How YouTube won the battle for TV viewers
wsj.com
wsj.com
A lot of what I may watch on Youtube might be categorized as "background noise" - lots of talking head content that I can play on the background. Much of it is low quality and self-serious - but it's arguably much better quality than any equivalent "background noise" show on TV.
Ironically, I feel like longform Youtube content is actually better for my attention span and more rewarding - because creators aren't trying to appeal to broad audiences, they don't have to jump from topic to topic and keep things under a time limit.
I recently watched the Animagraffs video on the Hoover Dam and I was blown away. I have probably watched dozens of TV documentaries on the Hoover Dam over the year, but none of them actually just stop and methodically explained everything from top-to-down so thoroughly.
Even beloved shows like Mythbusters, there are now dozens of channels on Youtube that do all the same things we enjoyed Mythbusters for but better and with less filler and shmaltz.
I still muscle memory enter youtube.com and I'm blown away how incredible addictive everything is setup there to be, the "algorithm" has trained the content creators to maximize their reach with incredible captivating thumbnails (and of course great content).
I'm like this too, but I prefer stuff like railfan videos that are short on words and long on landscape shots and monotony-quenching machine sounds. They never leave me with that feeling where my attention snaps back to the video in a way that makes me feel like I missed something and need to skip back a few seconds.
This channel is an especially-good example of what makes great background YT viewing to me: https://www.youtube.com/@7ideaproductions/videos
I use it 95% of the time for YouTube (via the wonderful SmartTube client).
I was a YouTube addict until I think late last year. Something changed in the recommendation algorithm and my recommendations became so bad that these days I can hardly find anything interesting to watch on the front page. I dig things out from my subscriptions.
I still pay for YouTube and consider it money well spent, it is a great source of information.
I'm really diligent about whenever I watch something that I don't want YouTube throwing more of at me, to just immediately delete it from my history. For example, if someone on Reddit mentions some funny dumb video, I'll watch it, but then delete it because I really don't want YouTube suggesting schlock to me.
Most recently I watched a highlight video of Australia vs West Indies test cricket series my home page was endless cricket videos.
A few weeks before that I watched highlights from World Cup Asian qualifiers, for a week or so endless soccer videos.
Just because I look up one video of “how to replace a toilet seat” doesn’t mean I am a connoisseur of toilets.
The other problem I run into is that no matter what I’m watching, I’m two autoplay videos away from Joe Rogan (and other right wing personas). Who knew something as innocent as listening about the economy of Iceland can be two videos away from why the Superman movie is too woke.
My YouTube ads (and Recaptcha experiences) have gotten terrible because Google seems to punish you more the less data you feed them, but for the most part I feel like I have control of the data that I do feed them (some of which is intentionally misleading because they have no right to know and I hate targeted ads; I love Spanish language ads, for instance, though my level of Spanish comprehension is stuck somewhere around first year of high school courses).
My watch history is basically entirely my hobbies and interests and thus YouTube suggests more stuff related to those. A lot of it is channels I'm already subscribed to, but it does a good job of surfacing new channels that I wouldn't otherwise know about it.
When I watch a video describing a new lens for a Canon or Fuji system, I get flooded with videos for Nikon or Sony stuff later on. When I choose "not interested" I only get two options a) I watched this already (which YT should know obviously, as I'm a subscriber, or b) I don't like it. A useful option like "I don't have Nikon/Sony stuff" or something more specific like that isn't available.
Amazon for example uses an equally bad algorithm, it seems to be "industry standard" ...or even worse, because the don't need to offer me another fridge or washing machine once I ordered one. Idiocracy, sigh.
It is something that would bring me down otherwise. Just like I never dared to even try WoW.
Not to mention, Adam Savage himself is also on youtube!
Instead
(1) Youtube recommends tons of channels of random creators who clearly just watched other channels and are now making copy-cat content.
(2) Youtube recommends insane channels - literally crazy people
(3) If I happen to watch anything I haven't watched before, suddently 30% ot 60% of my recommendations are for that channel. It has no way of knowing that it was a one off. I'm perfectly capable of going to that channel to see their other content if I thought it was good. If I don't go, then please take that as a signal that I didn't find it that interesting.
(4) even though I religiously select "not interested" it has no noticable effect
(5) They shovel shorts at me with their fucking inane "Ok, we'll show you less shorts" BS
At this point basically I have a few subscriptions of which only 1 updates daily, 2 update once or twice a month, the rest only periodically. Those I almost always watch when they have something new but most days there's 10-20 mins of content. Then, I look at the recommendations. See all the problems above and a few more I've mentioned before 20-50% music recommendations when I'm looking for video content and 20-40% recommending videos I already watched even though I'm looking for new content. So, I close the tab and do something else.
I know they won't do it but if they let Gemini watch all the videos and let me give Gemini detailed instructions I'm 1000% sure it would do extremely better for me. I don't know if it would be better for Youtube.
I'd like to give more specific instuctions like "Recommend French Language videos but only if they are business level French or higher, no beginner videos" or "Recommend news but never recommend anything about X or Y or Z as I'm just not interested in those topics". "Never recommend music or music videos. If I want music I'll go to music.youtube.com". etc etc
Don't get me wrong, I've been a subscriber for a very long time, and I get a lot of great content there. But going there to watch something specific, or watching a TV series, really sucks.
I recently realized a few studios (IIRC Warner Bros and Paramount) had put a lot of content there including movies and TV shows. I decided to watch Dick Van Dyke, because I'm a Carl Reiner fan. You can't really "Watch Next" a TV show and then go in to watch the next episode. And in fact sometimes it just wants to show you the shows in a non-linear order. "I want to watch the next Dick Van Dyke" is not something that YouTube makes easy. Another example, a friend recent sent me The Chit Show, I opened the playlist of the shows, and it played them in the reverse order (which I didn't really understand until the end when I realized I was on the first episode).
Also, the YouTube algorithm for suggesting things for you to watch is really bad. It gets stuck in ruts and it's hard to get out of them.
YouTube is amazing for learning DIY things, which is a large part of why I have subscribed for so long. But for watching entertainment the whole UI really just doesn't work.
From the article:
A coming YouTube feature, called “shows,” can automatically queue the next episode on a channel, rather than serving whatever the recommendation algorithm thinks you’ll like best from billions of options.
Initially, streaming had to compete with broadcasting's long seasons by producing the equivalent amount of content, spread between more shows, with higher-quality production but much shorter seasons. Now streamers are providing fewer shows and only semi-annual seasons. It ends up leaving a lot of open viewing time with nothing fresh to watch.
YouTube also has the advantage of people making highlight reels of the most popular movies and series. We get out-takes, behind the scenes, bloopers, best quotes etc. Streaming services haven't figured this out (yet). I've never watched The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on TV, but I watched almost every monologue on YouTube.
What once was on ~3 platforms is now on ~10+ platforms. They constantly shuffle around who has what, new promising series are constantly killed because if they don't instantly become a worldwide sensation and the prices are rising non-stop.
At some point I just said screw it and left all of them.
YouTube's economics are just so much better. YT provides no up front payment for content. The channels are almost infinite, microtargeted to everyone's interest. And the payout is proportional to the success of the content, and paid AFTER the audience has viewed. TV on the other hand has to make big bets before they know whether a show will be a hit.
I've had a TV for years but don't have cable and never watch broadcast. My TV is just a large ipad.
Are we sure about that? Apple seems to keep making more and more TV shows instead of focusing on technical debt. Last I knew my phone didn't work right with Apple Intelligence or whatever "Siri" is supposed to be but we're on season 4 of whatever a Ted Lasso is.
Certainly it's because the content creators stay on YouTube because that's "where the eyeballs are". (Or rather, the money is to be made there on ad revenue ... because that's where the eyeballs are.)
I don't know how you break that. eBay is probably in the same enviable position.
Monopoly laws and taxes are punitive. In other words: they can only ever create a situation where there is fundamentally less available. They cannot create a second Youtube, they can only destroy Youtube. Unless the government builds the infrastructure, which is a nonstarter.
If you cannot use state power and/or resources to create a second and third Youtube, then letting Youtube be a monopoly is probably the best option. The big difference between competitors and a monopoly is that a monopolist can only improve outcomes by growing the market ... which is exactly what we want.
Unfortunately it is very much not what the government wants. Well, it is not what governments (plural) want. Governments think they're god, and of course like two people in a madhouse that both think they're god, there is a rather fundamental disagreement here. They will realize, eventually, just how stupid it would be for god to let other gods (anyone but themselves, other governments, but also private people) control mass media. This means we will get closer and closer to the situation that Youtube cannot satisfy multiple governments. This could even apply to multiple parties within one state structure. You would hope this means they'll build infrastructure, but we all know what will really happen: they'll destroy it. Youtube will end because governments will see it as a threat to them, and they just won't care how much damage they're doing. Just look at the current government.
There are a LOT of economy texts, some quite old that warn about the dangers of letting private interests control the only market for anything. They suggest the government should make sure they own or at least control the market itself, but that includes paying for infrastructure. This has it's own problems (like censorship), but there is really no alternative. Either you do that or eventually the monopolists will BE the government.
Unfortunately for them, I don't watch enough of their learning content to care about subscribing. But it's an option, and if I wanted to spend more time watching videos I could do so.
Operating a site with all the features and scale of YouTube is prohibitively difficult just because YouTube sets the bar so high, but operating a smaller more targeted competitor isn't. There are no barriers to entering the market. And that's largely thanks to Google and how they pushed so much video functionality into Chrome itself!
Yes, and YouTube essentially gets all of this infrastructure from its parent company for free and still operates at a loss. So no other company who doesn't already have such infrastructure for other purposes can effectively compete with YouTube, and all such attempts were effectively destroyed by YouTube because YouTube could offer better services while still operating at a loss.
Monopoly laws should've prevented a situation like this.
Of course YouTube wouldn't be able to provide its services at current scale if it didn't have Google backing. But perhaps that could've made the current content market better. If YouTube had to place some restrictions on uploaded content because it wouldn't afford unlimited storage and bandwidth, it wouldn't push creators to make every video 10+ minutes long, and if creators had to pay at least some minimal fees (while they could still get residuals from ads if the video was successful) to post videos, we wouldn't have so much low quality videos there. And the competition could maybe give us better features we don't even dream of today.
It's not a monopoly. Tons of other sites successfully host and profit from videos, such as TikTok facebook etc.
The breakup of Ma Bell had its flaws, but it ABSOLUTELY created a situation where there was more available.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
> Obtaining a monopoly by superior products, innovation, or business acumen is legal
Second, “if Google can’t make it work no one can” is also a myth. YouTube, even the idea of which came after Google video was already launched, is a good example of that.
And, of course, Google+…
It’s not impossible to make a video streaming platform profitable, but it definitely is hard and it likely isn’t possible with arbitrary unlimited free uploads.
So 9.79/365*4 = 11 cents per hour of video.
I dunno what you need to profit from 1h of video.
Basically you're lucky to get ad revenue of 10c per hour.
As a guy who builds big streaming services, I can definitely say profitability is a very hard thing to achieve. Even as compute costs go down, demand for features goes up and long-tail archive costs mount.
There are few companies with the resources to create a real competitor.
- Odysee - has performance issues and the app is crap and no discoverability. Some niche, interesting content on there but a lot of the time I only used it because someone would upload Joe Rogan stuff while he was exclusive to Spotify.
- BitChute - full of racists and not a lot else, crap discoverability. The website feels like something from the 2000s.
- Rumble - US/UK right wing slop politics and conspiracy rubbish from David Icke wannabes. I don't like the interface at all. Tends to work okay. But there is very few things I want to watch/listen to on there. Discoverability isn't great.
- Daily motion - I remember it being decent a decade ago, but it has fallen behind and turned into something else from briefly looking at the home page.
- Twitch - Streaming platform only, I think. There is a lot of slop left wing politics on it and (for want of a better term) "titty streamers". I have visited the site once, not for me.
- Kick - Basically Twitch but has more permissive T&C. Bankrolled by Stake.com IIRC. I watch one live show if I am awake to watch it. Otherwise I wouldn't bother with it.
I spend most of my time on YouTube watching stuff either about Computers, Repairing 4x4 trucks, Weird Soviet Era vehicles, WW2 stuff by Mark Felton or some sort of Tech related stuff. None of that is catered to on the alternative sites at all. None of that is catered by TV particularly well either.
- BitChute - If you can get past the 'racists' and the MGTOW gayness that dominates the front page, this site has a rather large catalog of free movies available.
- Rumble - If you can get past the political slop, this site streams a lot of NFL sportsball for free .
- Twitch - I used to go here to watch my sportsball but the site is now overexposed, old and busted. Can't go five seconds with a copyright notice appearing.
Content creators prefer YouTube because it has more users, and each creator is afraid that their followers wouldn’t follow them to another platform. Even content creators focused on open source or self-hosting kind of tech.
Honestly, I really wonder if users would refuse to follow creators whom they like to another platform. Are most people really that adverse to just watching videos on another website?
Right now that's YouTube and TikTok.
If I want to find videos on a specific topic, I use a search engine. DuckDuckGo yields much better results than YouTube, even when the results are hosted on YouTube itself.
It’s fine if that’s not what you want, but people do love it and it keeps them going back to YouTube and TikTok.
My wife and I watch ~15 hours of YouTube together each week, entirely on our Apple TV. If someone we watch were to move to another platform, we just wouldn't watch them anymore. Honestly even if there is an Apple TV app for the other platform, it's still unlikely we'd switch over just to watch them instead of filling up their "time slot" with someone else.
I've told the creators that I follow that I'm paying to enable them to do what they do, I don't need any more return than that.
I tried Nebula and others, honestly the content was either unappealing, low quality recycled material, or it took too long to find something interesting. The variety of YT is important and I'd also say 30% of my selections are based on duration, fitting the content into my lifestyle as well as my mood.
It is such a sad state of things since Steve Jobs passed away both Apple and Google have a complete lack of taste and product sensibility to deliver something truly helps the customers. Instead every product and features are marketing or sales driven.
E.g. Netflix outright refuses any kind of integration where their content would be surfaced next to other services - their product managers DEMAND that people go to their app into their owned experience to access content.
And designers/product managers at other content providers are the same.
Instead of "channel surfing" and picking a competitor's production they want to keep viewers inside their walled garden.
In the real world, each company wants to be THE number one streaming platform, and wants users to use their app above all else. So each company reinvents the same things, and users need to deal with the mess of N apps for N services.
The idea of cooperation is completely alien in big tech companies. Descentralisation is perceived as dangerous, since it doesn’t let each individual be the number one.
In the end, because everyone want to be the number one and screw the rest, they all end up sucking. This is obviously predictable, but management everywhere remains oblivious of it.
The companies do not care about app usage. They care about subscription fees, which are highly (though somewhat elastically) dependent on a platform's available content. They don't give a damn what you watch with, they just want you to pay. They already know there will be no 600lb gorilla in streaming, so it's all about getting another month of fees from you, and that is unrelated to app usage.
Isn’t that what YouTube TV is? The problem with YouTube TV is that it’s essentially the old expensive cable model that everyone was trying to get away from in the first place.
The content is nowhere near as addictive as youtube though, partly because the format is still television and still built with a television executive mindset.
Streaming services make great shows then stop them after one season or force one episode a week. they also drop then pick back up shows constantly.
YouTube let's people watch the kinds of shows they want to watch and let's people create the kind of shows they want to create. everyone wins, including YouTube! plus they do music, smaller artists, bigger artists and mashups in between. it's all just there fairly reliably and it works on every platform.
I have YT Premium, so I automatically get YT Music. I would much rather pay less and drop the Music app. I almost never use it and don’t like it. I can’t justify buying for another service on top of this, so I went back to managing a local library and manually syncing all my music to my phone like it’s 2007.
A side effect of YouTube treating music special is that I can’t read comments on the TV for videos that it thinks are music. I find this very annoying. The same video will have comment on mobile or the computer.
Also, better audio quality in my subjective opinion.
(To be sure, this was very much a low-key affair, teens there with their parents were "DJ-ing" — but I was still surprised that is was YT. Just vanilla YT, pulling up "videos" and hitting "play".)
The thing I dislike about Youtube Music is how it is basically not a product the team have put any thoughts into it. It is constantly rated one of the worst in Apple Music and Spotify comparison. It has so much potential but it is just very poor done.
haven't used Spotify in any meaningful way in a few years now.
I use Youtube extensively for discovering new music and new artists. Sometimes (1 out of 100 times) I find myself on Soundcloud for a song that's not on Youtube, but for the rest Youtube is just perfect. I always wondered how many people use Youtube for music streaming... apparently a lot.
So, while Spotify can't get the rights (or the data) for that band that played down the pub one time in 1987, someone happened to record them and put them on YouTube and now they have royalties sat accruing somewhere and I get to listen to them on a nostalgia binge.
In the 90s we had Seinfeld, X-Files, King Of Queens, Frasier, Star Trek TNG, Macguyver and so on.
Then onto 1990s movies, which by the time they reached TV syndication were still good! Will I watch Lethal Weapon or Die Hard even though I've seen it before? Heck yes!
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Use of developer or inspection toolsYT has solid channels, from DIY to black hole talks and most importantly, uncensored news.
TV is just ADs and more ADs, garbage content after garbage content. Not everything is pretty tho, YT has a complete monopoly and there is nothing anybody can do about it, the alternatives suck with some silly subscription when there is no even content.
I do pay for Youtube Premium since Youtube Music is hands down better than Spotify. I would pay for alternative services to help them out IF they were worth it. YT Premium is the only subscription I pay and happy to do so, I see value.
I get the feeling that if many users start using Premium, at some point they'll see ads again.
Being a monopoly gives them that kind of power, but they haven’t gone overboard—probably because they know regulators would start poking around if they did.
It would be one thing if the ads weren't incredibly annoying by themselves, the content is either really, really weird, seemingly AI generated, or annoying, or some combination of all of those. I cannot imagine who they are for.
I would like evidence of this because I hear constantly how certain topics are persona non grata on YT, and will be pulled or shadowbanned to page 1001 of results.
Worse still, the best replacement I could find... Was Apple TV. So now I'm on that ecosystem.
Perhaps it's not "app weight" but more specific to the 4k video or SoC implementation?
I wish there were better ways to monetize it.
Likewise, despite their inaccuracy, movies like The Imitation Game or A Beautiful Mind led me to look at the life of Alan Turing beyond just what I learned in college.
Consuming content is very much a time-blocked thing for me. I have some YouTube content I consume to stay up with various AI/ML groups, etc. but that is closer to work-related and not something I will put on during a break from work as that will defeat the purpose of recharging my brain.
It's also interesting to see how movies or shows capture small details that change over time.
Good point. I hardly see any movies anymore and lately I found that what I miss is a good story. Some Youtube channels come close, but these are all 'garden variety' stories, so to speak.
The YT algorithm will often promote to you more that's similar to whatever you've already watched, so if you actually start seeking out a certain type of quality content, you'll find more of it being recommended. I carefully pick the things I take the time to view or play in the background while im working on household chores and so far haven't had any shortage of genuinely great things to enjoy.
YT has its many flaws, but one of them certainly isn't a shortage of quality vidoes about nearly anything you could want to know about.
One major problem I have with YT is that there is no concept of a "time budget" by the creators themselves. They are heavily incentivized to produce a lot of content. In the same way we see market distortions in the gaming space, where whales overshadow the general audience of the game, we basically see that in YT with how time budgeting works.
Most creators will succumb to this eventually and start making content longer and less respectful of your time.
Contrast that with a movie or TV show that has an actual time budget.
In the same way that SponsorBlock has really cut down on the time we watch YT content by skipping the intros, sub reminders, etc. I feel like a lot of YT content that is 25 minutes could be realistically condensed down into 3 minutes if a person wasn't just trying to fill time to pay their bills.
Not sure what kind of content you're watching or seeking, or your particular attention span, but I specifically appreciate the channels and videos in which they take their time to give me a meaty, detail rich video on something interesting, and if covering it all takes 25 minutes to an hour, all the better as long as they're delivering quality information (which most do). This is how informational documentaries should be, instead of being presented as moronic, information-barren shorts and reels.
I don't deny that what you describe happens, but among good content creators it's rare.
I wouldn't want a video that "optimizes" a complex subject down to 3 shitty minutes. Finding out new things shouldn't be condensed into nuance-destroying tiktok reels that reinforce an inability to pay attention for much longer than it takes to have a piss.
I'm less caring about which services are watched or games are played. But intentionality is key. The decision is made before the action is started as to what the point of the time is.
Don't get me wrong, "looking to zone out for 30mins due to a tiring day" is as valid as anything else - I'm not some kind of "always be hustling" guy.
But just turning something on mindlessly is not allowed.
TV costs money
Youtube is free... and i can block the ads
They could fix the bot problems, they could bring back dislikes, they should show downvotes on comments, comment history in profiles and an inbox for replies, search is broken, shorts is terrible, etc etc....