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
Three reasons, which you have to look at combined together:
1) Hosting high quality web video is extremely expensive, in both storage and bandwidth. You need a huge amount of money to even get started hosting something that’s remotely close to YouTube in terms of size and quality – there are only a few dozen companies around that could physically afford to do it – Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is the 18th highest grossing company in the *entire world*.
2) In order to make it worthwhile, you have to drag both creators and viewers away from YouTube. Creators won’t move until there’s enough viewers/ad revenue to make it worth it, and viewers won’t move until there’s content they want to watch, so the process is cyclical – not enough viewers is caused by not enough creators, and not enough creators is caused by not enough viewers.
3) You have to do all of the above, while still being at least as good, and ideally better, than YouTube for creators and viewers. That’s really hard, and probably going to be expensive, further compounding the above problem.
YouTube had the benefit of growing from nothing in a world where YouTube didn’t exist yet. The fact that YT started off tiny, and the videos started off potato quality didn’t matter, because very few other places on the internet were doing what they were doing – it was new technology.
We now exist in a post-YT world, where the idea of high quality internet videos is no longer either exciting or special, so any potential platform that wants to compete with them has to offer *more* than that.
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