[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.