Thinking About Why YouTube Is a Monopoly
worldofmatthew.com
worldofmatthew.com
Even in 2025 every other streaming site is unwatchable because of video buffering, videos not loading, and other hiccups in service that make it annoying as hell to use.
99% of websites in general suck, and the ones that don't get millions and billions of users.
Arrogant programmers think their products are great and they are geniuses, but in general 99.9% of their work is glitchy unusable trash and going nowhere.
Say what you want about youtube, it simply works better than anything else.
I don't know that anyone wants to make YouTube worse to improve competition. The allegation is that YouTube is subsidised by other Google ventures so as to drive other competitors out and that it abuses its market power to harm competition. That doesn't ultimately benefit consumers in the long term.
But I have no idea if any of that is actually true. Maybe YouTube is just better designed and developed and has natural network effects so Google would win even if they didnt do anything anticompetitive.
By UI performance I mean I click to go to the homepage and it loads a blank homepage with placeholder video thumbnails then spins for 5-10 seconds. I have fibre.
You press up arrow to up the volume? Oops, the seek bar had blue focus frame and you skipped five seconds instead.
You wanted to skip five seconds with a right arrow but missed and pressed numpad 0? Oops, you jumped to 0:00 and there’s no way back, not in this 5 hour stream record.
Buttons load for extra ten seconds, there’s a visible delay between click and actual pause, non-16:9 videos break the layout below the player, moving a song in a playlist jerks as hell or crashes the tab, and so on and so forth.
The usual “you are product not a client” is incoming, but I think that youtube ui team is just trash. There’s no prioritization of these issues, right, but having these in the first place on a site like youtube means you’re just incompetent.
I’ve never had this issue with YouTube ever and I also have fibre. I never had this issue with YouTube when I didnt have fibre.
I am glad you havent had the bug. It is an annoying one. Your not having it does not make it any less of a bug for me though, unfortunately.
It's hard to take these "YouTube is popular due to monopoly" arguments seriously when the competition can't even get the basics right.
I feel the same about a lot of online shopping. In Germany people often moan about Amazon and while it's has it's share of issues, the competition is often so bad. Really slow processes that feel like someone adopted a "submit order via fax" process slightly for the web, horrible web sites, sometimes next-to-non-existent customer service. No wonder the alternatives aren't taking off as they fuck up the basics before we even get to the point of starting to compete.
Nebula isn't free. Only invited creators are on there. Seems like they're clearly focusing on a niche.
I also had issues with Nebula at first. It's been steadily getting better. When did you try it?
I think now it probably performs more reliably than Youtube + Firefox on my Android.
Youtube may work better than “everything else”, except for basically any mainstream porn site. It is just so trash compared to pornhub or xvideos that according to your theory these sites could just start serving sfw content and destroy youtube. Idk about that.
I'm too old to see just how popular TikTok is and where they could take that with the (supposedly petty young) demographic they have.
My guess is that they looked at the costs of hosting trillions of hours of video and decided that only a corporate giant like Google would ultimately be able to afford it.
You would need a few times that to make it work all over again. Either that or some sort of decentralized framework with decades of volunteer man hours and hundreds of millions of dollars of volunteer hardware and network power to displace/replace it.
ISP's are not forced to host these servers, they gladly do, because it's cheaper to colocate a caching server than to clog the uplinks and pay for that traffic. It's a win-win solution.
Big CDN providers also have their caching servers in ISPs. That's why building a CDN is a high-capex business. And if Youtube didn't have the money to pay for that traffic/server/code they woudln't have been successful.
We had a competing product that we sold to a big media group around 2010. The economy of this kind of platforms is super skewed towards put humongous amount of money beforehand, try to achieve network effect and try to find a way to monetize it. Google might've been the only company that could've done it, because it's a 3 sided market:
- uploaders/creators
- advertisers
- viewers
They not only put the money, but they shared the revenue in a meaningful way and that's why their patience and huuuge costs gave them the lead they enjoy now.
I am not sure that if you add all expences from the beginning they are net positive on this investment (if we measure the free cashflow generated after all capex has been paid off).
ISPs don't QoS some companies to give them better service, the only difference is that in-demand companies tend to invest in capacity in partnership with ISPs. But ultimately, in most cases those investing generally use the same capacity that everyone else can use. The only company who doesn't resell their CDN capacity is Netflix. The others, Google and Amazon, dog food their own products. If you want to use the same systems as Prime or Google Video then you absolutely can. Other streaming providers use public CDN capacity just like anyone else.
Does YouTube get a favourable rate for capacity over other users? Yes and no. If Google doesn't charge YouTube then it's losing profit on the compute to sustain YT. But YT still has to make a profit and YT carries the cost burden of a great deal of legacy crap that a new entrant wouldn't. What Google has built is a miracle of engineering, to be able to get videos from relative nobodies to the other side of the in the world within minutes, at relatively high quality. While also allowing millions of kids to watch someone play Minecraft.
I respect what they've built. Would it be good to have diversity? In some ways yes, but in other ways choice sucks. Fragmentation of places to view content is something that gets increasingly complained about in the streaming world.
Is YouTube greedy? I don't think so. Building and maintaining what they've built is hard. As everyone else whose tried it knows. Just riding on their coat tails and leaching on their servers isn't sustainable. Ad blocking and saying Google deserves it isn't sustainable. In the extreme, if we burned down Google and said we wanted that model to end, the world would be a poorer place for it IMHO.
Context: 24 years in media, a decade in streaming for big companies, no affiliation with Google.
But Youtube did indeed built a great CDN, coupled with control of the end user video player made the best video on demand platform by far.
I think a lot of people that turned a hobby into a full time content creator job on YouTube will find themselves with much less ad revenue. Adsense is going to start charging a third-party company for services, which YouTube would be at that point, and those costs are likely to eat into any adsense revenue creators make, across the board.
There would also be the question of what search will power YouTube and if that can be physically separated from Google. There are likely economies of scale with how Google organizes data for search behind the curtain. That could be lost and increase YT operational costs or be another service YT needs to purchase.
Youtube is spreading the burden of carrying all that content, from utter crap that no one watches, deep archive and onwards to Mr Beast, etc. There's a huge volume of content that Google hosts that's costing more than it earns them.
In some ways in this theoretical world, the small/new upcoming creators would have a larger chasm to cross into profitability if they move from a free plan into a paid hosting/delivery plan before becoming profitable. Unless a small/new creator gets massive quickly or goes viral they will have a much longer time before adsense can fund the storage. This might mean that the nonsense content goes away because churning out volumes of content to have more "surface area" for people to discover a channel can't be profitable.
[0] There may be premium content subscription options where some users pay a creator but I would imagine that is a minority of creators.
I'm not sure YouTube can exist outside of being a monopoly. I'd actually argue YouTube is the strongest evidence in existence in favor of monopolies, far better than anything Thiel has suggested.
I want to be wrong about this but the evidence suggests it's so.
i dont think it is evidence that monopoly is good.
If I understand the author right, the big companies are allowed to set up caching servers at ISPs.
Isn't this basically a CDN? If you spin up your own screaming start-up you would first go with akamai or whatever and if you reach sufficient scale you set up your own agreements with ISPs.
Is the blog basically arguing for making it illegal to cut out the middle man here?
- YouTube isn't the dominant video player in every country! Niconico is super popular in Japan.
This doesn’t make sense because Niconico might be popular in Japan, but it is absolutely dominated by YouTube there and has been for a long time now.
Same with steam or other dominate online stores with recommendation algorithms: you can market your game with ads linking a store with a lower cut. Less sales and views on steam from that means you don't take off in their algorithm. Game flops. Buy ads pointing to steam store and it would have kicked off the self stoking cycle and done well in this hypothetical. The other store can't compete with rate alone even in cases where you are driving the traffic, because you are giving up driving even more traffic at at the other store through the augmentation of the algorithm.
But at this point I think the only way to compete with YouTube is decentralized P2P video hosting product because there is no way anyone can afford hundreds of millions of dollars for centralized video hosting product. TikTok was able to pull it off tho but remember that it started as a short form video service and its parent company was beefy enough to invest billions into user and content acquisition.
Free video hosting is good.
The EU doesn't exist to torture every single market until a viable european competitor emerges.
It exists to protect the interests of european citizens (most of whom do not own video hosting platforms), which in this case are perfectly served by YouTube.
And european public television exists to make video journalism available to everyone, which is also served by YouTube. And it's great that you can see content from public television and independent journalism on the same platform.
If you don't burn out before that.
Copyright laws, and unfair enforcement via the platform with no recourse (e.g., the "DMCA"-esque rules that cirvumvent actual DMCA laws, if nothing else), needs to change to make it a fairer place.