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
Videos takes up a lot more data compare to other forms of media, so streaming them, whether live or just browsing, is very expensive. For all the shit people have been giving to Youtube, they actually have some of the most sophisticated video streaming infrastructure, with good servers running at competitive cost. This essentially kills competition from smaller startups.
For other giants that wish to break into this space, they also need to having proper monetization scheme so the creators would go professional and not just treat it as a hobby. In this regard Google is far, far ahead of everyone else, even in adjacent industries; streaming is usually subsidized by a parent company (Amazon for Twitch, Stake for Kick), while short form sites opt to simply not pay their creators. There’s a reason why Tiktokers with a large following often migrate to Youtube shorts, but rarely the other way around. So for long form videos, no one is able to compete.
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