Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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