|
The fundamental benefit of Youtube is that it is perhaps the only social media platform, along with Instagram and Onlyfans, that has figured out how to create an ecosystem where creators are sufficiently compensated in a way that sustains careers. The problem here was only ever partly technological, and the rest is a business problem. On one end, you have the ability of Youtube to store huge amounts of video, transcode it, and then serve it to basically every corner of the globe, eating up significant portions of global bandwidth doing so, all with incredibly low tail latency (load up random 0-view videos and they still load quickly). On the other, you have creators actually getting paid. Yes, they're not paid very much, and yes there are endless issues with advertisers getting unhappy or creators complaining about content policy, but by and large it's sustained an incredibly diverse ecosystem of people making videos because enough people watch them to make it a living. That's not to add the embedded advertising that usually pays much more than YT's own ads. Any platform that wants to compete must solve all these problems simultaneously: can you serve video at global scale, not go bankrupt doing it, and split enough of your money video creators that they actually want to host their videos with you. The problem is as much with the business model as it is technological, and anybody that tries to build a better youtube just by throwing code at the problem is doomed to fail. And then after you have all of that you still end up with the network effect: YT has all the users and all the video, and it's a self-reinforcing system where one begets the other. |