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Comment by WJW | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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/

>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.

> 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

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.

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.

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