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
1. Video storage and streaming bandwidth are very, *very* expensive. Just setting up a service of that scale would take tens of billions of dollars, if not more.
2. Making money from such a service requires a large global ads business, which Google has.
3. Even if a competitor somehow solves 1 & 2, they still have to get over the lock-in effect. All the creators are on YouTube and all the viewers are on YouTube. How do you convince any of them to break their habits and switch?
The time to build a competitor was 10-15 years ago when the space was still developing. Now it may be too late.
However, plenty of companies are challenging YouTube in indirect ways. A lot of creators are moving to live streaming, where Twitch has the lead over YouTube. A lot of younger viewers prefer short-form videos, and TikTok and Instagram are ruling that space. Netflix/Amazon/Apple of course are doing big budget content. There are many adult video services. So the ecosystem still has a ton of players.
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