[maceurt]

It would be cool if anybody else could make a real competitor to youtube then Google would have to actually cater more to content creators. However, sadly I think youtube is just too far ahead and google has way to many resources and time spent in the space for any competitor to even be able to make a dent into youtube's market.

[donmcronald]

I don't think Google is too far ahead. You don't have to compete with all of YouTube.

I think LTT has the right idea with FloatPlane. If you can siphon off premium users that are willing to pay for premium channels you're getting the most valuable part of the system anyway (premium content and paying users).

IMHO anyone starting or running a video content business should be viewing YouTube as a great way to externalize costs while starting up and as a way to generate some revenue off users that aren't willing to pay once you're established. The goal from day 1 should be to build a following and then to move all your premium users to another platform.

[chii]

> valuable part of the system anyway (premium content and paying users).

doubt. The most valuable part of the system is the large audience. Youtube's advertising dollars is vastly bigger than any of the premium content from other places. Unless the new premium platform is also powered by advertising and tracking, and selling of demographic data about the audience for targeted ad campaigns. There's very little that can currently compete with short-form video content for the masses.

[Mindwipe]

Microsoft tried to siphon off the gamers with Mixer. Paid significant amounts of talent, built a reasonably good technical platform, leveraged Xbox, and gamers and game livestreaming are definitely one of the most profitable parts of YouTube for Google.

It didn't succeed.

If you're a large established video provider it works, but most people aren't film studios.

[Razengan]

YouTube is one of the reasons I will probably always dislike Google for.

They bought an existing service, made few improvements to it, made it worse in some ways, continue to ignore its major problems, and keep it artificially limited on their competitors' platforms (like not supporting the native Picture-in-Picture feature on iPad for years.)

Worst of all, because they are So Big, people are preemptively disheartened from even imagining a competitor.

[michaelt]

> made very few improvements to it,

Before the acquisition Youtube were getting their ass kicked about all the copyright violation on the site, they were losing money, they had no ad revenue sharing with video creators, they only supported low-resolution video, and only in an Adobe Flash player.

All of which changed after the acquisition.

I would agree, of course, that there's plenty wrong with Youtube these days, and the pace of innovation has dropped a lot.

[simcop2387]

> ... only in an Adobe Flash player

To be fair with this one, this was the only reasonable way to do video in a browser for a stupidly long time.

[Mirioron]

>they had no ad revenue sharing with video creators

This is the one point that makes YouTube so difficult to shake. The money is attractive to creators and YouTube offers the most money with the largest audience. YouTube themselves actually gets 45% of the revenue, while the creator gets 55%.

[dannyw]

70/30 sharing on the ad platform side is common. Take away that, and you have YouTube taking another 21% for hosting, engagement, and tooling.

It’s actually really cheap if you’re thinking about it.

[chii]

vimeo has a $55/month cost for 5T of videos. Most youtube channels that are businesses make way more than $55 per month, and youtube keeps way more than $55 of their ad revenue.

I dont think the major reason creators choose youtube because it's "cheap" - it aint. It's the only game in town where there's sufficient advertiser demand to pay out money. And youtube knows this, and thus, can charge the 45% split. The "free" aspect is also keeping out new competitors - the business moat is huge. There's a reason why microsoft or amazon isn't getting in the game.

[MaxBarraclough]

Advertiser demand may be part of it, but there's also discoverability.

Turning up around YouTube must be extremely valuable. If your content is only on Vimeo, your odds of being chosen by the mighty YouTube algorithm are 0%.

> microsoft or amazon isn't getting in the game

You're right really, and it's not really the same thing, but they do both offer free file-storage services capable of streaming video to the browser.

[d1zzy]

> They bought an existing service, made very few improvements to it

Huh? AFAIK the Youtube Google bought wasn't profitable and it had much fewer viewers and content creators. It even lacked transcode options! Other than the basic functionality it provided (you could upload clips for free, you could watch other people's clips for free) it isn't comparable to today's Youtube.

[theelous3]

Given the many years all of that took, I don't think it's reasonable to compare what exists now with what it was when it was bought.

It's perfectly reasonable to hypothesize that it would have been as good or better feature wise.

Also, saying it didn't have a big userbase? Compared to what? It was easily as much of a giant relative to the competition then, as currently youtube is to its competition.

[wolco]

Youtube had a lot of users but dailymotion, myspace and google video had a fairshare of marketshare. Now youtube is so much bigger than facebook, dailymotion, vimeo in terms of videos.

Google has introduced many great features that would not be possible without google or google ai. Muting songs but not background sounds is a cool new feature. Identifying and categorizing videos and presenting similiar videos is better than anywhere else.

For years youtube couldn't make money. Without google figuring this piece out a site like this would still be too expensive.

[Mindwipe]

> They bought an existing service, made few improvements to it, made it worse in some ways, continue to ignore its major problems, and keep it artificially limited on their competitors' platforms (like not supporting the native Picture-in-Picture feature on iPad for years.)

"Staying in business" was an improvement that literally would not have happened without Google (or at least Google, Apple, Amazon or Microsoft). The site was literally doing bankrupt, and down in flames. It needed Google to sustain the losses, and someone with that much of a warchest and legal power to muscle into collective agreements with enough music collecting societies to survive.

[beamatronic]

When Friendster and Orkut and MySpace were around, the same argument (So Big) prevented me from creating my own social networking site.

[joering2]

Is the business even profitable? They claim youtube made $5 billion in revenue ads last 3 months but they don’t provide net numbers. Their typical text ad weights approx 250 kb in size (including all JS junk) and ther profit margin is “only” 23%. I doubt pushing 4k content for 15 minutes and serving one 15 cents ad puts them in green.

[nl]

Google has backbone peering agreements because they bought huge amounts of fibre in the 2001 and 2008 crashes.

They don't really pay for bandwidth in the way you are thinking about it.

[throwaway2048]

Use Youtube without an adblocker, they have a lot more than just simple text ads. Also, bandwidth is essentially free for Google beyond capital costs due to the fact they are peered with practically every ISP on earth (traceroute Google.com).

[d1zzy]

If it was "free" then everyone could do it. The fact that very few people have the capability to provide the connectivity Google provides points to the contrary.

[throwaway2048]

I never said building the connectivity was free, In fact I said the opposite.

[ALittleLight]

I've looked at https://lbry.tv/ recently. It seems pretty decent for YouTube replacement.

One thing that they have is an automatic system to copy over your YouTube catalog and upload it to lbry.

[bdcravens]

For a large number of Youtube content creators, it's not the platform, it's the monetization opportunity.

[CapricornNoble]

The people behind PornHub need to make a "PeopleHub" site for hosting non-pornographic content. Use the same business model, which seems to work well for the "Pro-Am" content creators on PH.

That, or BitChute needs to finally release a mobile app.

[dbspin]

BitChute is a cesspit of genuinely hateful and extremist content. That alone keeps away a majority of creators and viewers. It's like a silo school for kids who've been expelled from all the other schools in the area. Only in this case the bad kids are advocating genocide and racewar.

[DaiPlusPlus]

Vimeo? DailyMotion? LiveLeak?

[xvedejas]

Facebook?

[fsflover]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube

[malka]

youtube is a huge moneysink. not only would it be hard to build, it would never bring money.

Google has entrenched themselves in a monopoly here. I think antitrust laws should be applied.

[d1zzy]

> Google has entrenched themselves in a monopoly here. I think antitrust laws should be applied.

If it's true that it isn't profitable how would anti-trust laws make it better? If it's truly unprofitable then separating it from the mothership means it goes bankrupt so no more Youtube. That doesn't seem like a better outcome than what we have today.

So it must be profitable to even begin to consider anti-trust regulation. Personally I think it is profitable although it likely has a very long time to recuperate investments (since it's mostly infrastructure like fiber, peering, caching accelerators, etc).

[Mirioron]

I think the argument is that YouTube is keeping the "price" artificially low which makes competition untenable. If at some point YouTube "raises their prices" (starts paying out less/takes significant extra money from creators) then you could argue that they were engaging in predatory pricing. I don't think it's true, but if you squint right you might get that impression.

[AlphaSite]

Because then someone who doesn’t have Google’s money could actually compete. It wouldn’t become a huge exercise in dumping.

[barry-cotter]

If Google is subsidizing everyone else’s consumption of video, pricing it below market, that’s a good thing. Someone giving you free money or a discount you b didn’t even need to ask for is a good thing. Dumping out selling below cost harms no one but the seller.

[Dylan16807]

It hurts anyone where the product doesn't meet their needs, and their needs would be met if there were several healthy competitors.

[malka]

it gives too much political power to Google. If google decide to ban you from youtube, you become non existent.

[nextweek2]

> If it's truly unprofitable then separating it from the mothership means it goes bankrupt so no more YouTube

You have to look back at Microsoft's Antitrust case around Internet Explorer, the were bundling the software into the operating system for free to kill any competition.

It maybe a loss leader but it plays into an overall corporate strategy.

Splitting YouTube off would not trigger it to go bankrupt, market forces would come into play, they'd have to seek revenue and others players would come into the market to offer a competitive offering.

[vikramkr]

To do what? It has a sort of natural monopoly in that it has network effects. If you broke it up, you'd end up with two unprofitable businesses. There are no shortage of youtube competitors- its not like they're locking out competitors with anticompetitive practices. For livestreaming they dont even have a monopoly because of twitch

[zarriak]

How are you going to enforce antitrust upon something that costs 0 to consume and pays some people who post upon it?

I think that ideally the legal problems that lead to stuff like content-id being necessary should be resolved so that you could theoretically have competitors but why should the thing that is a huge moneysink be forcibly removed from the company that sustains it?

I am definitely in the top 1% of people that hate Google but I fear that anyone besides Google would be pruning videos from Youtube at an amazing clip.

[dylan604]

As a monopolopy punishment, they should make any video that is available on YouTube and other platforms (Vimeo, etc) redirect to the other platform. Now, all of these other sites get an influx of users. We'll see who built the better infrastructure. sorry, my alarm clock is ringing, better wake up from the dreaming.

[nl]

Of course it's not a monopoly or moneysink. It's highly profitable ($5b a year in revenue and not huge costs given their peering agreements).

TicTok, Instagram, Twitch, Dailymotion, FB Video, Vimeo, Netflix etc all are counterexamples.

[amiga_500]

This is why they don't have to care. They have an effective monopoly.