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
YouTube as a business division was a loss leader for many, many years. This means that despite being acquired by Google in 2006 for $1.6Bn, YouTube was a drain on the company’s bottom line for many years. Only in the past 4 years has YouTube seen significant revenue growth on its own. It only survived because Google has deep pocket books from which to fund it and Google took a long term view of integrating YouTube into its ecosystem.
When integrated with the rest of Google’s product portfolio, YouTube is incredibly synergetic. The operating losses from YouTube were offset by tight integration with Google’s advertising and search business divisions. YouTube also gets to take advantage of Google’s enormous infrastructure.
YouTube had competitors during the 2000s and 2010s, but most of these have since gone defunct.
Netflix proved, until media companies broke their back, that people don’t need and don’t want, many different video channels.
I have no desire to subscribe to Disney, and Paramount, and Hulu, and Prime, and ESPN, and and and. None. And screw the media companies for thinking that’s what people want and value.
What caused torrenting wasn’t greed for money, it was that getting the videos you want, where you want them, and when you want them, was impossible because Cable sucked.
Netflix stopped torrenting because everything was in one place.
Why isn’t there an alternative to YouTube? Why??
I don’t want to have it use Vimeo, and TikTok, and Instagram Stories, and and and. YouTube, thank goodness, focuses on having the most, freely available, and there is no media company to force it apart in some grand licensing money making scheme.
Honestly, Pornhub probably has the ability to be a competitor if they chose to be. They could establish a separate brand and could go head to head with YouTube with their tech for video hosting.
before youtube got bought by google, metacafe (a youtube competitor at the time) had quicker video buffering
must be 20 years ago now
.. your on one of them. There are a few. Yes, they are WAAAAYYYY smaller. With the datacenter buildout for AI – new players will come up, we are close to that happening.
Let’s say you want to start a lemonade stand, because your neighbour Jimmy has earned a good amount of pocket money and bought lots of Fortnite skins with his Lemonade stand money. Jimmy has done so well because there were multiple barbeques happening lately, it’s summer and it’s hot: and Jimmy makes a really great lemonade compared to no lemonade. Jimmy’s lemonade has become a big deal and everyone knows Jimmy’s lemonade and either like it or not, it’s a known lemonade either way.
Now you start your own Lemonade stand OP’s lemonade. Since you are starting out people aren’t sure about your stand, it looks a little rickity and not as well put together as Jimmy who has been around and invested money. However, your mother grows strawberries and you found a way to make strawberry lemonade. You manage to move some customers from Jimmy to your stand who prefer strawberries over just lemons and some of the folks who weren’t convinced about Jimmy’s lemonade DO like your strawberry lemonade. Over time you establish yourself as the place to get strawberry lemonade and to Jimmy for regular.
If OPs Lemonade stand would have stuck with regular lemonade they may not have gotten as big because Jimmy had already convinced the whole neighborhood that this is the place to go, and there is no reason to go somewhere else. By offering a different taste you can get some folks who want something different, and maybe some folks who weren’t otherwise interested in lemonade.
Youtube has been offering “free” lemonade for some time, and really perfected Lemonade. That doesn’t mean that other flavours aren’t available: there are Netflix (strawberry) and Twitch (raspberry) for those looking for something else. So are there competitors in the streaming lemonade stand business? There absolutely are! Are they all looking to sell regular lemonade? Not so much, because it’s hard to beat the free lemonade you’ve been conveniently getting for a long time, and you have a favorite cardboard box to sit on.
There are lots of technical answers, but the correct answer is that Google’s business model is to buy their competitors and create a functional monopoly in all of their main services — web search, ad sales, maps, web-based email, hosted video, etc.
A federal judge just yesterday found that their practices of paying other companies to make Google/Chrome the default is an action that makes Google an illegal monopoly.
Because of the gargantuan storage and bandwidth requirements. It would require significant investment to even attempt to compete with youtube, and there’s absolutely no guarantee that that investment would ever be recovered because youtube has such a lock on the market that most people aren’t going to switch until your alternative is already very popular, which requires a significant amount of content. What competitors exist tend to focus on smaller niche areas of the market or be very focused on what it is they do well, like Nebula. Basically Google got into the video sharing business before it was a business and were able to slowly scale up as its customer base grew, anyone else would have to achieve some significant fraction of that scale right out of the gates in order to even try to be competitive.
Latest Answers