusual claim that you didn't justify. I've repeatedly given examples of what I believe to be more coherent strategies, and you've functionally ignored them (and yes replying with "you're not thinking about this with the right mindset" is not engaging)

To be clear, even if we assume Youtube's rise was anticompetitive, your argument relies on that being the explicit strategy, which well, there's decent documentation to believe it wasn't. Assuming that because a bad thing happened, everyone involved is evil, is weird, and requires you to jump through weird hoops to justify.

let me be blunt: you don't understand what (business) strategy is, nor any of the dimensions of analyzing it. there's no such thing as 'product strategy'; product executes on the business strategy using marketing tactics like building features the target market wants. product features are not a strategy.

in a competitive market, there are two broad strategies available: cost (walmart) and differentiation (apple). youtube coerced its market into being favorable to itself by leveraging the anti-competitive aspects i mentioned earlier. that simply trumps product tactics, and even these two competitive market strategies; it subverts entire markets unfairly and uneconomically. i really can't teach you strategy or market economics in an hn comment; you need to go study that yourself. also, arguing from emotion is a sure-fire way to lead yourself astray.

It's ironic that you are the one who is getting more heated and aggressive in their replies.

Can you point to some solid resources so I can get on your level? You sound like you know what goes on behind closed doors in the business world. Do you blog about these topics anywhere? Thanks.

get an mba? that’s how i gained much of my knowledge, along with general business experience (product management and founding startups).

less flippantly, you can actually find a lot of free mba courses online now. here’s one page listing some resources (halfway down): https://www.uopeople.edu/blog/the-best-free-online-mba-cours...

uopeople offers a cheap online mba, apparently accredited even (i personally can’t vouch for it’s quality though). investopedia is also a good reference resource for looking up random business concepts.

I wonder how much of your knowledge is from the MBA vs experience grinding in real business world experience. I know a handful of people who said MBA was worthless, only did it for connections and pay bump in their product orgs at F500 tech companies. Anyway, thanks for sharing a data point towards MBA, I'll look into it.

Have you read anything by Karl Marx regarding captialism? You seem to know a ton about capital and how it pervades society and social stratification of the workforce and labor.

plenty of folks coast through mba programs learning only superficially, but that shouldn't taint the value of the information itself. i gained plenty of confidence in the areas of finance, marketing, accounting, operations, etc. that i didn't have before and which was directly applicable to being a product manager and startup founder.

i've read a bit of marx but mostly in digest form. das kapital and adam smith's wealth of nations are on my list of older, original works that i want to read in full. i'm sympathetic to the labor theory of value, which both explored in their works, but most modern economists seem to eschew and even fear.

The original question was not asking how you can compete with YouTube. It asked why YouTube doesn't have competition.

>And despite all this, Youtube almost always works perfectly for almost all users. People click on their phones and the videos just play - all around the world, even while traveling on transit, etc.

Yes! I find any other video website that is not YouTube to be simply unusable. Don't get me started with Spotify's video player. My thought when I see a website using anything else: just put the damn thing on YouTube! The players suck, the experience suck, everything sucks on other products.

To add to this list, YouTube does an excellent job on its core competency — streaming high quality video without hickups and buffering. I've tried other video streaming services before, and none of them have the reliability as youtube. When I click a youtube video, I know it'll play immediately and throughout the video without buffering or hanging. I don't have the same confidence as other providers.

This actually kind of depresses me, how certain technologies are so entrenched and require so much effort/resources to compete against as to render the entrenched technology as the one and only that we can ever have (for all practical purposes). I feel particulary depressed about this considering how YOUNG the tech industry is, and how stagnant things become when the winners are decided so early.

There's plenty of free porn sites that didn't require billions of dollars to do and they were subject to all of the above restrictions.

> Apart from network effect, and Google's Ad Monopoly

This is like asking "why don't we live on the moon except that there is no atmosphere there and it's pretty far away?". Those two reasons are the main reasons Youtube is the clear winner in its field, saying "apart from that" does not make a lot of sense. If you'd want to start a competitor to take on Youtube, you either need to focus on a tiny niche not well served by Youtube (extreme far right or far left personalities perhaps, or porn) or you would need to find a way to match Google money (maybe partner up with FB/Microsoft/Amazon/etc) so you can buy popular creators away from Youtube.

>or porn

I'm quite confident you'll find Mindgeek/Pornhub has a Youtube-esque unassailable position in that market segment. Unless you're catering to illegal content, but I think you'll find that market isn't the greatest for building a profitable business on.

my guess is pornhub has been on steep decline since most of their payment processing methods has been removed. I will admit I haven't checked back but last I checked they were essentially crypto only.

Don't forget user surveillance and data mining. Probably a profitable market for them to sell user profiles.

To whom exactly. All the high spend customers are not going to participate.

So that leaves a volume of shit-tier players. That's not that worthwhile.

Pornhub has nothing even close to the kind of monopoly YouTube does. XVideos, XNXX, and xHamster at the very least are similarly gigantic in terms of content. The only thing Pornhub may have is more mindshare, being the more recognizable brand. By contrast, you simply cannot expect to find what you're looking for, or much of it, on YouTube's competitors.

Isn't OnlyFans quite strong competitor to Pornhub?

There are dozens of sizeable competitors. And I'm not even sure Mindgeek is the biggest player here, at some point Xvideos was even bigger, even though it was never featured in the news.

this is all accurate and i'd add that it is deceivingly hard to make something that sustains itself via advertising. when youtube was acquired google had a large part of that already figured out.

For sure. And I would add that Google bought the network-effect leader at just the right time to put Google's massive ops resources behind it. They basically killed off the competition and then made if very hard for anybody to compete.

> you either need to focus on a tiny niche not well served by Youtube (extreme far right or far left personalities perhaps, or porn)

Other niches are history videos and music analysis videos, the former which gets demonetized and the latter receives copyright strikes with abandon.

Many history channels are on Armchair History TV: https://armchairhistory.tv/content-creators/

Adam Neely (music analysis) is on Nebula: https://nebula.app/

> so you can buy popular creators away from Youtube

...and this is also an incredibly hard sell to any upstart, since to creators, reach is usually more important than money.

Source: Worked for one of the last semi-serious local Youtube competitors in our country who tried this strategy and miserably failed, after which the site was effectively shut down and rebranded as a storefront for the TV station that bought it.

> a tiny niche not well served by Youtube

TikTok is doing this. Using the same playbook as YT (paying creators for views) and they're creating a unique moat by building great tools for creators. iMovie may have helped YT get started by giving everyone an easy tool for video making, and TT is bringing comparable tools in-house.

They're also avoiding the issue of letting creators get too big and dictating the platform like some think started happening to youtube, because the algo pushes smaller creators and doesn't put focus on who you follow. This really shows their Chinese heritage (CCP wouldn't want individuals to have too much influence without being replaceable).

Also, i've seen some large youtubers or youtube catagories try to band together to make apps/sites that offer that content without YT influence. (eg. some tech reviewers, or some niche content like relaxation videos or meditation guides). If i were more entrepreneurial i'd throw my hat in this space and use Cloudflare's new hosting to lower costs.

Yes TikTok is a serious threat to YouTube because they have solved the chicken-and-egg problem. Most YouTube competitors don't have enough users to be worthwhile for content creators, but TikTok now has billions of users. Currently TikTok is limited to short, popular videos but if they can branch into long-term videos it will kill YouTube

It does have competitors. IMO, Odysee/LBRY is the most viable one but only time will tell because all the competitors lack some things and have been slow to develop.

The competitors have a hard time gaining traction because in the way many of us would expect because we live in a different world from when YouTube first became a thing.

YouTube in 2005 was way different. You could find just about anything on there. Pranks, home videos, entire TV shows, bumfights, skits, you name it. Mostly young people used it, and back then the youth were a little more "based" than my impression of Gen Z today. I remember older folks like my parents almost universally dismissing YouTube as "a bunch of crap" and how wrong I felt they were. Guess who turned out to be right about the future of information and entertainment!

Today, I'd wager everyone's interacted with YouTube at least once. There is nothing edgy or fringe about YouTube anymore. It's a mainstream media platform saddled with its past that it just can't shake. Without big advertisers and big audiences, it wouldn't be sustainable, thus it has developed to not offend the normies or their political allies.

Many have moved over to other platforms, but they are essentially the same kind of audience and creators that were on YouTube back in the old days. The so-called normies who didn't take YouTube seriously back then are now easily frightened of the dangerous content found on alt-tech. They are unlikely to ever move away from the warm fuzzy feeling only provided by the MSM and Silicon Valley.

Although I desire people be a little less allergic to supposedly dangerous content, can we really blame people for being disinterested or avoidant to YouTube competitors?

Maybe this is the way it should be. Average Joes/Janes/Jaydens will be happy on YouTube and TikTok, and the ends of the bell curve will find their place on smaller platforms that aren't interested in pleasing everyone.

The content may have matured, but has YouTube really changed?

I always thought the point was to make it easy for anyone to publish an original video? (And then to make it easy for anyone to watch the video.)

> but has YouTube really changed?

Unquestionably. If you recall, YouTube originally made its mark by having pirated copies of the SNL Lazy Sunday skit floating around, which quickly saw it become recognized it as the place to watch all kinds of pirated TV shows.

Eventually they started enforcing duration limits to quash people uploading entire episodes, but it wasn't until the content ID system was implemented that it started to see that type of content disappear and the 'homemade' stuff take over.

The home videos may have always been there, but it wasn't why people were using the service originally.

Which is in part why building youtube competitor is so difficult. Bootstrapping with pirated content is not something that will fly as easily in 2020 as it did in 2005

When was the content id system implemented? I'm sure there were plenty of pirated videos on YouTube (honestly there still are but they use cuts/filters/awful quality to get around), but I remember homemade videos in the top charts even before 2008.

2007, if the internet is to be believed.

Strange, I've been peeking at YouTube since the beginning and I almost never used it for pirated content.

>IMO, Odysee/LBRY is the most viable

As a competitor? It's not even a bug on their radar...

It's like waiting for Mastodon to replace Facebook and co...

or like youtube or netflix to replace cable and TV stations.

I mean in terms of having lots of the creators I like on it (around 80% I'm guessing), being less likely to become censorious, and isn't a broken piece of crap. I don't give a hoot whether they are an economic competitor.

>in terms of having lots of the creators I like on it

Are you tastes in any way representative of any large segment of the population though? Like, do these creators have thousands or millions of viewers?

> Like, do these creators have thousands or millions of viewers?

Yes, Minute Physics and Veritasium are two examples I remember off the top of my head (not an LBRY user since I quit algorithmic video binges after abusing them possibly worse then I do HN, IRC, and assorted doomscrolling now :P).

But, Minute Physics and Veritasium are on YouTube. So, maybe it's just cross-posting and their 99% audience is not there?

Of course from a "can I adopt X" perspective, cross-posted content to X is fine, even if most users watch it on YouTube.

But for that to be meaninful on a larger scale most popular content should be cross-posted to Odysee (or original to it).

E.g. Veritasium is for sure popular, but it might just be part of a tiny slither of YouTube content that made it to the platform - so that would mean I could adopt Odysee as a YouTube replacement only if my interests intersect with that slither.

> The competitors have a hard time gaining traction because in the way many of us would expect because we live in a different world from when YouTube first became a thing.

> Although I desire people be a little less allergic to supposedly dangerous content, can we really blame people for being disinterested or avoidant to YouTube competitors?

My takes on this is that DMCA/copyright laws is huge barrier of scaling. Lots of contents providers (I mean small players) are not comfortable expanding their platform due to copyright laws. It would requires to have a human moderation, legal contact, etc. Content Farms and Media Companies are huge abuser of DMCA takedowns, you can see the effects on YouTube. It is ramparts with legal issues because Google rather to use the bots to deal with the issues and that didn't help. Google allows companies to spam the takedowns with random urls that are not relevant to the contents.

Also public domain contents is another issues as well. There are companies that use DMCA takedown on content that are public domain which allows fair use. Sony Entertainments did this a few times, and they are not the only one doing this blatantly. They can do this because they knows they won't be accountable for it.

There are illegal contents uploaded daily and it have to be taken down which the small players don't have the resources to do so.

There are a lot of legal hurdles that small players need to account for before trying to scale bigger. It comes with risks, some players are not willing to take that risks, even Section 230 offers protections. But it didn't offer protection against companies that are brutal and ruthless with faking DMCA takedowns.

Would you mind listing more of these other platforms? YouTube can be so tediously, stiflingly boring.

I had not heard of Odysee/LBRY, so thanks for the tip.

LiveLeak was a bit too extreme for me, personally, though I am glad it existed, puzzled to see it go. Anything replace it?

Vimeo is nice for finding avant-garde or art videos.

There are curated, paid services for films like Mubi, Shudder and NoBudge.

https://joinpeertube.org

It's interesting that TikTok is a formidable competitor that focused on a different experience and a slightly different format (short form). Tiktok seems to work by choosing for you and only showing a single video at a time (esp on mobile, which is where it's really most at home), but allowing you to quickly reject that choice and learning from your rejections.

Is it possible to beat YouTube itself with a different experience but the same, longer-form, format? If so, what would that experience even look like, especially on mobile?

YT seems to think so, they've basically made a mini-TT experience with the shorts.

And the reason they are able to do so is because by rejecting a video, you don't see it anymore. On the other hand, if you are given a view of 5 videos on YouTube and you click next, what YouTube should be doing is rejecting all 5 and showing you a new 5. For some reason this doesn't happen on YouTube. When you come back to the frontpage, you see the same videos over and over and over again unless you manually tell YouTube you're not interested.

So it's not the auto-play that's crucial, it's realizing that the user is giving you a signal. YouTube has been ignoring that signal. Perhaps it's a performance issue that makes them unable to?

I often want to see some of those 5 later, but just not now. I suspect that’s common enough that YT’s algorithms have learned that.

I think that, on average, you are probably correct. More people prefer the current behavior over the opposite behavior, where instead of 'Not Interested' one would be forced to select 'Interested', or perhaps 'Add to Watch List -> Chill Music'.

But I'm not interested in an average case, and if given the opportunity to switch between a blocklist and an allowlist approach, I would do so frequently. Unfortunately we're not given that opportunity whereas I am given that opportunity in many other different cases, the 'Mark as Unread' button on e-mails and RSS readers being one such example.

Yes, same. EXCEPT there is new content all the time, and if you're like me, you'll probably never watch 4 of those videos because a new top pick emerged since.

> Is it possible to beat YouTube itself with a different experience but the same, longer-form, format?

Maybe focus on content longer than the YouTube average , like courses and documentaries and in depth video podcasts?

Youtube has plenty of that content already.

Vimeo is the only thing that comes close. All the open source offerings lack the dedicated apps for dedicated media players.

To be a serious alternative you’d need apps for Apple TV, Android TV, Roku plus iOS and Android and a solid desktop browser.

Ironically, YouTube is about to lose its Roku app. Contract expires Dec 9 and the two children seem unable to share a playground.

Thanks for the heads up.

I think Vimeo was once going after a similar market, but lately they seem to be distancing themselves from individual content creators. Their landing page, for example, describes their offering as "simple tools for any professional, team, and organization to create, manage, and share high-quality videos".

Sometimes I can find stuff in Vimeo that’s not available anywhere else. There was dailymotion, I don’t know about the state of it but back in the day it looked like it might have been a competitor to YouTube, too.

1) Video hosting is very expensive, due to high bandwidth and storage requirements. This is made worse when emulating YouTube, with its "anyone can upload for free, and anyone can view for free" model.

2) YouTube is an entrenched platform with a huge audience and wide reach. This causes a positive feedback loop where creators upload to YouTube because that's where the viewers are, and viewers flock to YouTube because that's where the creators are. This means that any creator that wants to upload elsewhere will struggle to find an audience, and any viewer looking to switch will lack content to view.

This means that few companies have the resources to even attempt to compete with YouTube, and those that do struggle to find consistent users. YouTube certainly has its issues, but there isn't an obvious way for a major competitor to enter the space.

I think the average person generally isn't aware of YouTube alternatives. Alternative video platforms don't seem to be a thing people seek out. In my own experience, I only know about Rumble and Odysee because a content creator I like wanted to mirror their work on other sites in order to avoid having all their eggs in one basket. If it wasn't for that, I probably wouldn't even be aware of these platforms.

Going a step further, people use YouTube like a video search engine. If people want to see a video they type in the terms they are looking for and see the results. They don't search for an alternative platform first, and then enter the keywords on those sites. Perhaps designing a video search engine that looks across multiple platforms would address this?

Google Search does video search across multiple platforms relatively well.

I hardly see a non YouTube video on Google video search results

It depends on what you're searching for, I often even get bilibili videos in Google video search results

There is a new "free speech" alternative called Rumble emerging. Rumble for now promises Not to become a censorship platform like YouTube is now currently.

https://rumble.com/

Even though some high profile civil libertarian and free speech advocates like Glenn Greenwald and Zaid Jilani have chosen Rumble as home, YouTube is still lights years ahead. But if they continue to censor, alternative free speech platform will emerge.

The problem with media platforms that market themselves as pro-free-speech is that they attract alt-right content - and their hyper-toxic followers - like a warm pile of shit attracts flies, even if that's not the intent of the platform operators.

A lot (but not all) of YouTube's problems would go away if they 1) used the actual DMCA and not their own system that allows for things that would be illegal under the DMCA and 2) stopped being retaliatory (latest example, deleting comments from creators critical of the dislike count removal). But they have a huge hegemony, so there's no incentive whatsoever for those two things to happen.

I bet they also know a lot of problems we are not even aware of, because these were fixed in trade offs they’ve made. Content id claims may even be beneficial to US-based creators because even if false, it’s still a [manageable] alarm before a real lawsuit, which creators couldn’t stand against anyway. They have a hegemony no doubt, but why wouldn’t another platform have it in the same position and under same legal circumstances. Investors be like “ah yes, it’s not youtube, so we’ll refrain from pursuing our goals and safety policies”?

They also have removed many leftists as well. My favorite story is an advocate of censorship, the British leftist media group Novara Media, got itself deleted by YouTube. Once there was an uproar on twitter it reinstated them saying it was a mistake:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59052155

Censorship advocates always get hit by the divine justice boomerang.

I have this idea in my head that most people (users, even platform creators) think "free speech" and they mostly just think "my speech" or "speech I agree with".

Beyond that there are some folks with some free speech ideals but even that devolves into "anything goes" and they turn a blind eye to the results because it is messy / unpleasant.

It does...

...but at the same time anyone who deviates from progressive orthodoxy in any way will be labeled alt-right.

So in addition to the hyper-toxic folks, you will get people looking for a platform allowing debate and a broad range of ideas.

Absolutely. I was one of the early members of voat.co (a reddit clone in C#), and never really used it due to a lack of content. Fast forward a few years, and that place became a portal to an alternate universe where Hitler won, slavery is taken for granted, and (he who must not be named) is the American emperor.

The stimulating nature of extremism makes it really hard for a new platform to be pro-"sensible free speech".

Cancel culture is hyper-toxic, and that came from far-left advocates.

It's nice to see that something you disagree with strongly, like alt-right content, can be labeled hyper-toxic and not be downvoted into oblivion. It is encouraging that HN as a platform can tolerate a strong opinion without retaliating.

Rumble just signed a deal with Truth Social. We'll find out real soon if Rumble has cracked the code to avoid that problem.

Kind of doubtful, unless they can also bring the mainstream over with them.

That's the rub: Whenever a new platform starts up, marketing itself as the "free speech alternative" to some big, mainstream platform, what always ends up happening is the new platform's user base consists entirely of people who got kicked off the mainstream platform--leading to all the toxicity and problems noted in this sub-thread. You need to be more than a place where the cast-offs from mainstream sites hang out. You need to bring the mainstream to your platform too.

Usually that is the case, and those people are just unnecessarily painful to deal with. Everything is an avenue to bring it back to their pet issue which is that their life sucks because of women, immigrants, brown people, god knows what. But I saw Russell Brand on the front page, and I recall him not being one of those folks so maybe these guys have figured out a way to not get overwhelmed by the annoying folks.

Not to claim that Brand can't be annoying, but he's not alt-right and I can't imagine them both occupying the same space.

i'm impressed with how fast that site loads

> Rumble for now promises Not to become a censorship platform like YouTube is now currently.

Which is all fine and good until people start filing copyright claims, lawyering up, withdrawing adverts, and cancelling subscriptions. Not to mention the possibility of governments intervening.

Sooner or later regulation comes, whether that's directly, or indirectly via market pressures.

(Note that this isn't necessarily a bad thing - or a good thing, for that matter - just a thing. An example where it might be seen as more positive for, say, a government intervention to occur is Facebook/Meta. I'm certainly losing patience with Mark Zuckerberg's indifference to the individual and societal damage his platforms are causing.)

99% of the users of any platform don't care. They want to see videos of cats, cartoons they can stick in front of their kids, and how to detach the door clips on a 2007 Camry. While I don't agree with the politics of the typical Rumble or Gettr user, I do believe sites like that are a strong part of a free speech society, but they'll never compete with the likes of Youtube or Twitter.

Bloody hell. That site is blazing fast. I click and it loads instantly. The videos play instantly. It's actually genuinely amazing - though the design looks awful.

Bandwidth and storage cost a lot. YouTube wasn't even profitable till a few years ago. Any new "free speech" video platform will be inundated with content that YouTube bans, things like hate speech, gore and calls for violence etc. which are not palatable to advertisers.

Yeah, I wonder what YouTube spends just keeping child pornography off the site. It surely isn’t a small amount.

This question is framed to preclude the answer.

The real competitor won't be a video hosting service, it will be a content monetization model competitive to advertising. Even content monetization is a weak way of thinking about it, because by abstracting it from the people who want a certain kind of content, you've pre-defined your solution as just another tech without a clear market (a non-product).

The question of "I have all these videos, how do I sell them?" is completely different from, "How do I sell videos?" or "What will these people really pay for and how does video distribution get it to them?"

The question isn't how to reinvent streaming, it's how to discover something someone will pay for. Youtube's product isn't content, their product is the distribution it provides to people who make it - and a combination of the data and channel it provides to advertisers. That's what they sell.

So, do you really want to make another product for advertisers? Even if you really like advertisers and did, investing in another video streaming platform seems like the least smart way to do that right now.

The next real competitor to youtube will look more like AppleTV than Rumble. Arguably, if I will pay $15.99 for a season of Ancient Aliens, I'll pay $7.99 for all of 3blue1brown. It's a different monetization model, and that's the real competition.

If I wanted to make a video streaming product, I would pop up a level and find a market then determine whether their need was more for produced content, or for distribution, and then solve for the economics of that desire. The quesiton isn't how do I monetize this landfill of content, the real question is, who is this customer and what do they want?

I've thought some of this through, and reach out via my profile if you are with a company that is serious about this.

Everybody here seems to be focusing on the YouTube the video hosting platform which has a lot of competitors: p2p video platforms, edtech websites, paid history YouTube streams, a gazillion VOD platforms in my country, all the tiktok clones that consume just enough bandwidth. Video hosting isn't hard, relatively speaking.

Instead, YouTube the video search engine is the product without any competition.

And since people search for a video on YouTube and not on odysee or peertube, these other platforms have poor video discoverablity. On these platforms I tend to watch creators that I already found using YouTube.

The video search is what somebody building a competitor needs to be focusing on.

Twitch is the evolution of YouTube and Twitch has an open-source competitor, the question is rather why is nobody using the competition?

Look at Mixer, and in specific Shrouds transition to Mixer. Almost nobody followed him there. When he came back to Twitch he was the single biggest streamer they have ever had with 200K+ viewers.

Technology is feature monopolistic as long as it's "free", the evolution always happens by constructive destruction. Eventually there will be something that replaces Twitch by being _fundamentally_ better at capturing our attention without needing OBS.

People that haven't moved to Twitch from YouTube simply do not know Twitch exists or haven't tried it because they lack time.

Or maybe the transition is going from passive to active and some people wish to stay passive?

As for video anyone with a computer and a range capable HTTP server can distribute it, the problem is competing with bandwidth.

I view twitch and youtube as two completely different types of content. Twitch is livestreaming and youtube is prepared, scripted content. Sorta like 24/7 cable news channels vs a documentary or drama series. A lot of people have a preference for one or the other and I definitely prefer the latter. Especially since the "news" that happens on twitch often seems to be twitch-specific drama.

Twitch is not for news! It serves only two purposes: entertainment and community.

Large streamers have humor, but chat is completely meaningless with them.

Small streamers (mostly gamedev) are the community that is meaningful.

It's surpisingly small still, only a few thousand viewers that all watch many of the same devs.

Game development is really the only meaningful thing you can do today that does not involve energy (food, heat and water = electricity).

I didn't mean it was for news, I meant that the "live-ness" of it seems to be the main selling point for it.

> Game development is really the only meaningful thing you can do today that does not involve energy

I don't even know what you are trying to say with this. What makes game development more or less "meaningful" than other activities? How does game development not require energy?

It requires much less energy, and we need to virtualize life completely, only food, sleep and toilet will be in meatspace, everything else will be a open (so you can modify and resell) action (think super mario galaxy) 3D MMO with 1000s of players per server!

If you want to live in the metaverse, fine, but don't claim that it's the only "meaningful" thing.

Well, until you give me a counter argument, I just proved it is!

The physical world is shrinking in every metric possible and it's accelerating.

The only way to escape it is through virtualisation, the kids are allready living there.

Also the metaverse is meaningless, what we need is action (as I said; super mario galaxy, but 1000s of players) and the current definition of metaverse talks more about virtual things and economies.

And now since Zuckerberg is cybersquatting the term we need to find a new one.

How about "the internet", wadda ya say?

CEO of vimeo will cry themself to sleep after reading this post

I remember a day where I preferred vimeo because of its support for higher resolutions...

They should make the platform quicker and more reliable then

Vimeo seems to have found a good niche – professional video hosting.

YouTube is a social network as much as a video hosting service, and for professional applications, embeds in websites, portfolios, etc, it's often a bad idea to include things that will detract from other content or take users away from the site. YouTube embeds are still fairly branded, may show ads, etc.

YouTube has no interest in this market, so I think Vimeo will be fine.

> Vimeo seems to have found a good niche – professional video hosting.

Yet I prefer websites use youtube to embed content. Whenever I encounter an embedded vimeo video, I'm asked to fill a captcha. This almost never happens with youtube.

I believe vimeo purposely isn't interested in much of the you from youtube, although these days youtube isn't either. Vimeo is looking to be a hoster for commercial content mainly.

I tried to use vimeo, but even if it had content on it that interests me, I find it very frustrating to use for some intuitive reason. Maybe it’s constant flashing of wait-spinners, maybe no place to discover things. It feels like yet another pic hosting but for videos. https://vimeo.com doesn’t look like a promising landing for 99% of users either.

I also signed up for a curiosity stream trial (or was it its competitor? idk), watched one video, only to delete my account afterwards. Their video player doesn’t support left-right keys and when I missed a sentence I had no chance to rewind just a little, because in an hour+ long video you can’t just point to a second with your mouse. It’s so stupid technically that I can’t imagine who could do that for a platform which is advertised from every crack.

I don’t think that youtube no-competition is just a network effect and ads and money. Even if we were to find youtube deleted tomorrow, both viewers and content creators would have a fucking hard time to continue their usual activities. I often blame youtube for its ui/ux, but—and this is my personal opinion—its competition is just trash.

this. Vimeo is great, but we've seen hardly any continued development in the last 10 years. It looks exactly the same now as it did 10+ years ago. In order to pursue the market you need to keep coding, adding things, trying things. Discovery, yes! W/o discovery you're sunk. But there are 20 other things you could do to defrictionize the platform. And 20 more you could do to improve its reach. Scale will come with the audience graph justifies the expenditure. I would argue that YouTube's recent machine-learning suggestions actually totally ffing suck. The way they were 8 years ago was incredibly better. This is one area you could challenge them in. Be a YouTube of 2014 and you could beat them in suggestion.

Because it’s impossible to draw eyeballs without content and impossible to draw content without eyeballs.

Many well funded companies have successfully drawn some content with money in the form of production budget, guarantees & advances but few with a developed audience elsewhere are willing to give it up and people watch the content they like where it is most convenient.

There are some in the Chinese market, but I don't know which are left. There used to be a few real contenders, like Vimeo, but Vimeo simply couldn't afford to host videos to all markets.

Japanese Nico Nico is the 34th most visited site in Japan, so I guess they are still doing okay.

For certain things, I think Twitch is very much a real competitor, and I think the best example to answer your question, on what a competitor would need to get an in on the market - a unique twist on video hosting.

Personally I consider Netflix, HBO and Disney+ the biggest competitors. It's basically the internet version of cable vs terrestrial TV, imho. Youtube isn't so much about sharing your vacation video, as it is a platform to turn amateur content creators into professional content creators (with an odd side hustles of hosting professional music videos).

In addition to the other comments pointing out the moat, it's also just a good product. There's some controversy here or there, but the watching experience is fast and good, it's available almost everywhere (phones, laptop, smart tvs, consoles, ...), and it just works well.

If someone hosts something on Vimeo, I always perceive that as giving users a worse experience just to make a point. Vimeo embeds don't sync how far I've watched across devices. It doesn't even remember it in a single tab on a single device. (Maybe that's because I don't have a Vimeo account but I do have a YouTube account. But that's part of the mount.)

YouTube does have competition:

TikTok (there is a reason YouTube released “shorts”), Twitch and Facebook (which also supports live streaming).

Vimeo, Metacafe and Dailymotion used to be a lot more competitive with YouTube too. In some cases even having a larger market share than YT at one point.

Plus there are plenty of adult streaming services too albeit they don’t directly compete due to YouTubes rules about video content.

I think a large part of YouTubes success was because Google bought them back when Googles reputation was still top notch. I remember being indifferent about YouTube (even preferring Vimeo and Metacafe) but started using TouTube because of Google’s tie in. Now I use it in spite of Google.

Does Twitch count? A lot of chess streamers I used to follow on YouTube moved to Twitch. Sometimes they replicate their content back to YouTube, but not always.

You mean like a company? I mean, this has been answered a million times over. It's scale, it's always scale.

Yes, Youtube needs a real competitor, and it's the sort of thing that would be very difficult to do as a for-profit company. I'd begin by asking Jimmy Wales and the like. Peertube's a great start.

Makes me wonder if this is a case where regulation needs to inject competition, like when we broke up Ma Bell into separate companies.

What if The act of uploading and hosting had to be a separate company from the act of searching and viewing? What would "YouTube" look like if someone could write their own app that had access to all of the same content? What would "YouTube" look like if someone could provide their own uploading and hosting service?

If you’re talking about sites that host videos for creators and stream videos to end users, YouTube has some very strong competitors who have eaten into YouTube’s percentage of online video watched: - Facebook - Twitch - TikTok

While you might not think of them as competitors, they provide a very similar service.

Youtube Alternatives :

Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller

Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube

Video hosting is a perfect storm of expensive things: lots of egress bandwidth, lots of storage, and lots of compute for transcoding. And most of the effort is wasted because most videos get watched only a few times, and only in a few of those transcoded formats. So they're not going to pull their weight even if you slap ads all over them.

It does, but not in the form of video-only platforms.

In terms of medium/long form videos, plenty of time is spent watching those on Instagram and Facebook. For shorter "clip"-style videos, those are watched on TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat.

Then you have livestreaming, in which Twitch and once again Facebook/Instagram have large viewership.

>Apart from network effect, and Google's Ad Monopoly, what does YT have that has made it a clear winner in this field? What would a competitor need to take on them?

Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

It comes preinstalled on all mobile phones.

If YouTube were just a website like any other video host, people wouldn't care. Do you really care about which video host a video you want to watch is on? No, more than likely you care about the video itself.

But YouTube is an app, on your phone, click it and search for what you want, oh whatever you're looking for is probably on YouTube anyway.

And that's another thing, YouTube is basically the only site with google search embedded into itself that only searches itself. Imagine a video search engine like YouTube that showed you results from all sorts of video sites.

These two things together are why. Want to find a video? Click the video finding app on your phone. Oh, it only searches YouTube? Oh well, the video is probably on YouTube anyway.

No longer preinstalled on iPhones. Not for a long while now since Apple’s app was discontinued in favor of Google’s own app.

I wonder what the usage metrics for disparate video hosts look like around the time of that change, and also the change on DDG to showing other video host results and their deal with Apple. I'd be willing to bet viewership on other sites went up and YouTube went down to some degree.

It's a shame, Apple's app was far better than Google's, to the extent that I stayed on iOS 5 (last version that had the old app) until they shut off the API it was using.

The competition is paid/subscription niche video sites. Outside of adult content I think they are very, very small compared to Youtube. But some do thrive.

To wit: https://www.offcenterharbor.com

Rumble just received a major investment, and has been the streaming alternative for when people got banned off YouTube. There's also LBRY/Odysee and Bitchute.

I quite like Odysee and use it a lot.

It's mostly free and meets people's expectations. Also, one of the driving goals of silicon valley companies is to grow as large as possible as soon as possible so that it becomes a competitive advantage. At some point, it's impossible to complete against a giant even if the product is easy to replicate.

Googles also has an ad network that finances the product's development and on going maintenance. So a competitor would have to compete against both giants to at least get a foothold.

At this point, the only way to get competitors against YouTube is for the government to get involved and help the new companies in some way.

One possible competitor is for a confederation of organizations to get together and produce a product. They would have to have a product that's at least as good and be willing to accept losses for a time. Also they have to stay together and act together as a force of one. It's unlikely to happen.

I would say that a competitor would have to start by building an ad network first so that there's some money to finance a YouTube like product.

The true competition is the one for people's attention. Find a product that can best get people's attention and you have chance to succeed against Google and YouTube.

Gfycat and imgur are pretty good alternative to post videos.

Youtube is good for large videos, gfycat is good for short ones, but honestly, I would really favor video platforms who offer direct access to the file. And since it's pretty common knowledge that videos need to be short to get views (free content, short attention span), hosting longer videos is more appropriate for platforms like netflix (entertainment, paid).

Youtube is dominating because it existed prior to html5 videos, since it used flash.

Now, h264 is everywhere and easily accessible. Online, ubiquitous videos don't require 4K, that's mostly for entertainment. 4K is okay for short videos maybe.

Youtube is really awful in many many ways, it has become so big it's acting like a news channel (removing content etc). It has become too big to fail, while I'm pretty sure there are terabytes of video that are almost never watched. When you compartmentalize the types of youtube videos, its competitors are spotify for music, netflix for youtube red, gfycat and cousins for shorts, etc. Platforms like patreon are much better suited to support creators.

Not to mention the ecological impact of such a large platform.

Network effect, and Google's Ad Monopoly account for 99.9% of the dominance of YouTube. Only Facebook could launch a competing product (maybe Twitter). It would take millions (or Billions) to build a platform just to end up like one of the many competitors (Vimeo). There will be something that kills YouTube, but it will look different (or work differently).

Is it really network effect though? I think with regard to YouTube the influence of network effect is overstated.

The easy monetization capability is unrivaled, this is a big reason people that make videos choose YouTube. This is where their network effects come from. People don't really choose where to watch videos, people choose where to upload them though.

But as far as a viewer is concerned, do you care what video host a video is on before you watch it? Probably not. You'll click a vimeo or dailymotion or whatever link if the video you want to watch is on one of those sites. YouTube by and large is not a social platform, so it's network effects are very limited.

IMO the reasons YouTube has basically a monopoly is they have what amounts to embedded google search that only searches their site, and their app comes preinstalled on almost all mobile phones. Think about it, as a user, you want to search for a video, you click the video searching app on your phone, oh it only searches YouTube? Oh well, the video is probably on YouTube anyway.

I'd argue that Youtube is a strong video discovery mechanism and "People don't really choose where to watch videos" is very much false. Many people watch videos by directly searching for them on youtube and by subscribing to specific "youtubers" (perhaps it's different between various ages/demographics, though); and, IMHO this is the largest part, when watching the next video people stay on the same site, at least in the case of youtube; they'll just pick one of the recommendations and it's not going to be on another site.

We are basically making the same point. People don't watch the videos because they're on YouTube, people watch the videos because the app on their phone only plays and searches videos on YouTube.

Because RSS/Atom subscriptions as the standard for following things you like, across websites, didn't really catch on, in part because no browsers (or mobile OS vendors) really championed the feature in their UX to make it better than having lots of interfaces on different sites (looking at you, Firefox—add it to the list of dropped balls).

Because network effects let them pay creators more, so of course creators tend to stick around.

Because people default to searching on Youtube for videos, and Youtube Search only searches Youtube, rather than being like Google Video Search.

> What would a competitor need to take on them?

A shitload of VC cash to burn on both data transfer / CDN buildout and paying prominent YouTubers way more than they're making you in exchange for exclusive videos (time limited would probably be fine, e.g. 1 year exclusivity). Also, maybe, integrate something like Patreon directly.

It's interesting that many content producers are starting to create their own websites, complete with ad free and extended content. I predict YouTube will become like Pandora was. Used for discovery but when folks want to deep dive on a specific content producer you go to their site or content portal directly.

Joe Rogan moved away, and it seems he is losing influence. https://www.sportskeeda.com/mma/news-monthly-listeners-joe-r...

Spotify employees, not a tolerant group, has been pushing to have Rogan deplatformed since he moved to Spotify. Yet, his reach has increased dramatically even while the listener numbers, according to this source, had decreased.

What use-case of YouTube would you want a competitor to though? Personal video hosting? Independent creator video distribution? Social network for video? Music video streaming?

One of the greatest achievements of YouTube is basically serving countless audiences and numerous use-cases under the guise of a single service.

You'd need to roll-up WhatsApp video sharing, Vimeo, Facebook Watch/Tik Tok/IG Reels, MTV, and then throw the aspirational element of creator payments over the top of it. I'd question whether anyone would actually want to do all of that.

Apparently, Google's strategy is to target the middle class (Eric Scmhidt said in some interview) which is like the majority of population in any country. Then to give them incentives to use their platform. This worked for Youtube by giving creators money and in some countries when they wanted adoption for their payment apps, they gave back good cashbacks as rewards. The cashbacks diminished after sufficient adoption was attained.

They were anticompetitive using multiple illegal tricks. Their competitors like dailymotion or vimeo couldn't compete for years. Now that google is under antitrust investigation around the world. They have started operating properly and that's why you get an ad every 12 seconds. Twitch only survived because big daddy amazon came in with the same deal as google. We will now see players like rumble finally taking off.

It does. Vimeo is probably the most popular YouTube alternative. But YouTube has a community that I don't know of any other video platform having.

I don't think we'll see a real competitor to YouTube until someone manages to decouple hosting from discovery. No startup can compete with free unlimited video hosting. But it would be relatively easy to make a better discovery algorithm. The problem is the network effects moat. But I think if you started in a specific community (say tech talks or ASMR) it might work.

YouTube used to have a 10 minute video limit. While I like that 1,2 or even 3 hour podcasts can now be uploaded in a single YouTube video, other than that I honestly probably wouldn't even notice if suddenly every video on YouTube was under 10 minutes. Same with things like full-HD / 4k support. I'm fine with 720p 99% of the time. In most cases I suspect a video hosting service with a 10 minute video limit and a 420p / 720p resolution would suffice just fine.

IMO what YouTube alternatives should focus on is being unique and different from YouTube in someway -- at least initially. Maybe focus on short-form video and build algorithms and moderation tools that ensure users are only served extremely high quality videos. Perhaps a video service providing something like a daily digest of the best daily / weekly videos that match your preferences could work.

As the platform grows it could then increase the allowed video length and expand into a more general video hosting service like YouTube. We see this trend in social media all the time, Facebook has a lot of competitors, but non of them are competing directly with Facebook. They're all doing something a little different and a little better than Facebook.

Because they show up on top of searches. Wait until the freemium approach fails and they lose content producers, and they will pivot into something more approachable by competitors.

If you would like to speed up the process refuse to login, support independent content producers and creators, and give search engines a reason to promote other platforms (don't click, simple as that)

for me personally Peertube checks all the boxes because it is in the fediverse and can be selfhosted. you can do whatever the hell you want and that is quite a big thing for people who have been burned by youtube.

edit: Tilvids.com is a good example of the power of peertube

How does the experience compare for the average user? I’ve put things on Peertube only for the instance to shut down.

tilvids.com check it and give your opinion

I noticed no subtitles or captions on videos and no obvious way to turn them on. I was able to watch the same videos on YouTube with closed captions but on my TV instead of my phone.

subtitles have to be added the video. youtube imo does this automatically for some videos but i am not sure

https://framatube.org/w/217eefeb-883d-45be-b7fc-a788ad8507d3

here is a good video intro to peertube which has subtitles

Those appear to be baked into the video. I can’t control how they look.

YouTube does have competitors: Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Netflix.

YouTube is a clear winner in a few big categories, but video is a huge market and they haven’t gotten an edge on anything new in awhile, for example short form.

Youtube makes it pretty easy to search for videos and watch without an account, and the other big platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok go out of their way to make sure you can't do that.

About making it easy to search... Do you know if there's a way to limit your searches to only the channels you're subscribed to?

Because AMZN and maybe MSFT have not yet decided there is sufficient revenue potential attached to it.

The other contenders don’t have the various resources or would do it “wrong enough” it wouldn’t matter.

AMZN has Twitch which is a competitor.

Other than a variety of technical reasons already mentioned, I think VEVO is an amazing moat that would be very difficult for even the most funded of competitors to cross.

This would have been a moat in 2013. But these days, at least where I live, I get music videos on my music app.

And maybe it's just me but music videos don't have the same traction that they used to have. There are so many chart toppers that I've listened to often for which I hadn't watched the video for a very long time.

Compare this to 2011 where we discovered songs, including Gangnam style, on YouTube charts.

In general, that's a good point. It's not as important as it used to be, you're right.

But I'd definitely not discount it entirely simply because not everyone has access or can afford to pay for the music apps, particularly in developing countries.

I think the only company that could probably compete with YouTube, although long term, is TikTok. If you think about it, it's like YouTube, just with smaller videos.

YouTube is sort of like Craigslist for videos and their competitors generally target either something they can do like Twitch and Instagram or something they can’t do.

Any viable YouTube competitor is going to be considerably different from YouTube.

I would argue that both TikTok and Netflix are very successful YouTube competitors.

Because Youtube can only make sense to run within Google. Youtube's actual service of providing free HD streaming video in exchange for showing the viewers ads is not, has never been, and cannot be profitable. Totally free, unlimited HD video streaming is just too expensive. It can only exist as part of a huge conglomerate because the only purpose Youtube can serve is to attract people into the ecosystem it's part of. No other company has an ecosystem valuable enough to justify losing that much money on Youtube.

The day Google shows a split up between YouTube ad revenue vs the rest, it's going to be an AWS moment.

I don't know why people believe YouTube is a loss maker. My guess is that it makes up 25% of the ad income

Alphabet has been reporting youtube ad revenue separately since last year or so: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...

In their latest (Q3/21) report they are hairs breadth away from Netflix revenue figures: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/youtube-q...

Considering that Netflix is profitable with the immense cost of producing their own content, I don't find it far fetched that Youtube would be profitable too (albeit with very different cost structure).

Fixed expectations from before Google bought them/it was stand-alone profitable perhaps? Although people got over the image of Amazon not making any money.

Competitors would have to make the content creators want to move their communities, knowing a large part of their community will not follow.

But it's not all or nothing. You can have videos on two websites.

Rumble

Odysee

WTV

Bitchute

Daily Motion

Peer Tube

..ad infinitum

There's literally hundreds out there, not everything needs to be 'Facebook scale' to be successful.

edit: formatting

Daily Motion was a strong alternative for a time in France, but it isn't used much now. Most long video content creators are on Youtube now. (DailyMotion is french)

Daily Motion seems to be a place where people just upload Jeopardy episodes and random movies and they don’t get taken down quickly.

None of those are available on "modern" TVs or set top boxes. YouTube is _everywhere_ and has monetization, the eyeballs, and a seemingly infinite number of videos. It will be extraordinarily difficult to compete with this.

Literally over a billion smart phones are sold each year, most of which have YouTube apps on them already. At the moment nothing can reasonably compete with YouTube. They can, of course, be successful but will remain a niche product.

Yeah but that is akin to laptops having Windows installed by default. Actually, it is worse, because in case of Android: it is from Google, and so is YouTube, so it makes sense that they have a YouTube app pre-installed. I do not expect them to pre-install a competitor's one, no matter how successful or great that is. This is why you have billions of Android phones with YouTube app instead of something else.

Nebula is pretty good but they need downvote / upvote options or some method of curating bad videos from good videos.

I am truly not trying to be snarky, but so it goes.

Does anyone on HN actually still have YouTube videos playable on their machines?

Why? Text is so much faster to learn from and without sound and video baggage that gets added.

I understand people raised on MTV and Snapchat caring about video for fun and not caring about the wasted time. But isn't this a community focused on productivity and knowledge? YouTube is the opposite of that. Might as well watch sports or hanging out in bars. ;)

I'm unlikely to learn a new coding pattern on YouTube.

But I have learned a ton of woodworking techniques from watching build videos. There are a ton of little techniques along the way that are innate to people who have been in the industry for years and thus wouldn't be in written instructions, but I can see them and pick them up from a video. It's really hard to describe the technique for some of the resin work out there too, like getting realistic looking waterlines.

Or when I'm stuck at a certain point in a game it's a lot easier to see a video of someone doing it than read a half-assed description.

for me yt does podcast & music well. just download w/e for a jog. (really i would prefer to read a book but i need the exercise) as for tutorials sometimes it helps to see what's going on (like with painting or audio design), sometimes if I'm limiting to reading a book I can easily fool myself about what I know. solving pre-made problems help but is still limiting.

All I want is to be able to pay to remove ads without also having to pay for a YouTube music subscription.

It was first. Read Positioning by Reis for why this matters and why nothing will ever beat YouTube head on.

Youtube beeds a peer to peer competitor.

https://odysee.com

Dailymotion? Youku? Fb watch?

How much does YouTube traffic cost? And for those of us who are not Google?

Viewers want to go where the content is.

Content creators want to go where the users are.

content, and pure scale, video hosting is enormously expensive to do at scale, youtube is able to do so because it is backed by google.

A time machine to travel back to 2005.

Why compete with yesterday?

bilibili in China Niconico in Japan

Ask TikTok.

Bilibili

> Users are going to upload copyrighted material, and the law says that's the platform's responsibility.

The law says the opposite, this is what Section 230 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is about. The platform is responsible for acting upon takedown requests from copyright holders. Everything YouTube negotiated with major copyright holders is extralegal.

Not surprisingly, most of the answers on HN are from an engineering perspective.

When I started selling the first products I designed and manufactured --decades ago-- I absolutely sucked at it. I was selling like an engineer thinks. Which means I was a horrible sales person. It wasn't until one of my friends, who happened to be one of my resellers, took me under his wing and taught me sales that I understood the process. It took somewhere around six to eight months for me to "see the light". Towards the end I could sell our products almost without saying a word about them. You are dealing with people, not robots. Everything you care about as an engineer is usually of no interest whatsoever to the buyer (that can be the case even for highly technical products).

I think the answer is far simpler than the obvious go-to's in this case (established, network, google, infrastructure, technical blah, blah, etc.). Sure, those are factors, but this is about sales and sales is about psychology.

Simple question:

What would it take to sell anyone on Y and have them stop stop using X?

Let's say X is a brand of forks and knives and Y is a different brand. Furthermore, assume they are free. Cost of the switch is exactly $0. Effort is also zero. You say "I want to switch to Y" and they magically appear in your kitchen and replace X. As easy as can be.

Well, Y has to give you a reason strong enough to compel you to make the change. Call it value, if you will. The mythical "differentiation" with, perhaps, more attached to it than just being different.

A few weeks ago I saw metal cutlery that was black. It looked beautiful. Same stainless steel material usually used for cutlery everyone if familiar with. Except, in this case, it was blackened, likely using a chemical process. If that was Y, it could inspire some to make the switch, just to be different. Maybe. More likely than that, they'll get Y and keep using X.

Put a different way, if X works well and does everything you want it to do, there are very few reasons to change to Y. The company behind X might have to do something horrible to suddenly inspire mass exodus.

I believe this is the case with YouTube/Google. What they do, they do well. The user experience is excellent. Yes, we all know about the ridiculous no-customer-service account suspensions where you lose all of your Google app access, etc. However, this is not the average user experience. In fact, I would venture to say that this is well outside two standard deviations from the mean, ridiculously outside of that. The area under the curve is deeply dominated by users who are satisfied to the extent that the thought of going elsewhere never really crosses their minds. When a user/customer/client can't be compelled to even think about Y when using X, the probability of them considering a switch is as close to zero as can be.

The only way for someone to mount a solid effort against YouTube falls under two areas:

A- By force. Spend billions advertising and educating the audience and, over time, if the product is good and the message is solid, N% of YouTube users would migrate. This would require so much money it would easily meet the definition of insanity. The cost of acquisition isn't likely to ever justify the investment.

B- Cater to a deeply motivated audience to carve out a much smaller percentage of YouTube's audience. The most obvious audience I can identify in this moment in history is Trump's audience. Regardless of what the reader might thing of them, they have grievances with social media and YouTube that could be addressed by an alternative platform. The cost of acquisition, in this case, would be relatively low. In fact, I would not be surprised if most of the investment went into creating a solid infrastructure with only a modest marketing push to trigger network effects.

Other than option B --which would only capture an audience in the tens of millions, and possibly grow it to >100million over time--- I can't see anything that would inspire people to leave YouTube behind. And, even with B, the same audience would continue to use YouTube, because, well, everything is already there and the user experience is good. B takes advantage of deep motivation for change. Without that, it simply isn't going to happen.

All a competitor needs to do for me to prefer them is not be part of the Ministry of Truth, i.e., to not set itself up as the arbiter of whether information is correct. It should know its role: to store and play videos and such. Odysee, Rumble, Bitchute, Gab TV, NewTube, all of these fit the bill. All of these are very valuable in an era when censorship has been normalized.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com