[o10449366]

I used Instagram as an example because I think Facebook has done a lot more with it than, say, Google has with their YouTube acquisition. YT has been largely stagnant in the face of competition from Twitch, Netflix, Spotify, etc. and I see fewer and fewer content creators using it, whereas Instagram continues to grow.

[michaelt]

You could argue that youtube's rate of innovation is low. But when it was launched it was Flash-based sub-10-minute low-resolution prerecorded videos that paid creators nothing, and so on.

Now it supports long videos, 4k, streaming, html5¹, pays content creators enough there are a bunch of them doing it full time², has an ad-free premium option, it isn't at war with music labels, and it hasn't been bankrupted by bandwidth costs.

Seems a fairly good track record to me.

¹ Arguably Youtube was one of the big forces getting decently working video out of flash and into browsers. Along with Apple refusing to ship Flash on iOS, that is!

² Admittedly at the whim of fickle algorithms, so not the best financial security there