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
There are a lot of challengers to YouTube. China has Youku and Billibilli, for example.
In North America/Europe, we have TikTok, Facebook, Twitch and Instagram. All of these are video services that challenged YouTube’s business model and won a very large portion of the video market.
The thing you think of as “YouTube” (mostly non-live, medium-to-long-form content) was shaped by competitors taking out chunks of what it could have been.
But why hasn’t anybody killed YouTube on their bread and butter? Because it has momentum. It’s very hard to dethrone a social product when it already has an audience captured. Instead, video services look for gaps in YouTube’s strategy and capitalize on those gaps to pull away users.
They do have competitors, but the thing is you probably don’t see them as competitors of YouTube because they don’t do the same exact thing like Pepsi and Coke do to each other – except they do. They sell the exact same thing, just not to you or me – instead, they compete for our attention that they could sell to their true customers, the advertisers.
Indeed, the time you spend scrolling on Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else is time you don’t spend watching on YouTube. The ads you passed through while scrolling here could have been ads you saw on YouTube instead, and the revenue Reddit made could have been theirs.
Also, Facebook is definitely a competitor just looking at it as a community driven long form video platform, as is Twitch. They’re just not primarily used for those reasons
Pornhub? Oh you mean safe for work. Here’s a list of available alternatives: [https://alternativeto.net/software/youtube/](https://alternativeto.net/software/youtube/)
Don’t know if they are any good or not.
While technically not a direct competitor, I’d saw Twitch comes close. You can do many of the same things there that you can on YouTube, just with the main focus being long-form streams instead of short-form videos.
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.
At one time there were many alternatives to YouTube, but over time Google purchased any that started to gain traction.
There probably won’t be without some anti-trust action, but who knows. There are small scale competitors who specialize in content that youtube won’t allow. Porn is the obvious one. But there are a couple of niche companies who do other content for things like firearms and warfare. Youtube doesn’t allow certain types of content, and sometimes what is acceptable and what is not is hard to figure out.
Because it is really expensive, hosting video costs a lot and is really hard to sustain with just ads, even YouTube is trying real hard to push everyone to premium because ads just don’t cut it.
fun fact about the coke/pepsi. Coke was SO ahead in being a vendor to restaurants that pepsi went and bought some fast food chains so that SOMEONE would serve their product. They were successful and thats why Yum brands now exists and you get pepsi in Taco Bell and KFC
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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