Why is there no significant competitor to YouTube?

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Youtube doesn’t have a large competitor challenging it for market share like other major companies do. There are plenty of streaming services, but YouTube is the only game in town when it comes to people generally browsing video content and following their favorite creators.

Coca-Cola has Pepsi. McDonald’s has Burger King. Toyota has Honda. Why doesn’t YouTube have one?

In: Economics

48 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because of the gargantuan storage and bandwidth requirements. It would require significant investment to even attempt to compete with youtube, and there’s absolutely no guarantee that that investment would ever be recovered because youtube has such a lock on the market that most people aren’t going to switch until your alternative is already very popular, which requires a significant amount of content. What competitors exist tend to focus on smaller niche areas of the market or be very focused on what it is they do well, like Nebula. Basically Google got into the video sharing business before it was a business and were able to slowly scale up as its customer base grew, anyone else would have to achieve some significant fraction of that scale right out of the gates in order to even try to be competitive.

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