Why doesn't YouTube have a competitor?

YouTube is a huge technical achievement that would require billions of dollars to replicate:

1. It consumes nearly unlimited bandwidth.

2. It consumes nearly unlimited CPU for transcoding and serving media at different bitrates.

3. It consumes massive resources to police, from user moderation to appeasing content owners by building systems and databases like ContentID, etc.

4. It generates endless PR and legal headaches, which also costs a lot of money.

5. A huge amount of work has gone into getting users hooked through algorithms that seek to maximize watch time.

6. A huge amount of work has gone into building a network of advertisers who want to pay to put their ads on the platform.

7. And importantly, a huge amount of work has gone into building up an ecosystem of video producers who make their entire living off of YouTube and spend countless hours producing content for them at no cost to YouTube. Obviously YouTube isn't giving out Golden Play Button plaques out of the kindness of their heart. That's marketing.

And despite all this, Youtube almost always works perfectly for almost all users. People click on their phones and the videos just play - all around the world, even while traveling on transit, etc.

There are very few companies who have the resources to attempt to compete with that. Vimeo has obviously given up targeting the same mass market audience. Other competitors without unlimited deep pockets can't seem to make a dent.

It's a lot like asking why doesn't someone just make "a better Google." Unless you have unlimited resources and an unlimited budget, it probably isn't possible. It's smarter to make something else tangental in video that can outcompete Google instead of facing them head on. See: Twitch, TikTok, etc.

> Apart from network effect, and Google's Ad Monopoly

This is like asking "why don't we live on the moon except that there is no atmosphere there and it's pretty far away?". Those two reasons are the main reasons Youtube is the clear winner in its field, saying "apart from that" does not make a lot of sense. If you'd want to start a competitor to take on Youtube, you either need to focus on a tiny niche not well served by Youtube (extreme far right or far left personalities perhaps, or porn) or you would need to find a way to match Google money (maybe partner up with FB/Microsoft/Amazon/etc) so you can buy popular creators away from Youtube.

It does have competitors. IMO, Odysee/LBRY is the most viable one but only time will tell because all the competitors lack some things and have been slow to develop.

The competitors have a hard time gaining traction because in the way many of us would expect because we live in a different world from when YouTube first became a thing.

YouTube in 2005 was way different. You could find just about anything on there. Pranks, home videos, entire TV shows, bumfights, skits, you name it. Mostly young people used it, and back then the youth were a little more "based" than my impression of Gen Z today. I remember older folks like my parents almost universally dismissing YouTube as "a bunch of crap" and how wrong I felt they were. Guess who turned out to be right about the future of information and entertainment!

Today, I'd wager everyone's interacted with YouTube at least once. There is nothing edgy or fringe about YouTube anymore. It's a mainstream media platform saddled with its past that it just can't shake. Without big advertisers and big audiences, it wouldn't be sustainable, thus it has developed to not offend the normies or their political allies.

Many have moved over to other platforms, but they are essentially the same kind of audience and creators that were on YouTube back in the old days. The so-called normies who didn't take YouTube seriously back then are now easily frightened of the dangerous content found on alt-tech. They are unlikely to ever move away from the warm fuzzy feeling only provided by the MSM and Silicon Valley.

Although I desire people be a little less allergic to supposedly dangerous content, can we really blame people for being disinterested or avoidant to YouTube competitors?

Maybe this is the way it should be. Average Joes/Janes/Jaydens will be happy on YouTube and TikTok, and the ends of the bell curve will find their place on smaller platforms that aren't interested in pleasing everyone.

It's interesting that TikTok is a formidable competitor that focused on a different experience and a slightly different format (short form). Tiktok seems to work by choosing for you and only showing a single video at a time (esp on mobile, which is where it's really most at home), but allowing you to quickly reject that choice and learning from your rejections.

Is it possible to beat YouTube itself with a different experience but the same, longer-form, format? If so, what would that experience even look like, especially on mobile?

Vimeo is the only thing that comes close. All the open source offerings lack the dedicated apps for dedicated media players.

To be a serious alternative you’d need apps for Apple TV, Android TV, Roku plus iOS and Android and a solid desktop browser.

1) Video hosting is very expensive, due to high bandwidth and storage requirements. This is made worse when emulating YouTube, with its "anyone can upload for free, and anyone can view for free" model.

2) YouTube is an entrenched platform with a huge audience and wide reach. This causes a positive feedback loop where creators upload to YouTube because that's where the viewers are, and viewers flock to YouTube because that's where the creators are. This means that any creator that wants to upload elsewhere will struggle to find an audience, and any viewer looking to switch will lack content to view.

This means that few companies have the resources to even attempt to compete with YouTube, and those that do struggle to find consistent users. YouTube certainly has its issues, but there isn't an obvious way for a major competitor to enter the space.

I think the average person generally isn't aware of YouTube alternatives. Alternative video platforms don't seem to be a thing people seek out. In my own experience, I only know about Rumble and Odysee because a content creator I like wanted to mirror their work on other sites in order to avoid having all their eggs in one basket. If it wasn't for that, I probably wouldn't even be aware of these platforms.

Going a step further, people use YouTube like a video search engine. If people want to see a video they type in the terms they are looking for and see the results. They don't search for an alternative platform first, and then enter the keywords on those sites. Perhaps designing a video search engine that looks across multiple platforms would address this?

There is a new "free speech" alternative called Rumble emerging. Rumble for now promises Not to become a censorship platform like YouTube is now currently.

https://rumble.com/

Even though some high profile civil libertarian and free speech advocates like Glenn Greenwald and Zaid Jilani have chosen Rumble as home, YouTube is still lights years ahead. But if they continue to censor, alternative free speech platform will emerge.

Bandwidth and storage cost a lot. YouTube wasn't even profitable till a few years ago. Any new "free speech" video platform will be inundated with content that YouTube bans, things like hate speech, gore and calls for violence etc. which are not palatable to advertisers.

This question is framed to preclude the answer.

The real competitor won't be a video hosting service, it will be a content monetization model competitive to advertising. Even content monetization is a weak way of thinking about it, because by abstracting it from the people who want a certain kind of content, you've pre-defined your solution as just another tech without a clear market (a non-product).

The question of "I have all these videos, how do I sell them?" is completely different from, "How do I sell videos?" or "What will these people really pay for and how does video distribution get it to them?"

The question isn't how to reinvent streaming, it's how to discover something someone will pay for. Youtube's product isn't content, their product is the distribution it provides to people who make it - and a combination of the data and channel it provides to advertisers. That's what they sell.

So, do you really want to make another product for advertisers? Even if you really like advertisers and did, investing in another video streaming platform seems like the least smart way to do that right now.

The next real competitor to youtube will look more like AppleTV than Rumble. Arguably, if I will pay $15.99 for a season of Ancient Aliens, I'll pay $7.99 for all of 3blue1brown. It's a different monetization model, and that's the real competition.

If I wanted to make a video streaming product, I would pop up a level and find a market then determine whether their need was more for produced content, or for distribution, and then solve for the economics of that desire. The quesiton isn't how do I monetize this landfill of content, the real question is, who is this customer and what do they want?

I've thought some of this through, and reach out via my profile if you are with a company that is serious about this.

Everybody here seems to be focusing on the YouTube the video hosting platform which has a lot of competitors: p2p video platforms, edtech websites, paid history YouTube streams, a gazillion VOD platforms in my country, all the tiktok clones that consume just enough bandwidth. Video hosting isn't hard, relatively speaking.

Instead, YouTube the video search engine is the product without any competition.

And since people search for a video on YouTube and not on odysee or peertube, these other platforms have poor video discoverablity. On these platforms I tend to watch creators that I already found using YouTube.

The video search is what somebody building a competitor needs to be focusing on.

Twitch is the evolution of YouTube and Twitch has an open-source competitor, the question is rather why is nobody using the competition?

Look at Mixer, and in specific Shrouds transition to Mixer. Almost nobody followed him there. When he came back to Twitch he was the single biggest streamer they have ever had with 200K+ viewers.

Technology is feature monopolistic as long as it's "free", the evolution always happens by constructive destruction. Eventually there will be something that replaces Twitch by being _fundamentally_ better at capturing our attention without needing OBS.

People that haven't moved to Twitch from YouTube simply do not know Twitch exists or haven't tried it because they lack time.

Or maybe the transition is going from passive to active and some people wish to stay passive?

As for video anyone with a computer and a range capable HTTP server can distribute it, the problem is competing with bandwidth.

CEO of vimeo will cry themself to sleep after reading this post

Because it’s impossible to draw eyeballs without content and impossible to draw content without eyeballs.

Many well funded companies have successfully drawn some content with money in the form of production budget, guarantees & advances but few with a developed audience elsewhere are willing to give it up and people watch the content they like where it is most convenient.

There are some in the Chinese market, but I don't know which are left. There used to be a few real contenders, like Vimeo, but Vimeo simply couldn't afford to host videos to all markets.

Japanese Nico Nico is the 34th most visited site in Japan, so I guess they are still doing okay.

For certain things, I think Twitch is very much a real competitor, and I think the best example to answer your question, on what a competitor would need to get an in on the market - a unique twist on video hosting.

Personally I consider Netflix, HBO and Disney+ the biggest competitors. It's basically the internet version of cable vs terrestrial TV, imho. Youtube isn't so much about sharing your vacation video, as it is a platform to turn amateur content creators into professional content creators (with an odd side hustles of hosting professional music videos).

In addition to the other comments pointing out the moat, it's also just a good product. There's some controversy here or there, but the watching experience is fast and good, it's available almost everywhere (phones, laptop, smart tvs, consoles, ...), and it just works well.

If someone hosts something on Vimeo, I always perceive that as giving users a worse experience just to make a point. Vimeo embeds don't sync how far I've watched across devices. It doesn't even remember it in a single tab on a single device. (Maybe that's because I don't have a Vimeo account but I do have a YouTube account. But that's part of the mount.)

YouTube does have competition:

TikTok (there is a reason YouTube released “shorts”), Twitch and Facebook (which also supports live streaming).

Vimeo, Metacafe and Dailymotion used to be a lot more competitive with YouTube too. In some cases even having a larger market share than YT at one point.

Plus there are plenty of adult streaming services too albeit they don’t directly compete due to YouTubes rules about video content.

I think a large part of YouTubes success was because Google bought them back when Googles reputation was still top notch. I remember being indifferent about YouTube (even preferring Vimeo and Metacafe) but started using TouTube because of Google’s tie in. Now I use it in spite of Google.

Does Twitch count? A lot of chess streamers I used to follow on YouTube moved to Twitch. Sometimes they replicate their content back to YouTube, but not always.

You mean like a company? I mean, this has been answered a million times over. It's scale, it's always scale.

Yes, Youtube needs a real competitor, and it's the sort of thing that would be very difficult to do as a for-profit company. I'd begin by asking Jimmy Wales and the like. Peertube's a great start.

If you’re talking about sites that host videos for creators and stream videos to end users, YouTube has some very strong competitors who have eaten into YouTube’s percentage of online video watched: - Facebook - Twitch - TikTok

While you might not think of them as competitors, they provide a very similar service.

Youtube Alternatives :

Centralized : Dailymotion, Bitchute, Rumble, DTube, Vimeo, Vidlii, DLive, Triller

Decentralized : Odysee(LBRY), Peertube

Video hosting is a perfect storm of expensive things: lots of egress bandwidth, lots of storage, and lots of compute for transcoding. And most of the effort is wasted because most videos get watched only a few times, and only in a few of those transcoded formats. So they're not going to pull their weight even if you slap ads all over them.

It does, but not in the form of video-only platforms.

In terms of medium/long form videos, plenty of time is spent watching those on Instagram and Facebook. For shorter "clip"-style videos, those are watched on TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat.

Then you have livestreaming, in which Twitch and once again Facebook/Instagram have large viewership.

>Apart from network effect, and Google's Ad Monopoly, what does YT have that has made it a clear winner in this field? What would a competitor need to take on them?

Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

It comes preinstalled on all mobile phones.

If YouTube were just a website like any other video host, people wouldn't care. Do you really care about which video host a video you want to watch is on? No, more than likely you care about the video itself.

But YouTube is an app, on your phone, click it and search for what you want, oh whatever you're looking for is probably on YouTube anyway.

And that's another thing, YouTube is basically the only site with google search embedded into itself that only searches itself. Imagine a video search engine like YouTube that showed you results from all sorts of video sites.

These two things together are why. Want to find a video? Click the video finding app on your phone. Oh, it only searches YouTube? Oh well, the video is probably on YouTube anyway.

The competition is paid/subscription niche video sites. Outside of adult content I think they are very, very small compared to Youtube. But some do thrive.

To wit: https://www.offcenterharbor.com

Rumble just received a major investment, and has been the streaming alternative for when people got banned off YouTube. There's also LBRY/Odysee and Bitchute.

I quite like Odysee and use it a lot.

It's mostly free and meets people's expectations. Also, one of the driving goals of silicon valley companies is to grow as large as possible as soon as possible so that it becomes a competitive advantage. At some point, it's impossible to complete against a giant even if the product is easy to replicate.

Googles also has an ad network that finances the product's development and on going maintenance. So a competitor would have to compete against both giants to at least get a foothold.

At this point, the only way to get competitors against YouTube is for the government to get involved and help the new companies in some way.

One possible competitor is for a confederation of organizations to get together and produce a product. They would have to have a product that's at least as good and be willing to accept losses for a time. Also they have to stay together and act together as a force of one. It's unlikely to happen.

I would say that a competitor would have to start by building an ad network first so that there's some money to finance a YouTube like product.

The true competition is the one for people's attention. Find a product that can best get people's attention and you have chance to succeed against Google and YouTube.

Gfycat and imgur are pretty good alternative to post videos.

Youtube is good for large videos, gfycat is good for short ones, but honestly, I would really favor video platforms who offer direct access to the file. And since it's pretty common knowledge that videos need to be short to get views (free content, short attention span), hosting longer videos is more appropriate for platforms like netflix (entertainment, paid).

Youtube is dominating because it existed prior to html5 videos, since it used flash.

Now, h264 is everywhere and easily accessible. Online, ubiquitous videos don't require 4K, that's mostly for entertainment. 4K is okay for short videos maybe.

Youtube is really awful in many many ways, it has become so big it's acting like a news channel (removing content etc). It has become too big to fail, while I'm pretty sure there are terabytes of video that are almost never watched. When you compartmentalize the types of youtube videos, its competitors are spotify for music, netflix for youtube red, gfycat and cousins for shorts, etc. Platforms like patreon are much better suited to support creators.

Not to mention the ecological impact of such a large platform.

Network effect, and Google's Ad Monopoly account for 99.9% of the dominance of YouTube. Only Facebook could launch a competing product (maybe Twitter). It would take millions (or Billions) to build a platform just to end up like one of the many competitors (Vimeo). There will be something that kills YouTube, but it will look different (or work differently).

Because RSS/Atom subscriptions as the standard for following things you like, across websites, didn't really catch on, in part because no browsers (or mobile OS vendors) really championed the feature in their UX to make it better than having lots of interfaces on different sites (looking at you, Firefox—add it to the list of dropped balls).

Because network effects let them pay creators more, so of course creators tend to stick around.

Because people default to searching on Youtube for videos, and Youtube Search only searches Youtube, rather than being like Google Video Search.

> What would a competitor need to take on them?

A shitload of VC cash to burn on both data transfer / CDN buildout and paying prominent YouTubers way more than they're making you in exchange for exclusive videos (time limited would probably be fine, e.g. 1 year exclusivity). Also, maybe, integrate something like Patreon directly.

It's interesting that many content producers are starting to create their own websites, complete with ad free and extended content. I predict YouTube will become like Pandora was. Used for discovery but when folks want to deep dive on a specific content producer you go to their site or content portal directly.

Joe Rogan moved away, and it seems he is losing influence. https://www.sportskeeda.com/mma/news-monthly-listeners-joe-r...

What use-case of YouTube would you want a competitor to though? Personal video hosting? Independent creator video distribution? Social network for video? Music video streaming?

One of the greatest achievements of YouTube is basically serving countless audiences and numerous use-cases under the guise of a single service.

You'd need to roll-up WhatsApp video sharing, Vimeo, Facebook Watch/Tik Tok/IG Reels, MTV, and then throw the aspirational element of creator payments over the top of it. I'd question whether anyone would actually want to do all of that.

Apparently, Google's strategy is to target the middle class (Eric Scmhidt said in some interview) which is like the majority of population in any country. Then to give them incentives to use their platform. This worked for Youtube by giving creators money and in some countries when they wanted adoption for their payment apps, they gave back good cashbacks as rewards. The cashbacks diminished after sufficient adoption was attained.

They were anticompetitive using multiple illegal tricks. Their competitors like dailymotion or vimeo couldn't compete for years. Now that google is under antitrust investigation around the world. They have started operating properly and that's why you get an ad every 12 seconds. Twitch only survived because big daddy amazon came in with the same deal as google. We will now see players like rumble finally taking off.

It does. Vimeo is probably the most popular YouTube alternative. But YouTube has a community that I don't know of any other video platform having.

I don't think we'll see a real competitor to YouTube until someone manages to decouple hosting from discovery. No startup can compete with free unlimited video hosting. But it would be relatively easy to make a better discovery algorithm. The problem is the network effects moat. But I think if you started in a specific community (say tech talks or ASMR) it might work.

Because they show up on top of searches. Wait until the freemium approach fails and they lose content producers, and they will pivot into something more approachable by competitors.

If you would like to speed up the process refuse to login, support independent content producers and creators, and give search engines a reason to promote other platforms (don't click, simple as that)

for me personally Peertube checks all the boxes because it is in the fediverse and can be selfhosted. you can do whatever the hell you want and that is quite a big thing for people who have been burned by youtube.

edit: Tilvids.com is a good example of the power of peertube

YouTube does have competitors: Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Netflix.

YouTube is a clear winner in a few big categories, but video is a huge market and they haven’t gotten an edge on anything new in awhile, for example short form.

Youtube makes it pretty easy to search for videos and watch without an account, and the other big platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok go out of their way to make sure you can't do that.

Because AMZN and maybe MSFT have not yet decided there is sufficient revenue potential attached to it.

The other contenders don’t have the various resources or would do it “wrong enough” it wouldn’t matter.

Other than a variety of technical reasons already mentioned, I think VEVO is an amazing moat that would be very difficult for even the most funded of competitors to cross.

I think the only company that could probably compete with YouTube, although long term, is TikTok. If you think about it, it's like YouTube, just with smaller videos.

YouTube is sort of like Craigslist for videos and their competitors generally target either something they can do like Twitch and Instagram or something they can’t do.

Any viable YouTube competitor is going to be considerably different from YouTube.

I would argue that both TikTok and Netflix are very successful YouTube competitors.

Because Youtube can only make sense to run within Google. Youtube's actual service of providing free HD streaming video in exchange for showing the viewers ads is not, has never been, and cannot be profitable. Totally free, unlimited HD video streaming is just too expensive. It can only exist as part of a huge conglomerate because the only purpose Youtube can serve is to attract people into the ecosystem it's part of. No other company has an ecosystem valuable enough to justify losing that much money on Youtube.

Competitors would have to make the content creators want to move their communities, knowing a large part of their community will not follow.

Rumble

Odysee

WTV

Bitchute

Daily Motion

Peer Tube

..ad infinitum

There's literally hundreds out there, not everything needs to be 'Facebook scale' to be successful.

edit: formatting

Nebula is pretty good but they need downvote / upvote options or some method of curating bad videos from good videos.

I am truly not trying to be snarky, but so it goes.

Does anyone on HN actually still have YouTube videos playable on their machines?

Why? Text is so much faster to learn from and without sound and video baggage that gets added.

I understand people raised on MTV and Snapchat caring about video for fun and not caring about the wasted time. But isn't this a community focused on productivity and knowledge? YouTube is the opposite of that. Might as well watch sports or hanging out in bars. ;)

All I want is to be able to pay to remove ads without also having to pay for a YouTube music subscription.

It was first. Read Positioning by Reis for why this matters and why nothing will ever beat YouTube head on.

Youtube beeds a peer to peer competitor.

https://odysee.com

Dailymotion? Youku? Fb watch?

How much does YouTube traffic cost? And for those of us who are not Google?

Viewers want to go where the content is.

Content creators want to go where the users are.

content, and pure scale, video hosting is enormously expensive to do at scale, youtube is able to do so because it is backed by google.

A time machine to travel back to 2005.

Why compete with yesterday?

bilibili in China Niconico in Japan

Ask TikTok.

Bilibili

Not surprisingly, most of the answers on HN are from an engineering perspective.

When I started selling the first products I designed and manufactured --decades ago-- I absolutely sucked at it. I was selling like an engineer thinks. Which means I was a horrible sales person. It wasn't until one of my friends, who happened to be one of my resellers, took me under his wing and taught me sales that I understood the process. It took somewhere around six to eight months for me to "see the light". Towards the end I could sell our products almost without saying a word about them. You are dealing with people, not robots. Everything you care about as an engineer is usually of no interest whatsoever to the buyer (that can be the case even for highly technical products).

I think the answer is far simpler than the obvious go-to's in this case (established, network, google, infrastructure, technical blah, blah, etc.). Sure, those are factors, but this is about sales and sales is about psychology.

Simple question:

What would it take to sell anyone on Y and have them stop stop using X?

Let's say X is a brand of forks and knives and Y is a different brand. Furthermore, assume they are free. Cost of the switch is exactly $0. Effort is also zero. You say "I want to switch to Y" and they magically appear in your kitchen and replace X. As easy as can be.

Well, Y has to give you a reason strong enough to compel you to make the change. Call it value, if you will. The mythical "differentiation" with, perhaps, more attached to it than just being different.

A few weeks ago I saw metal cutlery that was black. It looked beautiful. Same stainless steel material usually used for cutlery everyone if familiar with. Except, in this case, it was blackened, likely using a chemical process. If that was Y, it could inspire some to make the switch, just to be different. Maybe. More likely than that, they'll get Y and keep using X.

Put a different way, if X works well and does everything you want it to do, there are very few reasons to change to Y. The company behind X might have to do something horrible to suddenly inspire mass exodus.

I believe this is the case with YouTube/Google. What they do, they do well. The user experience is excellent. Yes, we all know about the ridiculous no-customer-service account suspensions where you lose all of your Google app access, etc. However, this is not the average user experience. In fact, I would venture to say that this is well outside two standard deviations from the mean, ridiculously outside of that. The area under the curve is deeply dominated by users who are satisfied to the extent that the thought of going elsewhere never really crosses their minds. When a user/customer/client can't be compelled to even think about Y when using X, the probability of them considering a switch is as close to zero as can be.

The only way for someone to mount a solid effort against YouTube falls under two areas:

A- By force. Spend billions advertising and educating the audience and, over time, if the product is good and the message is solid, N% of YouTube users would migrate. This would require so much money it would easily meet the definition of insanity. The cost of acquisition isn't likely to ever justify the investment.

B- Cater to a deeply motivated audience to carve out a much smaller percentage of YouTube's audience. The most obvious audience I can identify in this moment in history is Trump's audience. Regardless of what the reader might thing of them, they have grievances with social media and YouTube that could be addressed by an alternative platform. The cost of acquisition, in this case, would be relatively low. In fact, I would not be surprised if most of the investment went into creating a solid infrastructure with only a modest marketing push to trigger network effects.

Other than option B --which would only capture an audience in the tens of millions, and possibly grow it to >100million over time--- I can't see anything that would inspire people to leave YouTube behind. And, even with B, the same audience would continue to use YouTube, because, well, everything is already there and the user experience is good. B takes advantage of deep motivation for change. Without that, it simply isn't going to happen.

All a competitor needs to do for me to prefer them is not be part of the Ministry of Truth, i.e., to not set itself up as the arbiter of whether information is correct. It should know its role: to store and play videos and such. Odysee, Rumble, Bitchute, Gab TV, NewTube, all of these fit the bill. All of these are very valuable in an era when censorship has been normalized.