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Comment by the_omegist | Hacker News Reader

You're right in the absolute, but the issue here is that YT has a monopoly. So if it gets too easy for them to make people abandon ad blocking like this, what stops them from rising their prices every year ?

I see this as a nice "balance" that reminds them (if enough people don't cave in) that their monopoly is not giving them a free rein to do anything they want.

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YT doesn't have a monopoly, it has market share because 99% of the users watch content for free (via ads). If they made everyone pay or the ads were unbearable you'd see the market shift to other youtube front ends or other streaming sites entirely.

Personally, I pay for YT premium since it's a slightly better way to support creators (that I don't directly pay via Patreon) and I get Youtube Music. If they raised their prices unreasonably, I'd just enable my youtube-dl script on my plex server and watch for free there.

Where exactly are YouTube’s competitors? It has none for 99% of the content I watch, although udemy is good for beginner courses

Directly: sites like Twitch are close. Indirectly: Netflix, HBO, etc. all compete for screen-based entertainment.

I also watch a lot of Youtube, outside of a couple of good movies and TV shows that I stream from my plex. So YT premium makes a lot of sense for me

Do you use Twitch? I don’t really see the direct competition besides YouTube’s small amount of live streamers that directly compete with Twitch streamers.

Tiktok is probably a better direct competitor, but I see twitch and youtube as fairly comparable

TikTok.

Also - just because it doesn't have the content that you, personally, watch, does not make it not a competitor.

They are quickly losing that monopoly to TikTok. It's only a matter of time. TicTok has added 10 minute videos. When they add 1hr videos it will mostly be the end of YouTube's monopoly

Which, FWIW, they got there by being the only player. It's interesting that no one else has really tried until TikTok

I thought tiktok only had brainless videos though.

Maybe that was true in the past but there's a lot of high value production nowadays on it, including short series.

TikTok is eating the lunch of YouTube, Instagram and Facebook & expanding content by attracting higher quality creators. They're even expanding into shopping. At one point, YouTube only had random videos or pirated shows.

Tim Tok has been struggling with a massive problem where many creators that actually start to get big on the platform end up migrating to YouTube anyway because their pay sucks compared to YouTube, the same goes for instagram and every other platform in the industry. Youtube has a lot of problems but nobody pays better than them https://youtu.be/jAZapFzpP64?si=KrLqetuhzmer2T8H

Nope, content creators are moving en masse due to more fair payout model

Source? All I've heard about TikTok is that it barely pays out at all so content creators mostly sees it as a way to get eyeballs on things that do generate money, like their youtube channels.

How do I see 10 minute videos? I usually get mostly brainless content with the stupid voice or music in it.

Than search up some of the content you would like to see. The algorithm is quick and effective.

TikTok is a skinners box, we shouldn’t subject ourselves to machines that are that manipulative

Also, if there’s a thing I would want to support less than a massive data harvesting scheme is a Chinese massive data harvesting scheme.

Between Reddit, TikTok, Twitch, Instagram, etc Youtube hardly has a monopoly.

It's like people are being intentionally obtuse in this thread, almost like there's a bunch of paid shills

Let's read your list and consider which of those options hosts long form video content

Reddit: a link aggregator, not a video hosting site Tiktok: Chinese data collection machine that hosts very short form videos Instagram: data collection machine that hosts pictures your mom likes and short form videos Twitch: focused on streaming and gaming, not a YouTube competitor

Depending on your threshold for "long form", nearly all of them:

Reddit has supported direct video uploads for literal years, maybe 5 years at this point, and up to 15 minutes in length. TikTok also collecting your data doesn't change that it hosts videos, and supports up to 10 minutes, and that limit has been increasing as they try to be a more general purpose video platform. Instagram hosts pictures, but also livestreams and videos, both short-form (a few minutes), and long-form (IGTV supports to an hour). Twitch is the only one that seems to clearly not support long-form video content, but even then it's still a competitor because that's not all Youtube does either.

TikTok absolutely is a competitor. I'm not sure why it has to host long form content for it to be considered a competitor.

If more people get their video entertainment from TikTok, then they watch YouTube less.

Most blatantly, YouTube literally launched shorts recently - an exact TikTok competitor clone.

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