YouTube is a mysterious monopoly
anderegg.ca
anderegg.ca
Before you get into cdns, bandwidth, advertisers, and social features, you need to have content - and a steady flow of content. What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.
Any new competitor eventually runs into the fact that
* Your largest users eventually stop posting if you don't pay them (because they can go elsewhere after using your platform as a springboard: see Vine)
* In order to actually pay creators you need to have the capital, legal, and advertising side completely figured out.
So on top of building a giant cdn, you need gobs of money to pay people to stay on your platform, and another gob of money because you will be sued to death (especially because once you start paying people, people will cheat, and pirate content).
All this means is YouTube has an incredible moat. If YouTube dies, I doubt there will ever be a replacement.
It’s a bummer that nobody there seems to realize this. They only see a very dumb metric. Probably something like "did this German dude watch at least one Spanish videos, because we auto-translate titles and voice". It feels disrespectful.
I'm terribly annoyed by this, and even more so with their latest push to translate the titles, so now you have to click and listen in on the video in order to know which the original language is.
I speak 3 languages, and I want the title and voice to be in the original language. And I won't bother nor would settle with watching an AI translated video even if it is translated from a language which I do not understand. Then I simply do not want to see that video.
Considering I'm using it with an account that is about 20 years old now, that gave Google all of the permissions in the world and has all the possible data one might need to make the conclusions on which language I prefer, it is absolutely absurd that it cannot make a solid guess.
Go into your Google account settings, under General, then add any languages that you watch YouTube videos in. I did this for Spanish and all my Spanish videos stopped getting dubs and translated titles.
The excuse is "most people want it so we force it", hooray for the dictatorship of the masses (by assumption, I've seen no research papers on the matter published by any platform).
Watching quite some youtube content, and more than willing to pay any content provider for a worthy dose of content... I refuse to hand youtube any money and will happily play the adblocker cat and mouse and use clunky scripts to remove shorts. Starting to archive the most interesting channels myself. Thanks yt-dlp.
Add on top of that googles persistent (14 years and counting) inability to decide which of the three countries I've lived in they attribute my account to (sometimes it still opens maps centered on Stockholm 12 years after I left) and I understand why I watch way less video these days...
They still do. The vast majority of YT content is not monetized by creators, often not even eligible for it in the first place. Further, some big-ticket content creators hedge their bets, uploading to backup platforms, trying to shift to Patreon, etc.
The main thing is that viewers only ever go to YouTube, a learned habit. This is where they listen to music, where they get their news, where the algorithm suggests them related videos, where they can search for tutorials and reviews for gear, etc.
But TikTok shows that you can disrupt that simply by offering a video format that is different in some way and thus not gated by the same muscle memory.
1. TikTok exists today, and the author still feels like YouTube is a monopoly. If TikTok was actually a viable alternative to YouTube, this article wouldn't exist.
2. Futhermore, TikTok is not a substitute for YouTube, especially for the kinds of content that the author is watching. People don't treat TikTok as a video library - how many TikTok videos are posted straight to HN? TikTok does not have the same diversity of content as YouTube.
3. TikTok addressed point (2) of my post - ByteDance launched in the US with the acquisition of Musically, and even then still had to pay for content. The creator fund, and now also the TikTok shop is a huge part of TikTok's content strategy.
>The vast majority of YT content is not monetized by creators, often not even eligible for it in the first place.
This is a social quirk, not something that a newcomer can replicate. The problem is, for a new platform, your best content creators will quickly defect to other more monetizable platforms once they get the eyeballs. This is what happened to Vine. If you want to have a sustainable platform you have to keep your creators. YouTube doesn't have the existential threat of the next PewDiePie defecting off the platform. TikTok paid AlixEarle millions to ensure they didn't lose her.
They go to Spotify and Apple Music to listen to music, they turn on cable TV or go to a website to get their news, they get the Netflix algorithm to suggest them related videos. Etc.
They tried to put longer videos but it didn't take off. Also search sucks so I can't got a search for a tutorial.
But niches within YouTube can be disrupted. We've seen it with short form (TikTok etc), music (Spotify etc). We see it with specific niches of content creators (nebula etc). It's happened with livestreams.
I'm bad at predicting future, but could imagine niches like "publicly funded content" from e.g. EU public broadcasters moving away (e.g. NPOstart in NL) because of privacy issues or because they legally can't monetize their content anyway. Maybe university lectures? Or sports video? Game reviews by a specialized platform by steam? Video between 4 and 10 minutes? Podcast videos?
So YouTube as a whole will stay, but it can be chipped away at. Some chips may prove in themselves a small, but still good business model.
/. Used to be the goto tech forum, but now we are all at hn. Digg was the place to be, now its reddit. Audiences can shift surprisingly suddenly.
TikTok, SnapChat and instagram has all had huge success in their short form formats.
It’s not unheard of, that even millennial couples, will spend and evening together in bed scrolling TikTok instead of watching tv together.
While the battle is far from over, had YouTube not reacted, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these mobile first competitors would have started experimenting with long form content by now.
We're doomed
The even harder problem is just answering the basic question of why the viewer side should care, and why they should change their deeply-ingraned habit of going to YouTube to find something to watch. "YouTube isn't fair and transparent to creators" is not going to be compelling to very many people, if the experience of the likes of Tidal competing with Spotify is any indication. YouTube is valuable to creators because it aggregates a huge audience of viewers, those viewers stick around because it's addictive and there is a content flywheel already.
But if you actually had a truly good answer for why the average person should switch their YouTube habit to watching some other site instead, the resulting payoff is huge enough (and there's enough crazy risk-hungry investors in the world) that the capital and the moat problems could theoretically be overcome.
Disrupting YouTube is difficult because the rampant piracy isn't as easy to pull off anymore.
What if I told you it did?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Original_Channel_Initi...
https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/investing-in-future-of-...
Look up the story of Vid.me
It exploded in popularity around 2015-17. Many youtube creators moved to it.
Then they went bankrupt because no one wanted to pay a subscription, and no one wanted to view ads.
Internet users desperately need to look in the mirror to figure out why so many services have strangleholds and why so many services plain suck for users - the users aren't paying for anything in any form, and they celebrate that fact.
I almost stopped watching YT. In the few instances I watch I will for a8 minutes or so and at the first ad I am leaving. I am wondering if behavior like this explains the drop in views, but the fact that revenue stayed the same....
Youtube has no competition because it's a winner-takes-all market, and they won.
Creators go where viewers are. Viewers go where creators are. Rinse and repeat, and sooner or later you end up with a monopoly.
I don't think that's as big as a problem as you do, as long as you don't care about exclusivity.
Think of the streaming music market: Youtube Music, Spotify, Tidal, Amazon Music, ect, generally have mostly the same content and little exclusivity.
For example, you could have a feature where all uploaded videos are automatically uploaded to YouTube and all of your competitors.
It also helped that tons of copyrighted content was uploaded and the policing and take down was originally pretty lax.
This has been a huge thing in car YouTube, a drag race that’s over in 11 seconds stretched out to a 19 minute video. Realistically 5-7 minutes would’ve been heaps of time.
Shorts have been shown to cause more issues in the brain than not.
Long slows the brain down to actually be able to sit with an idea.
For example - background playing, less commercials, less distractions etc.
For a company, it's impossible. For any country except for the US, it's very easy: you use any of the million different protectionist measures available. Such as tarriffs, as the US itself has taken a liking to - in this case it would be their digital equivalent, namely digital service taxes.
How does it work in the Internet itself? By decentralization, i.e., different servers serve their own small part. The same can work with the videos: see PeerTube.
I am sure if YouTube somehow died overnight, TikTok or some other player would work very quickly to get the alternative out there.
Meta, Bytedance, Snap, and even X could fill the void relatively easily. a few new views focussing specifically on video, and video focussed apps that don't require a login for all the platforms.
I think the Zero Interest Rate era made a lot of business like this.
I can think about YouTube, Uber, several food delivery apps, Fintechs, and so on.
A competitor needs a good legal department willing to take up that fight.
That simply means that the alternative to YouTube will look nothing like YouTube.
Independent competitive companies are great, but things tend to devolve into de-facto mini-governments once things stabilize, and from there I think the (real) government using its power to force a little more competition could really improve things.
Long form YT is a gold mine of
- documentaries (hobbyist and professional)
- informative content (literally any hobby you can imagine from gardening to warhammer to free diving)
- educational content, similar to above but world class institutions hosting their lectures for free
- musical content, live performances ranging from tiny amateur bands to top names and performances of now dead artists
- sports events, the entire 6 hour+ Wimbledon 08 final is there
I can go on but for a while now I have seen YouTube as the Video Internet (where web 1.0 was the Document Internet).
Now, the other platforms certainly have added shorts.
There is quite literally a conspiracy to suppress alternatives to YouTube because they do not align with the ideological parameters of the pernicious system. If you let that boot up from humanity’s neck, there would be many competitors to YouTube that would immediately atrophy YouTube. You seem to simply not be aware of what is going on outside of the authorized narrative. You will never be able to see the reality of things if you limit yourself to only the confines of the illusion matrix created for you by the system.
But yes, YouTube has a moat and like all moats it is built and maintained by the tyrannical monarch who believes himself to be chosen by God, but must hide away behind it from reality.
Let me go into wild eyed futurist speculative mode here,
1- AI/LLMs are basically a response to the enshittification of Google. The reason this tech is so good and useful is because for years Google rewarded SEO optimized content a.k.a. long winded articles that repeat the same words over and over again and take ten years to make a point, which after training on all that gunk, your LLM can now do in one paragraph. The Google search monopoly gave rise to this lengthy word salad web content and blanketed the earth with it. The AI summarizer arose as a natural response. The web as we know it may now die.
2- The software industry seems to gravitate toward a layer cake of monopolies. E.g. we have Microsoft monopolize the OS and app platform, it becomes so awful the government even tries to put the brakes on it, partially succeeds, then we get the Web application platform. Sitting in a browser on top of Windows and others. Which Google goes on to monopolize. One may suppose that another platform will be built on top of this, which will be unmonopolized for a few years, and then someone will monopolize and enshittify that too, paving the way for the next cycle. It's turtles all the way down.
3- How this pertains to YouTube, well in the near future I suppose someone could ingest all of YouTube, and create AI versions of it, exactly like what was done with the web. And they might even get away with it once we set a bunch of legal precedents that this is not a thing you can get sued for. Presumably the AI platform would need to be different or better in some way, so perhaps we'll see a video platform where all the content is generated on the fly by AI, and you can get exactly what you want because it was trained on the videos that humans made. E.g. you can simply tell the AI you want to watch a comedy show called Three and a Half Horses where all the characters are reverse centaurs, and it will spin up as many episodes as you want until you get bored. And YouTube will continue to be an aging monopoly for decades, like Windows, but no one will really care because we'll be watching horses deliver Seinfeld quality jokes [1]
[1] It's not horses and it's not as good as Seinfeld, but someone's already doing this. So all that remains for my prognostication to come true is for a financial crisis to happen, at which point the government can use it as an excuse to print a random $500B and give it to a politically connected billionaire intermediary who will invest a fraction of it into the engineering, and history will continue to march forward as it does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever
This way there is real competition on what matters, the user experience and still a economy of scale on what costs a lot which is actually storing and delivering videos.
Some frontend would be free with ads, some with a paywall but without ads. Some low quality, some high quality, some both. The user would have a choice. Each creator would be free to choose its licensing model. The hosting company would then only provide the video to frontends following the creator's wish.
The creator would pay by the bytes stored and the frontend by the bytes transferred. No incentive for the hosting provider to favor either of them.
Not perfect as the hosting company is still a monopoly, but it could be regulated to be neutral and behave like a utility.
The frontend has to cater to users and nobody else. They have competition and disappear if they enshittify.
Creators are free from the tyranny of google. They become the clients of the hosting company which makes steady money whatever the content.
Everybody wins, except google, which is fine by me.
Youtube will be disrupted by AI created, better content.
Who builds AITube? AITok?
Which to be clear isn't a contradiction to your comment at all. It'll take work and time though, at minimum.
This wasn't coordinated between Jeff Geerling and myself. However, I did mention the post in the Bluesky thread that Jeff was included in. [0]
I concluded the piece with “[t]his space is ripe for disruption”. That was a really poor choice of words. I've since updated the piece to better match what I was trying to say. Diffs are available. [1]
On YouTube: as I mention in the piece, I think the service is excellent as a consumer, and I pay for Premium.
This piece was mostly written because I've been frustrated that YouTube is effectively the only place for user submitted video on the internet. I wasn't going to write anything until I saw the video from RedLetterMedia that I mentioned in the post. They have a huge following and were blaming something that might be related? Or might not? It's really hard to tell! I'm not a YouTube creator, but I assume having metrics that determine your livelihood shift out from under you as a creator must feel awful.
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/gavin.anderegg.ca/post/3lyeayuckv22...
[1] https://github.com/gavinanderegg/gavinanderegg.github.io/com...
Why? Because the tools that allow them to take almost 50% of the revenue (they say you earn) have low friction?
I would say the opposite. There is no customer service. There are endless legal pit traps that allow larger channels and companies to predate on smaller ones alongside the AI channels, which lead to the same end. The entire point of the platform is to push as much advertising as possible, while mutating a user's search habits. Ironically, this leads to videos becoming borderline useless for many use cases, without taking them off youtube. This is not a good platform.
I'm sure I feel this way because I don't have a bunch of content I'm afraid of being yanked from the platform. Another "benefit" of having a big youtube presence, is I would be forever worried about implied retaliation.
Something is going on.
It looks like Youtube might be measuring views differently and perhaps getting rid of unmonetizable views which doesn't impact the number of likes or revenue. I think the annoyance is over the lack of transparency and the power Youtube holds over content creators rather than any immediate concern over loss of income etc.
https://help.vimeo.com/hc/en-us/articles/30298226209169-Chan...
Vimeo does have monetization tools [1] but they’re focused on direct sales.
YouTube is just way ahead… even if you ignore the ads platform, a YouTube premium subscription gives you WAY more ad free content than a Vimeo purchase or Floatplane/Nebula subscription.
I realized this back in 2009 and tried really hard to start using other platforms, but wound up just not watching YouTube as often instead. I hope this changes. The only true competitors are places like TikTok and Instagram, but they don't feel like a true replacement to the rest of us who don't want to be tied to "social media" but YouTube shorts are evidence that it does compete with YouTube directly.
I think YouTube even tried to have "IG Stories" at one point iirc.
One of the things that is notable about Youtube is there was once competition (Vimeo and Daily Motion) but they effectively outdistanced it. A bit like Amazon and Ebay. There are related things semi-competing like Twitch.TV etc, also, of course.
I suspect that the situation with the earlier video providers is that they were "bleeding cash" for many years until the process finally reversed - if they were the winner (again like Amazon).
I think this long capital investment process is what means that no one wants to or expects to step into the ring with a large, successful player. It took that player a long time to learn to be successful, that player will fight you to keep their relative monopoly and you will have to risk a lot of money.
Youtube content creators are effectively Youtube's suppliers. Youtube is squeezing and its "normal" - squeezing suppliers is part of the monopolist's playbook. Its unfortunately convenient for Youtube that people have been willing to make good quality video for nearly nothing since the tools to do so became cheaply available.
Why there is "no competition" for Nvidia, Amazon, Youtube, etc. Not that I like the situation but it's not an "unnatural" situation.
The second isn't viable in most real world cases until something changes the huge expense of decentralized CDN fetching. My gut says that the third would be on the losing side of almost every network effect.
Well, technically there's lots of user submitted videos posted to p*rn sites... Apparently even started posting educational videos there, like math and neural networks and stuff.
And don't tell me it will never happen, I'm old enough to have heard that a few times already.
ArchiveTeam generally is an interesting project I highly recommend people read about.
Their YouTube project can be seen here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/YouTube
And you can learn how to get involved (by running a virtual machine appliance) here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
Someone below brought up a very good point about many of these videos being much longer than they need to be (mainly for reimbursement and ad reasons). If the transcripted content can be archived, it could also be abridged and/or summarized as well as being combined with other similar video content as well.
I'm sort of thinking as I go here now, but I would think that perhaps Youtube has an API that lets you access the closed captions of videos?
I save everything with replay value now, especially music.
If music, video or writing is something you want to see again, download a copy to own it yourself. Trusting a for-profit streaming company is simply idiotic.
HD space is cheap these days, so no excuses.
It's the really niche stuff that few if anyone would notice or care enough to talk about that would be properly lost. And if it's niche but there's a lot of care from the few, then that's one way that archivists are made.
Either we go up and eliminate the oil dependence but acceleration eats YouTube in a transformative way, or we go up and eliminate the oil dependence but societal fission eats YouTube in a catabolic way.
IMO it might be just a product problem. I opened nebula and:
* The same video had a better title on YT that was actually less clickbaity and more informative - assumedly because of YT algorithm for optimization
* Nebula auto set quality to 480p compared to 1080p in YT - if I wasn't tech-savvy I'd assume it's just worse quality.
* The loading times when you seek to part that's not loaded yet are 10x longer
* I missed comments
The recommendation algorithm is weaker too, I can't tell to what extent this is due to YouTube having simply more data and to what extent it's weaker engineering.
Why would you particularly care about the title is that's a videomaker you follow anyway? Why would you care about seeking times? Are you jumping constantly in an ad-free and sponsor-free video you specifically subscribed for? Why miss the comments? Is it a video sharing platform or social media?
Because Nebula has a lot of complex content. Things like history, science, making stuff.
And those things have a lot of room for things like the maker messing something up, or struggling with something, or not explaining something properly.
On Youtube if somebody makes an obvious mistake, or is obviously incompetent to an expert, somebody will point it out. If a hobbyist doesn't quite have the skills to do a thing sometimes an expert will show up and help them. If an educative video doesn't include crucial details, somebody will ask.
Like look at say, Inheritance Machining or Alec Steele on Youtube, who take on challenging projects they struggle with and often get advice from expert viewers.
It's weird not to have this on Nebula. On one hand it seems to sell itself as "smart content", on the other hand it's a return to the old TV model of "shut up and consume".
Because you don't necessarily enjoy everything they produce?
That's a low bar to be honest, because google's recommendation algorithm is absolutely atrocious.
- Like
- Subscribe
- Dislike
If you have to lose a lot of money for a long time to compete, how is it ripe for disruption?
YouTube works because it has eyeballs, content/creators, advertisers, a cdn, and has made enough piece with large copyright license holders that it's allowed to continue.
Competing with YouTube is certainly possible, and there's a lot of fun technical work, but there's also a big challenge to attract the people you need to make the thing work. You probably already need to already have two out of four of users, content, advertisers, cdn. And you need to get licenseholders on board quick. And probably law enforcement as well.
I'm not saying it is or isn't a monopoly, but it would be hard to compete with. I think monopoly would depend on the defined market... a broadly defined market might include netflix and even cable tv. A narrowly defined market would include durably published user uploads, which has a lot fewer entrants.
In what way?
Youtube is not social media. Nobody makes new friends whilst on YT. However, broadcast TV in the olden days before satellite TV and video recorders provided a shared conversation for the whole nation. You could spark up a conversation by asking a friend if they saw something on the TV during the previous evening. Nowadays people say DON'T TELL ME, I HAVEN'T WATCHED IT YET with no further conversation possible without changing topic.
A video platform could build community by letting people know if their friends and family have enjoyed watching the same programmes. Also possible is a mechanism whereby you can have a schedule made just for you. I have two YT faves, one which is fun (parasocial relationship) and another which is intellectual. If it is early in the evening and I am possibly relaxing with food then I will want the former, not the latter. On a daily basis I could have what we had in the olden days, light entertainment in the early evening and stuff that requires some brain cells later.
Revenue is always interesting and the state broadcasters in the English speaking world might as well pool resources and supply content people enjoy as soft propaganda on a free basis with no adverts. If the CDNs are in place with everything cached with a little bit of P2P, the cost model for delivery could be improved on.
The answer is "no", which is why YT is so amazing
I pay $5cad/mo to get ad free access to the CBC catalog. I would gladly pay the same or even double for the BBC catalog or iPlayer (whatever its called).
> Youtube is not social media.
But it is (as you point out) parasocial media.
It is, but it's hard to gain the same audience share for all the reasons you mention.
Just ask Dailymotion, Vimeo, Twitch, Odysee, Peertube, Rumble, Kick, BitChute...
And don't say Youtube was first, Dailymotion is slightly older than Youtube.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't find such kind of work "fun". I would have a constant feeling of "well, we are simply trying to mimic what YT did, maybe we should just hire someone that worked there and do the same, instead of going through the same inevitable mistakes".
Handling massive amount of video ingestion from content creator; Transcoding to various format that is optimal for various devices, Live streaming with Live to VOD, Geo restriction, Live Commenting, Ad insertion and penalise adblocker, Recommendation engine.
There are many features and challenges that are unique to OTT streaming applications and running at YouTube scales makes it even more challanging, or fun to some, to handle.
how can you expect company that has less resource make an alternative ???? I still remember when microsoft throwing money to make mixer (twitch alternative) and yet it failed miserably
tiktok is close as we can get honestly, but youtube also expand toward shorts
Take Kick for example, made to compete against Youtube and Twitch, but ended up with mostly people who are banned by those 2 platforms for a good reason. "Kick streamers" is now a negative words.
So new players on this field has to be specific about curating the people posting on their platforms.
Its a bit more mysterious now a days though. Video compression got way better (albeit video quality also went way up), hard drives got way cheaper. Bandwidth is really cheap at scale. People are way better selling ads now then they used to be. A lot of video serving infrastructure got standardized.
Don't get me wrong, its still hard and expensive, but i don't feel that is the moat it once was. Network effects is also a whole other conversation.
This is extremely false, where are you getting this information? Bandwidth is ludicrously expensive, no matter what your scale.
Why do you think Netflix gives ISPs server racks filled with the entire Netflix catalog, or Microsoft/Google/Meta spend billions on their own private submarine cables? Nobody would do that if bandwidth was cheap, but it isn't.
In the past 480p would be okay. Now everyone wants 4k.
In fact, in the past IMAGES were normal. Imgur was an image website. Now everything is about short videos. Even memes are now videos.
I'm pretty sure if we make Internet faster and storage cheaper, we'll also invent a new sort of media to waste that speed and storage.
There are significant network effects. Content creators use youtube because there are a lot of viewers watching content there, and viewers use it because there is lots of content there. Since YouTube already dominates the market, it is extremely difficult for another platform to compete, even if it was better in every way.
Google can promote YouTube using its other monopolies/oligopolies. Most notably, google search prioritizes videos on YouTube over other videos. Also, being able to pay for video ads and search ads with a single vendor is probably actractive for ad space buyers.
Google also already has its own CDN, which probably reduces the cost of distributing the content.
The YouTube algorithm is problematic in many ways but it does succeed in viewers being suggested videos they want to see, even if the signal-to-noise ratio is not very good. That's hard to replicate when starting a new service.
Then why isnt everyone jumping at the opportunity to make a competitor? If it is soooo easy, we should have competitors. Nobody is stopping you from launching margalabargalatube.com and win the market.
Nobody, including Jeff Geerling, has an exclusive deal with YouTube to distribute the videos. Make it happen!
It's very possible that it's only that profitable at Youtube-sized scale.
The videos I am being recommended are still about how natural McDonalds food is, how this natural supplement from XYZ is disrupting healthcare and how this coffee machine will revolutionize the way I make coffee.
If the recommendation algorithm would be a bit less corporate, I’d be a happy customer. That, plus Apple Watch standalone Youtube Music app.
Sometimes the answer really is: it is well managed product.
They take 45% of YouTube premium subscription revenue. That’s higher than the App Store (30%), Spotify (30%), and any other content marketplace on the internet.
I think they get a free pass for now because they allow creators to monetize with their own native ads within videos. If I had to guess, this may become a point of contention in the future…
If I open the Youtube app on my phone, I have to click through 3 menus before I can even see the newest video from the users I'm subscribed to, and then I have to watch 2 ads that change the entire layout of the app to present me more information about those ads - or I can pay $30 a month to skip those ads.
If I have spotty connectivity, I also can't buffer a video to watch anymore. I have to wait for some minimal percent to load, watch that part, then wait again. If I skip ahead, the earlier part is lost and has to be re-buffered.
Furthermore, not of immediate consequence to me, but still insufferably annoying is that creators I follow are regularly suspended from earning income on YouTube due to false copyright strikes, or saying a "bad word" that has no clear enforcement guidelines and seems to be different from person to person or day to day, and thus have begun to produce less content or found other platforms to move their videos to first.
It's pretty terrible, from my point of view. It's a bad service where a good service used to be, surviving on the dregs of goodwill and familiarity from its heyday.
Also, the amount of highjacked accounts and the length of time to regain control is absurdly long.
And Shorts. I wish I could disable Shorts from my feed.
If you see Youtubers getting kicked out constantly you might be subscribing to some weird stuff...
The YouTube management has to be adaptive enough to work in the small window that society allows at that time.
A website? ("platform" for advertising) A website's users? ("you are the product") Paid subscriptions? (insufficient revenue to sustain operations)
If YouTube is a "product" does that mean US products liability laws apply? (Please support your answer with facts not opinions)
History so far has shown website popularity varies over time
https://hosting.com/blog/the-most-visited-websites-every-yea...
Would anyone today claim that, for example, Yahoo.com was "extremely well managed"? Yahoo was #1 for many years. Change is inevitable
It is hilarious to see people obsessed with targeting virtually anything for "disruption" until their favorite website becomes the target
In any organisation there is always room for improvement. Monopoly power reduces, perhaps even eliminates, incentive to improve
My issues with YouTube are usually limited to some UI problems. I think I can even list them all:
1) Thumbnails autoplay but the disclaimer about paid content is so large that often I click to watch the video and get the paid content info page.
2) Translates stuff depending on my browser language and IP. Very annoying
3) The add to queue button sometimes doesn't work and just plays the video right away. Very annoying
4) When I'm listening to songs, sometimes I just let it auto play the next song it picks and often it picks 2 hours long video of songs sticked one after another. Very annoying
5) The share button adds som ID that I have to remove every time, it's probably to track my sharing behavior. Annoying
6) When chromecasting, tapping on a video or receiving it through airdrop used to give me an option to add it to the queue or play it right away. Now just plays right away. Annoying
7) If I navigate from a page and go back I'm presented with a different page and often the video I noticed previously isn't there.
Besides that, I think I don't have much issues with YT. Best money spent on a premium subscription ever.
you tube is close to perfect using third party clients, like PipePipe.
it automatically skips paid adverts in the video. not even a shadow of actual ads. background music only. etc.
but now they are adding those dumb features, such as translating titles, as if i'm a peasant who don't speak several languages. so lame.
I believe there are positive cases of karma when a person becomes moderator.
Either reducing the number of ads (they really have increased quite a lot) or give a bigger piece of the advert pie to creators.
The problem is that if youtube is ever threatened its trivial for them to do both those things, and they can almost certainly outlast any up and coming competitor in a price war.
It was a few days ago for the AI auto-filter and also Beato copyright claims.
Then there's the issue of AI slop channels, and pre-AI slop directed at children like the infamous Elsa and Spiderman spam.
Every so often they also are in the news for AB testing some anti-adblock measure. And people used to adblock who see it with ads for the first time in a while seem to always be shocked at the level of ads for pure fraud or malware.
YouTube seems to be a terrible place if you put anything up there that you actually care about. But I agree on one thing: it's not "ripe for disruption". Google sank so much losses into it for so many years just to have this monopoly, so it's not going to be easy to replace.
They have all the eyeballs. All creators that got fucked over YT stay on the platform if their accounts are restored. And who can blame them, where are they going to go, Vimeo?
The blog mentioned that the forced activation of Restricted Mode could have reduced video views, and while it's true that Restricted Mode blocks live streams, which could affect those who focus on live content, it basically doesn't block soft porn, violent videos, or political content. So, I don't think it's relevant.
On what joy? The biggest mistake that DoJ did was asking to court to divest Android & Chrome. Judge took grave offense at that (read the court's opinion) and there's a school of thought that said it distracted from the whole thing.
Once you start being imprecise, all your arguments fall apart.
I haven’t watched a video hosted on YouTube in years. But I hate amateur video. I never watch anything that I can possibly get through reading.
So in my tiny corner of user space, it’s really as if YouTube doesn’t exist except as an annoying thing Google puts at the top of searches I have to scroll past, reminding me to configure this device to use a different search engine.
While I do prefer to read as well I do like some of the better videos. Sometimes the information density is not as high as I would like - there are reasonable efforts.
Sure, there is amateur content. But there is a surprising amount of original researched content with a high production value.
A recent example with a scientific approach to cooking with some fun high quality references to Breaking Bad:
Yes - they want to (discretely) sell thermometers as well. Not all is good. But very far from amateur.
videos you just watched
videos you watched 10 years ago
auto dubbed videos on topics you are not interested
clickbait videos with 10 views
anything, but what you are used to watching
On my phone, the mobile site (m.youtube.com) has introduced Widevine a couple of weeks ago (last week of August IIRC). No idea if I’m just unlucky and part of a shitty A/B experiment, but I definitely had to recompile libc (being on Linux) with patches from Chromium and install Widevine so I could watch videos again.
Whenever I replace my patched libc with the unpatched original, then the Widevine plugin crashes everytime I try to play back a video on m.youtube.com. And it used to work before.
So, I stopped going there as much. They stopped respecting visitor intentions. Just like every other platform, they just want to keep you on the site for as long as possible sifting through a feed of dopamine slop.
Regardless I don’t think youtube is a monopoly.
A monopoly caries with it strict anti-competitive practices along with meddling in government affairs and great public harm. Just because something has market dominance does not make it a monopoly.
Facebook is a monopoly. Complete dominance of the entire social graph, aggressively buying competitors to silence them… direct government meddling not just in the us but abroad creating untold deaths and suffering in the process… to the point they rebrand themselves to skirt responsibility… thats a monopoly.
Live nation buying up entire cities worth of venues, artist managers, booking agents, artists themselves, ticketing, promotion companies, subsequently entire production staff, blacklisting anyone they dont like, meddling with politics, obfuscating their activities through subsidiaries, destroying entire communities and cultures in the process… thats a monopoly
Youtube could be a monopoly but I dont see them squashing their most successful creators from creating their own streaming services, I dont see them directly meddling with politics on a large scale (granted there was that time the algorithm would tend towards promoting fascism, but rather than keep that going or doubling down I see the opposite which implies active intent to the contrary), I dont see them aggressively purchasing competitors… I see them as ridiculously huge and I find their censorship annoying that if government was working I would think should be examined from a public responsibility stance but I dont see them engaged in monopolistic practices… in fact I see them actively avoiding most activities that would make them a monopoly that is of course other than being really really huge.
Isn't that the definition of a monopoly though? Just because something is a monopoly, that doesn't mean it necessarily has anti-competitive practices or meddles in government. (though that usually follows)
For what it's worth I agree that YouTube isn't abusing their market position, but it's important the semantics are clear.
The Hypothetical Monopolist Test is a primary method used to define relevant markets in antitrust cases. It assesses whether a hypothetical monopolist could profitably impose a small but significant and non-transitory increase in price (SSNIP).
Steps in the Test Market Definition: Identify the relevant product and geographic market.
Price Increase Assessment: Determine if a hypothetical monopolist could raise prices without losing too many customers.
Iterative Process: If the price increase is profitable, the market is correctly defined. If not, the market definition is expanded to include substitutes.
To establish a monopolization claim, two main elements must be proven:
Possession of Monopoly Power: The firm must have significant and durable market power.
Willful Acquisition or Maintenance: The firm must have obtained or maintained this power through improper means, rather than through competition on the merits.
Volume isnt even your main issue here. YouTube ads are powered by adwords... that all advertisers already use. It comes with tracking and user-analytics built in.
You can't compete with YouTube by replicating this business model.
Even so.. direct YouTube ad revenue per view is low. Many successful tubers monetize with sponsors. That is replicable, if a (single) tuber has enough views.
I think there can be markets for smaller, paid video sites... but that's not really a competitor to YouTube. It's more like competition for substack.
The way YouTube is managed, including all the reasons for criticism, are why it is successful.
Legible rules have loopholes. Keeping advertisers "on their toes" with mystery rules is a strategy.
It makes sense to keep the platform as unoffensive as possible. Strict nudity rules, and other such "hard" rules. Demonetization gives yotube a chance to implement soft/illegible rules... many of them simply assumed or imagined. It also makes business sense to suppress politics a little. The chilling effect is intentional.. and understandable.
Honestly, I think the more open alternative to YouTube is podcasting. Podcasting has terrible discovery, and video is underdeveloped but... it also has persistence that proves it is a good platform.
Half of "the problem" with YouTube is Google running the platform and pursuing their own interests. These are somewhat restrictive, but they also make sense.
The other half is intense competition for daily attention. That's what a low friction, highly accessible platform does. You can't have everything.
Without all the restrictions and manipulations that YouTube do, the platforms would be 100% nudity, scandals and suchlike.
Ever seen a colorized video from 1900? It's like a time machine. Imagine looking at today's videos, 100-200 years from now..
Systems that enable multi-platform natively are the answer to change the calculus on this problem. End-user clients such as Grayjay that enable users to view videos from multiple platforms at once can give much-needed views to creators on alternate platforms. A similar solution for creators (not sure if one exists or not) would lower the barrier to upload to all platforms at once.
I feel instead of trying to force google to sell chrome, they should have forced them to spinoff YouTube and other non-search monopolies google has that are insanely profitable.
I dont think I follow the logic. Having a successful business is not grounds for "forcing" to spin out. Airpods are extremely successful, and does that mean it needs to be a separate company? MacBooks are extremely profitable, so should they be a different company? Azure is widely popular, should they be too?
For me, Premium's only value proposition is removing ads. Recommendations are still the same (quite shitty). Search is unusable (4 relevant results then unrelated recommendations). Shorts are pushed aggressively no matter how many times you hide them. Search in history will often not find even something you just watched a few days ago.
It's the same Youtube.
You're paying YouTube to stop annoying you, and they then decide what to do with that money, incidentally paying some creators.
If the bandwidth bankrupts them, then boo hoo. They take advantage of network effects so no one can go anywhere else.
Don't feed the bears. That's what I say
The creator is getting paid more from my Premium subscription, so I definitely do not want to see their own ads.
1) I watch youtube more than any streaming service
2) I really really value not having ads in my life
So the price for ad-free youtube really seems phenomenal. None of the other features really matter to me - ad free dominates all value discussions.
I would amend that to say "any *other streaming service". To me Youtube provides more and better content than the other streaming services, and I don't think people should balk at $14 for youtube when they happily pay that for netflix, disney+, hulu, or spotify.
I'm in vehement agreement with parent to be honest. "We'll stop spitting in your soup if you pay us extra" isn't a nice value proposition.
And you don’t have to log in.
While I agree YT without Ads is great, you also get YT music which is really good and for us it replaced Spotify completely.
Personally, though, I don't have a problem with search (maybe because I set a lot of channels as "do not recommend/show"). Shorts, however, they are really annoying.
Previously search was just search. It wasn't great, but it wasn't too bad.
Now it shows 5-7 results from actual search (often really bad results).
The next section is "People also watch" which quite often has very passing relevance to what you look for.
Then there are shorts.
Then there's "explore more" which may or may not be relevant to your search, and it has "+N more" underneath.
And then there's the rest of the search which, again, may or may not be relevant to your search at all.
---
I think it was slightly fixed recently, so the results are a bit more relevant, but it still is just ... weird
YouTube stays in the dominant position either way, it's not like tomorrow you'll go watch Nebula exclusively (you'd already have done it at this point). They're not providing anything materially, so the amount you pay is bound to nothing except how much you're willing to pay. And how much you're willing to pay depends on how much you're annoyed.
So YouTube's main incentive for this program is to annoy you as much as you can tolerate to optimize the most money you get extracted.
I come to youtube for the *creators*, the actual platform where I have watch history off and use extensions to block the aggressively pushed slop as it currently stands is not something I want to put money towards.
I'm already a patreon to a few creators and have a Nebula subscription; adding it up it's probably slightly more than a premium subscription.
I have been moving off Google for a while, and will continue doing so.
So: YouTube will cease to be a monopoly if 1) user needs change 2) it stops being the best at serving videos. Until then, it's not mysterious.
Even if a firm has a cool new gimmick to get through a successful launch, the incremental cost of hosting "free content" will pose a liability due to higher operational margins.
YT are not a true monopoly, but rather "free" content from a spam heavy competitor is a foolish business plan. =3
After some searching I found a few threads where others had encountered this and restricted mode was the only thing that seemed to stop these videos and honestly they're jarring and unwanted enough for me to warrant enabling restricted mode and all the features it disables - YouTube please please stop these unrelated 'jump scare' videos!
as an example I'm scrolling through videos on how to fix a leaky tap at 10pm I'll come across a thumbnail 5 videos down with a ghostly face or trypophobia type thumbnail then another 5-10 videos down. in no way are they highlighted as sponsored and I find it hard to believe that Google with it's search skills and other far more relevant videos in the results can be returning these videos as results!
I've heard about an online video website called Netflix. Don't know if anybody is using it though.
(maybe a tear-down of my washer is there too!)
"But there's more Subway restaurants than McDonalds restaurants"
"I can't get a burger at Subway, therefore McDonalds is a monopoly."
Making a post with this title without mentioning TikTok or Instagram is like making a post titled "Pepsi is a mysterious monopoly" without once mentioning Coke.
It's even worse sometimes, googling some "how to" queries returns links to yt-videos. Even if the video is 5 minutes, it's a waste of time, because I'm usually in the middle of an ongoing process when dozens variants are evaluated and an average dedicated time for a single one is much shorter.
Transcripts sometimes help. But not the native (no diarization as long as I remember). An example, Lex Fridman podcast is a good source of anecdata from famous science/tech/non-tech people and provides good transcripts on the site (but only starting some point in the past). For transcripts before this point v1.transcript.lol covered many, but amongst other glitches no names for diarization (Speaker 1/ Speaker 2).
e.g, Veritasium is a channel I quite like for their longer 'mini-documentary' like videos. And then there are just entertainment channels like Linus Tech Tips.
Not _everything_ has to be micro-optimized in my life, so I don't mind occasionally just sitting in the sofa watching a video that could have been a 3 minute blog :)
So they started discounting AI data collection bots?
Likes and comments by real humans can remain steady and bot views can vary dramatically. Likes and comments aren't metrics that produce revenue for creators.
Survival of the clickbaitiest.
And getting the technicals right won't be easy. Video delivery is not text. Will need dedicated datacenters if you ever get popular and want to keep prices under control. It's expensive.
Rumble and vimeo provide basically the same service, but if you got fed up with YouTube and wanted to take your money (eyeballs) elsewhere, you can't, because rumble and vimeo don't have the same content at all. And if you were a creator you can't take your content elsewhere because there's no viewers.
Solid content has solid fans. Solid fans follow the content creator, not the platform.
I just feel that Vimeo’s video quality is better, and it gives more direct control of the content.
But I do so little video work, that it hasn’t been worth it to maintain the subscription.
I have seen the argument: all my games in Steam, all my movies in Netflix, all my videos on YouTube, etc.
To have to pick and choose between different apps makes everything more complex, and it is too much for the average user that has other things to worry about.
All this is really bad for capitalism, as it creates monopolies that no competition can fight against. It concentrates power and eliminates competition.
E-mail is still alive because it is the one place that one can get registration messages, invoices, goverment communications, etc. It is based on a standard so I can use my own provider but interact with all the rest of the world without caring what do they use. This is the future of the web.
For example, I should be able to download any movie app an see all the movies from Sony Pictures and Disney, and Ghibli, and all of them. Once purchased, I should be able to see all of them in the same app. The standard offers interfaces so I can choose one provider that connects to the world. Prices are the same on all apps, but they can differentiate themselves thru localization, recommendations, etc. This is feasible but it requires strong regulatory intervention as current monopolies are the best option to maximize profit and eliminate competition.
Ads are also perfectly fine to finance on-line videos. It is the tracking and invasive privacy practices what is dystopian and horrifying. Most of the revenue of YouTubers comes anyway by paying users (Patreon, etc.) or external traditional ads (NordVPN, SkillShare, etc.) that still ask for metrics for the channel but are not individually targeted.
Standards over platforms is the only possible future, but it will require to topple down the current status quo and that is what is difficult to do.
Hijack data-centers with Gorillas. re-claim the community ...
Then again, their search engine is also subpar nowadays.. :)
This sentence is just oddly thrown in there and is made the title of the article. Yes they're a monopoly, but so what? As you say they're the best bang for buck subscription service on the market.
The problem is that they are unable to see why their viewership has dropped, that's it. I'm sure Youtube might provide context as to why at some point.
Nobody wants to hear ad-blocking has negative effects. But it does, and it's effectively killed off any YouTube competitor.
All a VC has to do is read a comment section on the topic of yt to say "nope" to funding a competitor.
Huh? RLM is about as inoffensive as it gets
Words are best when they have meaning!
They're something like 75% of video hosting, and if you exclude vimeo for being paid-only then it's over 90%. That sounds like a monopoly to me.
Youtube began as a video hosting platform where creators got a huge cut from ads being shown on their video page. Today, the ads are injected into the videos and creators get only a tiny portion of the profits - if any. The views are gone as only (highly)monetised content is being promoted by the algorithm. Google simply prioritises making money for themselves instead of providing a service that merely breaks even.
Youtube has done what most businesses do - they pay the initial opex costs and provide some kind of freemium, they get huge number of users, then they monetise the sh.. out of them. And it always ends the same - the platform dies as users leave. Youtube is not any different. It's just so big that this process takes much longer than usual. But do not be fooled, it is happening.
Nowadays, people are slowly realising that there is no more free lunch and that you have to pay for the content(see how many streaming services there are compared to just a few years ago). This is why paywall services like Patreon are so popular(and why I have created my own as well as it is one of few viable online businesses left in the digital space).
Content creators who are relying on anonymous views, that Youtube always provided and which is now slowly dying, will end up out of business and many in debt due to costs of the video gear they bought and oversaturated marked/competition. There is plethora of this "i'm broke" videos on YT itself exposing the harsh reality of digital content creation of today.
On the other hand, smart content creators have realised that the way forward is to build smaller community of reliable fans and use paywalls/pay-per-view model, where they can charge tiny amount whilst getting 95% of it for themselves, which incentivises users to pay(ie. i am willing to pay 10 cents directly to my favourite content creator rather than 5$ to youtube). Some are stuck in the middle with injecting sponsored content into their own, but that will die out soon as well and likely YT will ban it straight up sooner or later. There will be some networks that host multiple creators, like we already have with unauthorized.tv, censored.tv and others. The YT alternatives like Odysee or Rumble will not survive as they are using the same outdated business model as Youtube does but they lack the backing of Google(not just money but infrastructure).
It will take time but people will eventually flock to specific content creators instead of relying on algorithms to recommended them content they might be interested in - as this has been completely broken for a decade now and caused huge amount of great content creators to just quit for good. A huge loss to humanity as a whole.
This will be the next generation of content creators whom will understand that the game has changed.