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
Ironically enough Reddit would probably be a great platform for user-created video, because it would be organized by channel and, presumably, moderated better than YT is. As other commenters have noted, there’s a lot of infrastructure cost and work to it.
The specific dynamics of YT dominance probably have to do with a combination of network effects (people upload more videos where the audience is biggest and engagement is highest, begetting more audience & engagement, etc.) and Google’s unique ability to monetize massive volumes of low-quality traffic effectively. The only other players from the YT startup era who could have come close would have been Yahoo (relevant audience/content yes, technical chops yes; ability to navigate the content and moderation challenges and solve the monetization problems, no).
TikTok is the big threat to it today, not “competitor who does it better/cheaper/etc.”
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