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
If you’re talking about a web site where you can do a search and learn how to fix a toilet or see a trailer for the new movie or watch a Taylor Swift video then, yes, YouTube has no real competitor. But if you’re talking about a place where you can sit down and just watch videos for entertainment from favorite creators, then it has plenty of competition from TikTok, Instagram, FB, and Snap.
Their competitor right now is tiktok. Why do you think that Youtube keeps pushing its Youtube Shorts?
Platform effects are huge. Meaning: you have creators and viewers on YouTube. Any competitor would need to get both to switch, otherwise the platform is useless (creators without viewers don’t make money, viewers without creators have no content).
I mean, just watch at the Twitch situation. Microsoft invested _massively_ to get some creators over to Mixer – the viewers didn’t follow in big enough numbers, platform is dead now.
Basically, once you have a huge platform, it’s almost impossible to compete meaningfully
It doesnt make money. Google loses money to keep YouTube up, ad supported is just not enough. There have been others that tried and failed.
It’s a good thought 👍 I think someone will create a product as more and more youtube videos started displaying ads for a greater length.
If you look at the situation in this point in time, it’s because it would require a company to dump billions of USD for multiple years just to have a slight chance of making it.
No one is stupid enough to make a bet of that magnitude for odds that are heavily stacked against you, so no one does it.
Market Effect. People go where the Content/Publishers are, and Publishers go where the people are.. and Money follows them.
Really difficult to break the Market Effect, once it reaches critical mass.. especially when the product & cost are attractive. You need to come up with a very substantial better product, and/or heavily incentivize some early-mover group, and hope that gains momentum 🤷♂️
Same reason, IMO, that Reddit doesn’t. It’s a platform that depends on user-generated content and you need a critical mass of users contributing for it to catch on. Then it just keeps getting bigger and you get more users watching because there is a lot of content which causes more people to contribute.
There are competitors to YouTube and Reddit out there. They just don’t have the amount of users generating enough content to make them mainstream. There are YouTubers that advertise alternative platforms all the time like “Nebula”. But I think you have to pay to join them. It’s kind of like Patreon, maybe.
Aside from the reasons posted by others here, I’d like to comment how seamless Youtube is as a video player. Videos load instantly, the functions are all responsive immediately, no delays. You have everything you need.
Just like Netflix when compared to every other streaming platform. Shit just works flawlessly from a technical standpoint.
YouTube has never had its profit margins revealed, and it’s almost a confirmed theory that it’s largely unprofitable.
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