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
Two main factors, first network effect and second it’s hard.
Network effect is the idea that you need to have people using your product for others to use it. If there is no one using your platform to upload videos how do you attract people to watch videos and upload videos on your platform?
It’s hard, it takes a HUGE amount of storage space and bandwidth to serve videos. Google bought YouTube in 2006 and didn’t turn a profit on it until the early to mid 2010s. They only make a profit because of their huge ad-network augmented with their subscriptions.
So basically you need to get a bunch of people to use your platform and have a ton of cash to build it, which is quite the hurdle to get over.
There are a number of alternative video streaming platforms but none of them come close to YouTube in scale, and most are overrun with pretty toxic far-right hate speech crap.
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