[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.