I doubt there will ever be an alternative to YouTube. "Disrupting" YouTube is difficult because the social conditions that created YouTube do not exist anymore.
Before you get into cdns, bandwidth, advertisers, and social features, you need to have content - and a steady flow of content. What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.
Any new competitor eventually runs into the fact that
* Your largest users eventually stop posting if you don't pay them (because they can go elsewhere after using your platform as a springboard: see Vine)
* In order to actually pay creators you need to have the capital, legal, and advertising side completely figured out.
So on top of building a giant cdn, you need gobs of money to pay people to stay on your platform, and another gob of money because you will be sued to death (especially because once you start paying people, people will cheat, and pirate content).
All this means is YouTube has an incredible moat. If YouTube dies, I doubt there will ever be a replacement.
I love YouTube, so many things to learn. But their recent push to just ignore people capable of speaking two or more languages with their auto-translated bullshit and no way to turn it off makes me use YouTube way less.
It’s a bummer that nobody there seems to realize this. They only see a very dumb metric. Probably something like "did this German dude watch at least one Spanish videos, because we auto-translate titles and voice". It feels disrespectful.
> What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.
They still do. The vast majority of YT content is not monetized by creators, often not even eligible for it in the first place. Further, some big-ticket content creators hedge their bets, uploading to backup platforms, trying to shift to Patreon, etc.
The main thing is that viewers only ever go to YouTube, a learned habit. This is where they listen to music, where they get their news, where the algorithm suggests them related videos, where they can search for tutorials and reviews for gear, etc.
But TikTok shows that you can disrupt that simply by offering a video format that is different in some way and thus not gated by the same muscle memory.
But niches within YouTube can be disrupted. We've seen it with short form (TikTok etc), music (Spotify etc). We see it with specific niches of content creators (nebula etc). It's happened with livestreams.
I'm bad at predicting future, but could imagine niches like "publicly funded content" from e.g. EU public broadcasters moving away (e.g. NPOstart in NL) because of privacy issues or because they legally can't monetize their content anyway. Maybe university lectures? Or sports video? Game reviews by a specialized platform by steam? Video between 4 and 10 minutes? Podcast videos?
So YouTube as a whole will stay, but it can be chipped away at. Some chips may prove in themselves a small, but still good business model.
So if you succeed, how the terabytes of content and bandwidth will be sponsored - by what?
The only way i can think of it is some super-efficient neural codec with extreme video compression ratio that runs on mobile devices. Othewise Youtube wins by sheer scale google invested in it.
YouTube has recently have had massive, competitive attacks on their business and have had to quite drastically amend their offerings.
TikTok, SnapChat and instagram has all had huge success in their short form formats.
It’s not unheard of, that even millennial couples, will spend and evening together in bed scrolling TikTok instead of watching tv together.
While the battle is far from over, had YouTube not reacted, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these mobile first competitors would have started experimenting with long form content by now.
I disagree, the internet is full of websites who were on the top of the world until they weren't. Its easy for content creators to post their content on multiple sites. The main moat is the critical mass of users.
/. Used to be the goto tech forum, but now we are all at hn. Digg was the place to be, now its reddit. Audiences can shift surprisingly suddenly.
For a company, it's impossible. For any country except for the US, it's very easy: you use any of the million different protectionist measures available. Such as tarriffs, as the US itself has taken a liking to - in this case it would be their digital equivalent, namely digital service taxes.
I remember reading a history of YouTube once, and early on they were about to go under from the sheer weight of music industry copyright lawsuits and the cost of bandwidth. Google had the technology, heft and resources to do infringement detection at scale to really save them, not to mention their global bandwidth.
Currently many YouTube creators request additional money on patreon-style platforms. It either means that YouTube's paycheck sucks OR they are greedy. In both cases this reverts your arguments on paying to creators, because if some platform would be better in some meaningful property, it could steal the user base.
For example - background playing, less commercials, less distractions etc.
A lot of creators that started with a YouTube channel nowadays have moved a lot of content to social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram reels. To me YouTube risk to be replaced (or it has already been replaced) by short videos, because a lot of people is no longer interested in watching a 20 minutes long video nowadays, especially new generations tend to spend a lot of time on just TikTok.
If the US government was a function body, it would force Youtube to separate the hosting business and the website itself. The hosting would be a low margin low risk business which doesn't care about traffic either way. It's just selling infrastructure the way telecom companies do. It would be paid by websites to offer a frontend to users.
This way there is real competition on what matters, the user experience and still a economy of scale on what costs a lot which is actually storing and delivering videos.
Some frontend would be free with ads, some with a paywall but without ads. Some low quality, some high quality, some both. The user would have a choice. Each creator would be free to choose its licensing model. The hosting company would then only provide the video to frontends following the creator's wish.
The creator would pay by the bytes stored and the frontend by the bytes transferred. No incentive for the hosting provider to favor either of them.
Not perfect as the hosting company is still a monopoly, but it could be regulated to be neutral and behave like a utility.
The frontend has to cater to users and nobody else. They have competition and disappear if they enshittify.
Creators are free from the tyranny of google. They become the clients of the hosting company which makes steady money whatever the content.
Everybody wins, except google, which is fine by me.
I do not see that as inherently correct. There have been and are several alternatives to YouTube and every single one has been actively sabotaged for primarily political/ideological reasons that have nothing to do with any of what you are talking about.
There is quite literally a conspiracy to suppress alternatives to YouTube because they do not align with the ideological parameters of the pernicious system. If you let that boot up from humanity’s neck, there would be many competitors to YouTube that would immediately atrophy YouTube. You seem to simply not be aware of what is going on outside of the authorized narrative. You will never be able to see the reality of things if you limit yourself to only the confines of the illusion matrix created for you by the system.
But yes, YouTube has a moat and like all moats it is built and maintained by the tyrannical monarch who believes himself to be chosen by God, but must hide away behind it from reality.
The replacement may be AI generated content or something.
Let me go into wild eyed futurist speculative mode here,
1- AI/LLMs are basically a response to the enshittification of Google. The reason this tech is so good and useful is because for years Google rewarded SEO optimized content a.k.a. long winded articles that repeat the same words over and over again and take ten years to make a point, which after training on all that gunk, your LLM can now do in one paragraph. The Google search monopoly gave rise to this lengthy word salad web content and blanketed the earth with it. The AI summarizer arose as a natural response. The web as we know it may now die.
2- The software industry seems to gravitate toward a layer cake of monopolies. E.g. we have Microsoft monopolize the OS and app platform, it becomes so awful the government even tries to put the brakes on it, partially succeeds, then we get the Web application platform. Sitting in a browser on top of Windows and others. Which Google goes on to monopolize. One may suppose that another platform will be built on top of this, which will be unmonopolized for a few years, and then someone will monopolize and enshittify that too, paving the way for the next cycle. It's turtles all the way down.
3- How this pertains to YouTube, well in the near future I suppose someone could ingest all of YouTube, and create AI versions of it, exactly like what was done with the web. And they might even get away with it once we set a bunch of legal precedents that this is not a thing you can get sued for. Presumably the AI platform would need to be different or better in some way, so perhaps we'll see a video platform where all the content is generated on the fly by AI, and you can get exactly what you want because it was trained on the videos that humans made. E.g. you can simply tell the AI you want to watch a comedy show called Three and a Half Horses where all the characters are reverse centaurs, and it will spin up as many episodes as you want until you get bored. And YouTube will continue to be an aging monopoly for decades, like Windows, but no one will really care because we'll be watching horses deliver Seinfeld quality jokes [1]
[1] It's not horses and it's not as good as Seinfeld, but someone's already doing this. So all that remains for my prognostication to come true is for a financial crisis to happen, at which point the government can use it as an excuse to print a random $500B and give it to a politically connected billionaire intermediary who will invest a fraction of it into the engineering, and history will continue to march forward as it does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever
The author makes an argument that at least looks like people choose YT over Nebula because YT is free. I, for example, already pay for Nebula, so I can watch it for free, but I still go to YT.
IMO it might be just a product problem. I opened nebula and:
* The same video had a better title on YT that was actually less clickbaity and more informative - assumedly because of YT algorithm for optimization
* Nebula auto set quality to 480p compared to 1080p in YT - if I wasn't tech-savvy I'd assume it's just worse quality.
* The loading times when you seek to part that's not loaded yet are 10x longer
* I missed comments
The recommendation algorithm is weaker too, I can't tell to what extent this is due to YouTube having simply more data and to what extent it's weaker engineering.
just want to also plug dropout.tv, which is way less annoying than Nebula with ads-in-video, and is just a generally entertaining good time + inspiring business story.
This seems like a very strange perspective. Nebula is for specifically following content creators you really like and enjoy their videos earlier and at a better quality (plus some exclusive content).
Why would you particularly care about the title is that's a videomaker you follow anyway? Why would you care about seeking times? Are you jumping constantly in an ad-free and sponsor-free video you specifically subscribed for? Why miss the comments? Is it a video sharing platform or social media?
Author here. I woke up to a surprising amount of traffic! Some notes based on the discussion.
This wasn't coordinated between Jeff Geerling and myself. However, I did mention the post in the Bluesky thread that Jeff was included in. [0]
I concluded the piece with “[t]his space is ripe for disruption”. That was a really poor choice of words. I've since updated the piece to better match what I was trying to say. Diffs are available. [1]
On YouTube: as I mention in the piece, I think the service is excellent as a consumer, and I pay for Premium.
This piece was mostly written because I've been frustrated that YouTube is effectively the only place for user submitted video on the internet. I wasn't going to write anything until I saw the video from RedLetterMedia that I mentioned in the post. They have a huge following and were blaming something that might be related? Or might not? It's really hard to tell! I'm not a YouTube creator, but I assume having metrics that determine your livelihood shift out from under you as a creator must feel awful.
> On YouTube: as I mention in the piece, I think the service is excellent as a consumer, and I pay for Premium
Why? Because the tools that allow them to take almost 50% of the revenue (they say you earn) have low friction?
I would say the opposite. There is no customer service. There are endless legal pit traps that allow larger channels and companies to predate on smaller ones alongside the AI channels, which lead to the same end. The entire point of the platform is to push as much advertising as possible, while mutating a user's search habits. Ironically, this leads to videos becoming borderline useless for many use cases, without taking them off youtube. This is not a good platform.
I'm sure I feel this way because I don't have a bunch of content I'm afraid of being yanked from the platform. Another "benefit" of having a big youtube presence, is I would be forever worried about implied retaliation.
> This piece was mostly written because I've been frustrated that YouTube is effectively the only place for user submitted video on the internet.
Well, technically there's lots of user submitted videos posted to p*rn sites... Apparently even started posting educational videos there, like math and neural networks and stuff.
I host videos on my own server and there's Vimeo and Mux. I guess you're saying it's the free-as-in-beer service that has a social network and recommendation network attached to uploaded videos.
Structurally there's only a few ways disruption can happen to a platform that has existing centralized hosting of metadata and centralized hosting of data. Either the disruptor also centralizes both, decentralizes just the data or decentralizes both.
The second isn't viable in most real world cases until something changes the huge expense of decentralized CDN fetching. My gut says that the third would be on the losing side of almost every network effect.
One of the things that is notable about Youtube is there was once competition (Vimeo and Daily Motion) but they effectively outdistanced it. A bit like Amazon and Ebay. There are related things semi-competing like Twitch.TV etc, also, of course.
I suspect that the situation with the earlier video providers is that they were "bleeding cash" for many years until the process finally reversed - if they were the winner (again like Amazon).
I think this long capital investment process is what means that no one wants to or expects to step into the ring with a large, successful player. It took that player a long time to learn to be successful, that player will fight you to keep their relative monopoly and you will have to risk a lot of money.
Youtube content creators are effectively Youtube's suppliers. Youtube is squeezing and its "normal" - squeezing suppliers is part of the monopolist's playbook. Its unfortunately convenient for Youtube that people have been willing to make good quality video for nearly nothing since the tools to do so became cheaply available.
Why there is "no competition" for Nvidia, Amazon, Youtube, etc. Not that I like the situation but it's not an "unnatural" situation.
ArchiveTeam is working on backing up selected channels/videos to the Internet Archive, where they can also be watched via their Wayback Machine. You can help them decide what is culturally or historically important enough to save.
ArchiveTeam generally is an interesting project I highly recommend people read about.
It has already happened. A lot of content that used to be available on YouTube is gone because of policy changes (unlisted content automatically changed to private, banned users, videos deleted by the site) and more is already only available to logged in users or only in certain countries even though they used to be public.
Video quality apparently slightly degrades as youtube constantly re-encodes/processes things and there's at least one well-known example of a Neil Cicierega video being completely unplayable
https://twitter.com/neilcic/status/911080613733580801?s=20 (not this specific video, but this has happened in the past)
You should be locally saving any video you ever think you will want to watch again. Many of the videos I enjoyed in college of regular people just making stuff for fun (when being a content creator wasn't a thing) have been taken out by reruns of copyright searching bots and creators turning 30 and being embarrassed by what they posted in their 20s. One musical artist I followed decided to take down all of their old content because their latest album wasn't getting enough plays.
I save everything with replay value now, especially music.
On a personal level, you don't need the entire platform to go down to notice the bitrot. Over half of my "Watch Later" and other playlists from 8(?) years ago are now "deleted/private" videos.
Anything can disappear in this modern era.
Thankfully YouTube is not DRM protected yet and you can do something about it.
Any media company can take any video offline and your access to it will be gone. Same for ebooks, not only those tied to your account, but I was thinking, what if Overdrive/Libby terminate the access to particular library.
The steady state idea that most people have about civilization is just not applicable once there is oil-dependent information technology.
Either we go up and eliminate the oil dependence but acceleration eats YouTube in a transformative way, or we go up and eliminate the oil dependence but societal fission eats YouTube in a catabolic way.
I don't think this monopoly is really mysterious. Storage costs money. Bandwidth costs money. Someone needs to pay for it and the only way to cover those costs at any meaningful fraction of Youtube's scale is to have a money printing machine like Google's ads.
Its a bit more mysterious now a days though. Video compression got way better (albeit video quality also went way up), hard drives got way cheaper. Bandwidth is really cheap at scale. People are way better selling ads now then they used to be. A lot of video serving infrastructure got standardized.
Don't get me wrong, its still hard and expensive, but i don't feel that is the moat it once was. Network effects is also a whole other conversation.
I don't thinks it's quite that simple, there are other factors as well:
There are significant network effects. Content creators use youtube because there are a lot of viewers watching content there, and viewers use it because there is lots of content there. Since YouTube already dominates the market, it is extremely difficult for another platform to compete, even if it was better in every way.
Google can promote YouTube using its other monopolies/oligopolies. Most notably, google search prioritizes videos on YouTube over other videos. Also, being able to pay for video ads and search ads with a single vendor is probably actractive for ad space buyers.
Google also already has its own CDN, which probably reduces the cost of distributing the content.
Also youtube is big enough that they can get cache servers in isp datacenters for the popular content - it saves the isp the cost of a bigger pipe so deals not offered in general exist. (Netflix also has this with some - or at least they were working on it years ago)
At the rates I use video, my CDN doesn't care I'm distributing video bits, so at my end of the use spectrum, video bandwidth costs no more than the CDN fees I'm already paying. But yes, that won't work for Netflix or Disney+.
If the quantities of money paid to all the YouTube freelance advertisers is anything to go on, a video platform having their own ad network would itself be highly profitable.
> I think this space is ripe for disruption, but there are only a handful of companies who could make a go of it… and I think they’d lose a lot of money for a long time while they tried.
If you have to lose a lot of money for a long time to compete, how is it ripe for disruption?
YouTube works because it has eyeballs, content/creators, advertisers, a cdn, and has made enough piece with large copyright license holders that it's allowed to continue.
Competing with YouTube is certainly possible, and there's a lot of fun technical work, but there's also a big challenge to attract the people you need to make the thing work. You probably already need to already have two out of four of users, content, advertisers, cdn. And you need to get licenseholders on board quick. And probably law enforcement as well.
I'm not saying it is or isn't a monopoly, but it would be hard to compete with. I think monopoly would depend on the defined market... a broadly defined market might include netflix and even cable tv. A narrowly defined market would include durably published user uploads, which has a lot fewer entrants.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't find such kind of work "fun". I would have a constant feeling of "well, we are simply trying to mimic what YT did, maybe we should just hire someone that worked there and do the same, instead of going through the same inevitable mistakes".
In the UK we have the venerable BBC which is struggling with the revenue model, cost of broadcasting and much else. I am not a fan but I think that under new leadership they could do the disruption.
In what way?
Youtube is not social media. Nobody makes new friends whilst on YT. However, broadcast TV in the olden days before satellite TV and video recorders provided a shared conversation for the whole nation. You could spark up a conversation by asking a friend if they saw something on the TV during the previous evening. Nowadays people say DON'T TELL ME, I HAVEN'T WATCHED IT YET with no further conversation possible without changing topic.
A video platform could build community by letting people know if their friends and family have enjoyed watching the same programmes. Also possible is a mechanism whereby you can have a schedule made just for you. I have two YT faves, one which is fun (parasocial relationship) and another which is intellectual. If it is early in the evening and I am possibly relaxing with food then I will want the former, not the latter. On a daily basis I could have what we had in the olden days, light entertainment in the early evening and stuff that requires some brain cells later.
Revenue is always interesting and the state broadcasters in the English speaking world might as well pool resources and supply content people enjoy as soft propaganda on a free basis with no adverts. If the CDNs are in place with everything cached with a little bit of P2P, the cost model for delivery could be improved on.
Agree, another point is that video content making is a space full of grifters, unlike other form of media.
Take Kick for example, made to compete against Youtube and Twitch, but ended up with mostly people who are banned by those 2 platforms for a good reason. "Kick streamers" is now a negative words.
So new players on this field has to be specific about curating the people posting on their platforms.
nah its too late honestly, if big tech didn't want or care to make competing platform
how can you expect company that has less resource make an alternative ????
I still remember when microsoft throwing money to make mixer (twitch alternative) and yet it failed miserably
tiktok is close as we can get honestly, but youtube also expand toward shorts
YouTube was built on piracy and then Google bought YouTube and got immunity from copyright infringement claims by selling its user data to LE/IC in exchange for legal immunity. YouTube is still powered by piracy world wide. They only enforce copyright controls in western markets where the potential consumer is expected to have the income to afford streaming services. This is on par for the entire Google empire, which is all built on piracy, whether it is putting their ads on other people's content, redistributing other peoples's content without licenses, or building AI built on unlicensed content. And the whole thing works because they give their users personal data to intel and law enforcement in exchange for back door immunity deals.
Monopolies naturally come from doing a thing the best possible way. YouTube does it. I personally use it very rarely and wouldn't care about its disappearance, but I don't know of other services serving its users needs better.
So: YouTube will cease to be a monopoly if 1) user needs change 2) it stops being the best at serving videos. Until then, it's not mysterious.
YouTube has a superior offering to competitors, just like Spotfify has a superior offering to YT music. I pay for both Spotify and YouTube, but I don't listen to music on YT music because Spotify is just a vastly superior solution for delivering the music.
I’m a paying customer, but my biggest issue is that the content and suggestions themselves are still ads. I feel like I am paying to remove ads from within my ads.
The videos I am being recommended are still about how natural McDonalds food is, how this natural supplement from XYZ is disrupting healthcare and how this coffee machine will revolutionize the way I make coffee.
If the recommendation algorithm would be a bit less corporate, I’d be a happy customer. That, plus Apple Watch standalone Youtube Music app.
My personal experience is that the increase in ads has encouraged me to subscribe to creators I like via Patreon and view content on there. If many people are doing this, I wonder if it skews the view statistics and, therefore, lowers the number of recommendations for the best channels. In turn, this makes it less likely for good channels to be discovered. The increase in YouTube ads also makes me much less interested in browsing there, and I am finding other things to do instead.
You just don't make enough money from ads anyway, a lot of creators now see YT as more of top of funnel advertising leading you to a patreon or even more common livestream format where they make the real money from superchats.
“This space is ripe for disruption”. On the contrary I feel like YouTube is extremely well managed. For an application that is this ubiquitous and this well known, it seems to work pretty well. I can’t remember the last time it was in news for something bad.
Sometimes the answer really is: it is well managed product.
Youtube is such a dominant and ubiquitous monopoly that it is almost easy to forget about it as a monopoly because there is so little competition to contrast against and to even remind you that there ought to be. I've wondered for years why it gets so little attention vs so many of the other tech giants that do have more competition.
Well managed? Not so sure about that.. the fact that UMG can harass content creators unchecked is a problem, and it's not just UMG abusing the copyright strike system.
Also, the amount of highjacked accounts and the length of time to regain control is absurdly long.
And Shorts. I wish I could disable Shorts from my feed.
I do not have a youtube account. I never sign in. If I go to watch a video and I get confronted with a puzzle to solve then I immediately close my browser and go do something else. This has led to a personal trend of using youtube less frequently.
I agree that it is a mostly well managed product, but I can think of a lot of things when it was in the news for something bad.
Most controversial is probably the increase in the amount of Ads, unskippable ads, then there was multiple problems with Youtube kids, e.g. how bad people get really bad videos there. There was an outcry when the dislike button was removed, and so on..
I think if anyone disrupts it, its going to be over money.
Either reducing the number of ads (they really have increased quite a lot) or give a bigger piece of the advert pie to creators.
The problem is that if youtube is ever threatened its trivial for them to do both those things, and they can almost certainly outlast any up and coming competitor in a price war.
YouTube comment section can offer more like reddit. Where extended multiple level discussions can happen on the video with user profile and karma and all.
I agree, it's one of the few last places on the Internet where the content is not just rage bait or AI slop. These things are trying to creep in but so far they failed to dominate unlike other places.
My issues with YouTube are usually limited to some UI problems. I think I can even list them all:
1) Thumbnails autoplay but the disclaimer about paid content is so large that often I click to watch the video and get the paid content info page.
2) Translates stuff depending on my browser language and IP. Very annoying
3) The add to queue button sometimes doesn't work and just plays the video right away. Very annoying
4) When I'm listening to songs, sometimes I just let it auto play the next song it picks and often it picks 2 hours long video of songs sticked one after another. Very annoying
5) The share button adds som ID that I have to remove every time, it's probably to track my sharing behavior. Annoying
6) When chromecasting, tapping on a video or receiving it through airdrop used to give me an option to add it to the queue or play it right away. Now just plays right away. Annoying
7) If I navigate from a page and go back I'm presented with a different page and often the video I noticed previously isn't there.
Besides that, I think I don't have much issues with YT. Best money spent on a premium subscription ever.
Oh? I remember countless times it's been in the news (well, our news) for copyright abuse, appeals processes that are either an AI pretending to be human or a human pretending to be AI. The de-facto only way to clear up rampant abuse like mass claiming of videos over use of public domain music, is to have clout in social media.
Then there's the issue of AI slop channels, and pre-AI slop directed at children like the infamous Elsa and Spiderman spam.
Every so often they also are in the news for AB testing some anti-adblock measure. And people used to adblock who see it with ads for the first time in a while seem to always be shocked at the level of ads for pure fraud or malware.
YouTube seems to be a terrible place if you put anything up there that you actually care about. But I agree on one thing: it's not "ripe for disruption". Google sank so much losses into it for so many years just to have this monopoly, so it's not going to be easy to replace.
Sometimes the answer really is: it is a monopoly and it doesn't matter what they do.
They have all the eyeballs. All creators that got fucked over YT stay on the platform if their accounts are restored. And who can blame them, where are they going to go, Vimeo?
I don't think "the news" matters here as much as how it works, and it really doesn't work that well if you compare it to how it used to work.
If I open the Youtube app on my phone, I have to click through 3 menus before I can even see the newest video from the users I'm subscribed to, and then I have to watch 2 ads that change the entire layout of the app to present me more information about those ads - or I can pay $30 a month to skip those ads.
If I have spotty connectivity, I also can't buffer a video to watch anymore. I have to wait for some minimal percent to load, watch that part, then wait again. If I skip ahead, the earlier part is lost and has to be re-buffered.
Furthermore, not of immediate consequence to me, but still insufferably annoying is that creators I follow are regularly suspended from earning income on YouTube due to false copyright strikes, or saying a "bad word" that has no clear enforcement guidelines and seems to be different from person to person or day to day, and thus have begun to produce less content or found other platforms to move their videos to first.
It's pretty terrible, from my point of view. It's a bad service where a good service used to be, surviving on the dregs of goodwill and familiarity from its heyday.
Even without directly visiting the YouTube site, it's impossible to avoid contact with YouTube because its videos are embedded everywhere. In that sense, YouTube's influence is extremely large. I feel that the FTC might have been better off trying to separate YouTube from Google rather than Chrome.
The blog mentioned that the forced activation of Restricted Mode could have reduced video views, and while it's true that Restricted Mode blocks live streams, which could affect those who focus on live content, it basically doesn't block soft porn, violent videos, or political content. So, I don't think it's relevant.
> I feel that the FTC might have been better off trying to separate YouTube from Google rather than Chrome.
On what joy? The biggest mistake that DoJ did was asking to court to divest Android & Chrome. Judge took grave offense at that (read the court's opinion) and there's a school of thought that said it distracted from the whole thing.
Once you start being imprecise, all your arguments fall apart.
I am so fascinated by the different worlds everyone lives in.
I haven’t watched a video hosted on YouTube in years. But I hate amateur video. I never watch anything that I can possibly get through reading.
So in my tiny corner of user space, it’s really as if YouTube doesn’t exist except as an annoying thing Google puts at the top of searches I have to scroll past, reminding me to configure this device to use a different search engine.
There is a catch-22 that helps YouTube keep it's monopoly. Nobody will jump to another platform until all their favorite creators/majority of media is there, but no other platform is able to attract a significant portion of creators/media until they have a large base.
Systems that enable multi-platform natively are the answer to change the calculus on this problem. End-user clients such as Grayjay that enable users to view videos from multiple platforms at once can give much-needed views to creators on alternate platforms. A similar solution for creators (not sure if one exists or not) would lower the barrier to upload to all platforms at once.
Have you heard about Russia? Why bother of doing multi-platform if they can just prohibit anything Western and build their own digital platform for everything.
The solution that will actually work, then, is to build a platform that has the YouTube content. Don't try to convince creators to sign up for your new multiplatform thing - just rip it directly from YouTube. Now you're thinking like a VC-backed startup. Yes, it's illegal, so make sure to scale rapidly and become rich before they have time to sue you. Facebook did this to Myspace. Doordash did this to restaurant phone orders.
Wonder what’s the cause of decline in views. One plausible reaction I had was that views might be down because of people using AI search (ChatGPT, etc) which unlike Google don’t show videos prominently. But since likes haven’t gone down that doesn’t seem likely.
Could it be related to mandatory Widevine encryption?
On my phone, the mobile site (m.youtube.com) has introduced Widevine a couple of weeks ago (last week of August IIRC). No idea if I’m just unlucky and part of a shitty A/B experiment, but I definitely had to recompile libc (being on Linux) with patches from Chromium and install Widevine so I could watch videos again.
Whenever I replace my patched libc with the unpatched original, then the Widevine plugin crashes everytime I try to play back a video on m.youtube.com. And it used to work before.
Anecdotal, but for a while it felt like YouTube had decent content on whatever I was looking for. I trusted product reviews on there ever so slightly more than text content because of the relatively higher cost of producing videos. Nowadays there’s a glut of low quality stuff. Anything from low-effort videos to outright text-to-speech, non-videos that snare you using a promising thumbnail. The search results only surface about 5-10 relevant videos followed by things that have specious relevance. On top of that, they jammed Shorts into prominent screen real estate. It screams “hey while I’ve got you here, about a few of these distractions!”
So, I stopped going there as much. They stopped respecting visitor intentions. Just like every other platform, they just want to keep you on the site for as long as possible sifting through a feed of dopamine slop.
Apparently very few people use the subscriptions list and rely on the videos they subscribe and watch to appear on the Youtube homepage. And youtube changed what videos they put there. Instead of new videos by people you watch and related ones they show:
videos you just watched
videos you watched 10 years ago
auto dubbed videos on topics you are not interested
The idea that what's needed is for these alternative platforms to switch to "free with ads" is amazingly short sighted and disheartening. Everything bad YouTube does is driven by this business model. Switching to it might make a few people rich at the top of these alternative platforms, but it won't make anything better for any user or creator.
Russia tries to push its population to "alternatives" like Rutube(sic!) and VK Video by interfering into network connectivity (they call it "slowing down", they just drop fraction of packets that goes from YouTube servers), but it seems the success is quite limited.
is it possible that restriced mode is more aggressive for users not logged in?
I feel instead of trying to force google to sell chrome, they should have forced them to spinoff YouTube and other non-search monopolies google has that are insanely profitable.
> they should have forced them to spinoff YouTube and other non-search monopolies google has that are insanely profitable.
I dont think I follow the logic. Having a successful business is not grounds for "forcing" to spin out. Airpods are extremely successful, and does that mean it needs to be a separate company? MacBooks are extremely profitable, so should they be a different company? Azure is widely popular, should they be too?
> I also think that YouTube is a monopoly. There are some alternatives — I also pay for Nebula, for example — but they’re tiny in comparison. YouTube is effectively the place to watch video on the internet.
I've heard about an online video website called Netflix. Don't know if anybody is using it though.
>I also think it would take some doing to get advertisers to jump on a new platform when YouTube has almost all the viewers.
Volume isnt even your main issue here. YouTube ads are powered by adwords... that all advertisers already use. It comes with tracking and user-analytics built in.
You can't compete with YouTube by replicating this business model.
Even so.. direct YouTube ad revenue per view is low. Many successful tubers monetize with sponsors. That is replicable, if a (single) tuber has enough views.
I think there can be markets for smaller, paid video sites... but that's not really a competitor to YouTube. It's more like competition for substack.
The way YouTube is managed, including all the reasons for criticism, are why it is successful.
Legible rules have loopholes. Keeping advertisers "on their toes" with mystery rules is a strategy.
It makes sense to keep the platform as unoffensive as possible. Strict nudity rules, and other such "hard" rules. Demonetization gives yotube a chance to implement soft/illegible rules... many of them simply assumed or imagined. It also makes business sense to suppress politics a little. The chilling effect is intentional..
and understandable.
Honestly, I think the more open alternative to YouTube is podcasting. Podcasting has terrible discovery, and video is underdeveloped but... it also has persistence that proves it is a good platform.
Half of "the problem" with YouTube is Google running the platform and pursuing their own interests. These are somewhat restrictive, but they also make sense.
The other half is intense competition for daily attention. That's what a low friction, highly accessible platform does. You can't have everything.
Without all the restrictions and manipulations that YouTube do, the platforms would be 100% nudity, scandals and suchlike.
My bet is that some of these channels actually do real and honest reviews. So what’s the point of companies spending millions on YouTube ads if those same channels they criticized get more views—precisely because they’re better and more honest? I feel like this is a kind of selective nerf.
I was a daily, active, and paying Youtube user until recently and am quitting entirely. I was still able to work around many of Google's dark patterns – like the aggressive bot and adblock measures – but it was a chore I do not care to continue, and the emotional distress caused by the extreme hostility and toxicity around everything Youtube is too high a price to pay for content.
I support content creators on Patreon but unfortunately many of them still use Youtube for hosting and those videos are not accessible to me any longer.
fwiw I (a YouTube premium subscriber) recently enabled restricted mode myself due to the app showing me completely unrelated and 'scary' videos in searches.
After some searching I found a few threads where others had encountered this and restricted mode was the only thing that seemed to stop these videos and honestly they're jarring and unwanted enough for me to warrant enabling restricted mode and all the features it disables - YouTube please please stop these unrelated 'jump scare' videos!
as an example I'm scrolling through videos on how to fix a leaky tap at 10pm I'll come across a thumbnail 5 videos down with a ghostly face or trypophobia type thumbnail then another 5-10 videos down. in no way are they highlighted as sponsored and I find it hard to believe that Google with it's search skills and other far more relevant videos in the results can be returning these videos as results!
I first thought it would be easy for content creators to start selling their content on other platforms as well. But the algorithms come to play. It is likely valuable that the hardcore fans are watching and liking the videos on YouTube, since that increases the probability of the algorithms to push the videos to new viewers as well.
Good luck competing with youtube. They are something called natural monopoly. Even if you get the technicals right, networks effects will kick in. You would need to bring in something revoliutonary to get people to move. Or youtube to fuck up something really badly.
And getting the technicals right won't be easy. Video delivery is not text. Will need dedicated datacenters if you ever get popular and want to keep prices under control. It's expensive.
Youtube pretty aggressively blocks automated usage now. If you connect via a VPN it won't show any videos until you log in. Considering that ad income and real engagement seems unchanged, it possibly is just that they started blocking bots better. Something you wouldn't strictly expect a public announcement over.
I have seen the argument: all my games in Steam, all my movies in Netflix, all my videos on YouTube, etc.
To have to pick and choose between different apps makes everything more complex, and it is too much for the average user that has other things to worry about.
All this is really bad for capitalism, as it creates monopolies that no competition can fight against. It concentrates power and eliminates competition.
E-mail is still alive because it is the one place that one can get registration messages, invoices, goverment communications, etc. It is based on a standard so I can use my own provider but interact with all the rest of the world without caring what do they use. This is the future of the web.
For example, I should be able to download any movie app an see all the movies from Sony Pictures and Disney, and Ghibli, and all of them. Once purchased, I should be able to see all of them in the same app. The standard offers interfaces so I can choose one provider that connects to the world. Prices are the same on all apps, but they can differentiate themselves thru localization, recommendations, etc. This is feasible but it requires strong regulatory intervention as current monopolies are the best option to maximize profit and eliminate competition.
Ads are also perfectly fine to finance on-line videos. It is the tracking and invasive privacy practices what is dystopian and horrifying. Most of the revenue of YouTubers comes anyway by paying users (Patreon, etc.) or external traditional ads (NordVPN, SkillShare, etc.) that still ask for metrics for the channel but are not individually targeted.
Standards over platforms is the only possible future, but it will require to topple down the current status quo and that is what is difficult to do.
This. Email and text is one of those things were you are not stuck to a single provider. Anything closed and proprietary is a problem. I'd say this is also the case for banking. Banks often require Google Play or iOS, severely constraining the user. Governments somehow need to put a stop to this, especially in the EU where we are becoming a US colony due to all our IT being in the hands of US companies. We need to take back control!
They aren't a tier 1 but they also aren't paying for most of their bandwdith. They peered very liberally in the past so have zero settlement peering to most networks and if you're a big enough eyeball network you can request a caching server from them where you pay for rack space, power and network and google just pays for the server hardware. [0]
I prefer Vimeo, as a content publisher, but I don’t monetize, nor have I posted many vids. I’ve simply used the “pro” option, which I have recently let lapse.
I just feel that Vimeo’s video quality is better, and it gives more direct control of the content.
But I do so little video work, that it hasn’t been worth it to maintain the subscription.
It's a hard question to answer for products that rely on user created content like this.
Rumble and vimeo provide basically the same service, but if you got fed up with YouTube and wanted to take your money (eyeballs) elsewhere, you can't, because rumble and vimeo don't have the same content at all. And if you were a creator you can't take your content elsewhere because there's no viewers.
This sentence is just oddly thrown in there and is made the title of the article. Yes they're a monopoly, but so what? As you say they're the best bang for buck subscription service on the market.
The problem is that they are unable to see why their viewership has dropped, that's it. I'm sure Youtube might provide context as to why at some point.
YouTube is a marvelous platform. I know how to live life, thanks to the innumerable passionate souls that produced relevant content and put their voice out there. This library of videos never fails to amaze me on how many weird, fun, informative tidbits of humanity it contains. As much as it is a for-profit endeavor, I wholeheartedly support this well managed space.
I watch my son grow up learning to DIY from youtube videos. I'm marveling at the wealth of instructional video he has easy access to, and I wish I had it too when I had my first home, learned to work on my first car, etc.
Hot Take: Youtube is terrible. It's a time sink that's filled with billions of videos that take 15-20 minutes to talk about a topic that's worth only 1-3 minutes of your time. Text is skimmable and easily absorbable, Video is not.
> ... a topic that's worth only 1-3 minutes of your time
It's even worse sometimes, googling some "how to" queries returns links to yt-videos. Even if the video is 5 minutes, it's a waste of time, because I'm usually in the middle of an ongoing process when dozens variants are evaluated and an average dedicated time for a single one is much shorter.
Transcripts sometimes help. But not the native (no diarization as long as I remember). An example, Lex Fridman podcast is a good source of anecdata from famous science/tech/non-tech people and provides good transcripts on the site (but only starting some point in the past). For transcripts before this point v1.transcript.lol covered many, but amongst other glitches no names for diarization (Speaker 1/ Speaker 2).
> Today I saw a video by the RedLetterMedia folks on this topic. If you’re not familiar with their work, be warned that the video is vulgar and juvenile (sorry, I love their stuff).
Heh, maybe haven't watched some of their deeper cuts; back in the day they were a lot more edgy especially with series like Plinkett Reviews. They've toned it down a bit, but they're definitely not a 'family friendly' channel in some of the content they release (not in a bad way, just... I wouldn't put on a random RLM video at a grade school function!).
Likes and comments are steady, apparently. How do you reconcile the reduced views with that? Anyway, nearly one-third to one-half of my video suggestions are bot videos. Honestly quite distasteful. They should just ask the users to flag them, instead of employing even more bots who're ever so enthusiastic to kick out those who do not belong to their race.
Isn’t a monopoly just a market leader that leverages its dominant position in anti-competitive ways? The article does make a (weak, IMO) argument that YouTube is using its position to screw creators out of revenue by gaming metrics.
People still think that Youtube of today is the Youtube of yesterday. But that is not the case ever since the first adpocalypse.
Youtube began as a video hosting platform where creators got a huge cut from ads being shown on their video page. Today, the ads are injected into the videos and creators get only a tiny portion of the profits - if any. The views are gone as only (highly)monetised content is being promoted by the algorithm. Google simply prioritises making money for themselves instead of providing a service that merely breaks even.
Youtube has done what most businesses do - they pay the initial opex costs and provide some kind of freemium, they get huge number of users, then they monetise the sh.. out of them. And it always ends the same - the platform dies as users leave. Youtube is not any different. It's just so big that this process takes much longer than usual. But do not be fooled, it is happening.
Nowadays, people are slowly realising that there is no more free lunch and that you have to pay for the content(see how many streaming services there are compared to just a few years ago). This is why paywall services like Patreon are so popular(and why I have created my own as well as it is one of few viable online businesses left in the digital space).
Content creators who are relying on anonymous views, that Youtube always provided and which is now slowly dying, will end up out of business and many in debt due to costs of the video gear they bought and oversaturated marked/competition. There is plethora of this "i'm broke" videos on YT itself exposing the harsh reality of digital content creation of today.
On the other hand, smart content creators have realised that the way forward is to build smaller community of reliable fans and use paywalls/pay-per-view model, where they can charge tiny amount whilst getting 95% of it for themselves, which incentivises users to pay(ie. i am willing to pay 10 cents directly to my favourite content creator rather than 5$ to youtube). Some are stuck in the middle with injecting sponsored content into their own, but that will die out soon as well and likely YT will ban it straight up sooner or later. There will be some networks that host multiple creators, like we already have with unauthorized.tv, censored.tv and others. The YT alternatives like Odysee or Rumble will not survive as they are using the same outdated business model as Youtube does but they lack the backing of Google(not just money but infrastructure).
It will take time but people will eventually flock to specific content creators instead of relying on algorithms to recommended them content they might be interested in - as this has been completely broken for a decade now and caused huge amount of great content creators to just quit for good. A huge loss to humanity as a whole.
This will be the next generation of content creators whom will understand that the game has changed.
I keep seeing people say this: "I pay for YouTube Premium. For my money, it’s the best bang-for-the-buck subscription service on the market" and I don't understand.
For me, Premium's only value proposition is removing ads. Recommendations are still the same (quite shitty). Search is unusable (4 relevant results then unrelated recommendations). Shorts are pushed aggressively no matter how many times you hide them. Search in history will often not find even something you just watched a few days ago.
Yes basically all it does is remove ads. Those of us who are happy with it are those of us who don’t feel entitled to unlimited video streaming for free. Most people think YouTube should just be free and have no ads for some reason, and they probably wouldn’t say Premium is such a great deal.
The new thing that YouTube Premium includes is the one button press to skip over "commonly skipped parts of the video"- typically the in-video promotions. This just showed up last week on my nVidia shield connected to my TV. So finally there is a way to remove ads for real. It would be nice if it did it automatically.
The creator is getting paid more from my Premium subscription, so I definitely do not want to see their own ads.
YouTube music being included effectively replaces an additional music streaming service. From that perspective the family oriented plans in particular carry a lot of value.
On top of removing ads and giving you a couple extra minor features, it also has a way better rev split with creators (last I heard). Half of the sub gets divvied up to the people you watched that month, portioned out via watch time.
Full disclousure: I work for Google, but nowhere near YT/YT music. Opinions are my own and I am actually a customer as I pay for YT premium with a family plan for me, my wife, and our son.
While I agree YT without Ads is great, you also get YT music which is really good and for us it replaced Spotify completely.
Personally, though, I don't have a problem with search (maybe because I set a lot of channels as "do not recommend/show"). Shorts, however, they are really annoying.
Absolutely, If premium sorted out all those problems and generally treated creators better i'd have a subscription.
I come to youtube for the *creators*, the actual platform where I have watch history off and use extensions to block the aggressively pushed slop as it currently stands is not something I want to put money towards.
I'm already a patreon to a few creators and have a Nebula subscription; adding it up it's probably slightly more than a premium subscription.
The other useful Youtube Premium feature is the ability to offline download videos to your device. Useful for long plane rides and elsewhere where internet is limited or nonexistent.
I doubt there will ever be an alternative to YouTube. "Disrupting" YouTube is difficult because the social conditions that created YouTube do not exist anymore.
Before you get into cdns, bandwidth, advertisers, and social features, you need to have content - and a steady flow of content. What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.
Any new competitor eventually runs into the fact that
* Your largest users eventually stop posting if you don't pay them (because they can go elsewhere after using your platform as a springboard: see Vine)
* In order to actually pay creators you need to have the capital, legal, and advertising side completely figured out.
So on top of building a giant cdn, you need gobs of money to pay people to stay on your platform, and another gob of money because you will be sued to death (especially because once you start paying people, people will cheat, and pirate content).
All this means is YouTube has an incredible moat. If YouTube dies, I doubt there will ever be a replacement.
I love YouTube, so many things to learn. But their recent push to just ignore people capable of speaking two or more languages with their auto-translated bullshit and no way to turn it off makes me use YouTube way less.
It’s a bummer that nobody there seems to realize this. They only see a very dumb metric. Probably something like "did this German dude watch at least one Spanish videos, because we auto-translate titles and voice". It feels disrespectful.
> What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.
They still do. The vast majority of YT content is not monetized by creators, often not even eligible for it in the first place. Further, some big-ticket content creators hedge their bets, uploading to backup platforms, trying to shift to Patreon, etc.
The main thing is that viewers only ever go to YouTube, a learned habit. This is where they listen to music, where they get their news, where the algorithm suggests them related videos, where they can search for tutorials and reviews for gear, etc.
But TikTok shows that you can disrupt that simply by offering a video format that is different in some way and thus not gated by the same muscle memory.
YouTube as a whole has a giant moat.
But niches within YouTube can be disrupted. We've seen it with short form (TikTok etc), music (Spotify etc). We see it with specific niches of content creators (nebula etc). It's happened with livestreams.
I'm bad at predicting future, but could imagine niches like "publicly funded content" from e.g. EU public broadcasters moving away (e.g. NPOstart in NL) because of privacy issues or because they legally can't monetize their content anyway. Maybe university lectures? Or sports video? Game reviews by a specialized platform by steam? Video between 4 and 10 minutes? Podcast videos?
So YouTube as a whole will stay, but it can be chipped away at. Some chips may prove in themselves a small, but still good business model.
So if you succeed, how the terabytes of content and bandwidth will be sponsored - by what? The only way i can think of it is some super-efficient neural codec with extreme video compression ratio that runs on mobile devices. Othewise Youtube wins by sheer scale google invested in it.
YouTube has recently have had massive, competitive attacks on their business and have had to quite drastically amend their offerings.
TikTok, SnapChat and instagram has all had huge success in their short form formats.
It’s not unheard of, that even millennial couples, will spend and evening together in bed scrolling TikTok instead of watching tv together.
While the battle is far from over, had YouTube not reacted, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these mobile first competitors would have started experimenting with long form content by now.
I disagree, the internet is full of websites who were on the top of the world until they weren't. Its easy for content creators to post their content on multiple sites. The main moat is the critical mass of users.
/. Used to be the goto tech forum, but now we are all at hn. Digg was the place to be, now its reddit. Audiences can shift surprisingly suddenly.
> "Disrupting" YouTube is difficult
For a company, it's impossible. For any country except for the US, it's very easy: you use any of the million different protectionist measures available. Such as tarriffs, as the US itself has taken a liking to - in this case it would be their digital equivalent, namely digital service taxes.
I remember reading a history of YouTube once, and early on they were about to go under from the sheer weight of music industry copyright lawsuits and the cost of bandwidth. Google had the technology, heft and resources to do infringement detection at scale to really save them, not to mention their global bandwidth.
Currently many YouTube creators request additional money on patreon-style platforms. It either means that YouTube's paycheck sucks OR they are greedy. In both cases this reverts your arguments on paying to creators, because if some platform would be better in some meaningful property, it could steal the user base.
For example - background playing, less commercials, less distractions etc.
> "Disrupting" YouTube is difficult because the social conditions that created YouTube do not exist anymore.
That simply means that the alternative to YouTube will look nothing like YouTube.
A lot of creators that started with a YouTube channel nowadays have moved a lot of content to social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram reels. To me YouTube risk to be replaced (or it has already been replaced) by short videos, because a lot of people is no longer interested in watching a 20 minutes long video nowadays, especially new generations tend to spend a lot of time on just TikTok.
On the other hand, an alternative without all the "content creators" that are just in it for the money sounds really great to me.
Maybe it can be replaced by something like Anna's archive, but for videos.
TikTok disrupted YT and gained over a billion MAU.
All this means is its a public good and should be made a utility. Either directly or strip mined and mirrored.
If the US government was a function body, it would force Youtube to separate the hosting business and the website itself. The hosting would be a low margin low risk business which doesn't care about traffic either way. It's just selling infrastructure the way telecom companies do. It would be paid by websites to offer a frontend to users.
This way there is real competition on what matters, the user experience and still a economy of scale on what costs a lot which is actually storing and delivering videos.
Some frontend would be free with ads, some with a paywall but without ads. Some low quality, some high quality, some both. The user would have a choice. Each creator would be free to choose its licensing model. The hosting company would then only provide the video to frontends following the creator's wish.
The creator would pay by the bytes stored and the frontend by the bytes transferred. No incentive for the hosting provider to favor either of them.
Not perfect as the hosting company is still a monopoly, but it could be regulated to be neutral and behave like a utility.
The frontend has to cater to users and nobody else. They have competition and disappear if they enshittify.
Creators are free from the tyranny of google. They become the clients of the hosting company which makes steady money whatever the content.
Everybody wins, except google, which is fine by me.
I do not see that as inherently correct. There have been and are several alternatives to YouTube and every single one has been actively sabotaged for primarily political/ideological reasons that have nothing to do with any of what you are talking about.
There is quite literally a conspiracy to suppress alternatives to YouTube because they do not align with the ideological parameters of the pernicious system. If you let that boot up from humanity’s neck, there would be many competitors to YouTube that would immediately atrophy YouTube. You seem to simply not be aware of what is going on outside of the authorized narrative. You will never be able to see the reality of things if you limit yourself to only the confines of the illusion matrix created for you by the system.
But yes, YouTube has a moat and like all moats it is built and maintained by the tyrannical monarch who believes himself to be chosen by God, but must hide away behind it from reality.
There will always be a new kid on the block.
The replacement may be AI generated content or something.
Let me go into wild eyed futurist speculative mode here,
1- AI/LLMs are basically a response to the enshittification of Google. The reason this tech is so good and useful is because for years Google rewarded SEO optimized content a.k.a. long winded articles that repeat the same words over and over again and take ten years to make a point, which after training on all that gunk, your LLM can now do in one paragraph. The Google search monopoly gave rise to this lengthy word salad web content and blanketed the earth with it. The AI summarizer arose as a natural response. The web as we know it may now die.
2- The software industry seems to gravitate toward a layer cake of monopolies. E.g. we have Microsoft monopolize the OS and app platform, it becomes so awful the government even tries to put the brakes on it, partially succeeds, then we get the Web application platform. Sitting in a browser on top of Windows and others. Which Google goes on to monopolize. One may suppose that another platform will be built on top of this, which will be unmonopolized for a few years, and then someone will monopolize and enshittify that too, paving the way for the next cycle. It's turtles all the way down.
3- How this pertains to YouTube, well in the near future I suppose someone could ingest all of YouTube, and create AI versions of it, exactly like what was done with the web. And they might even get away with it once we set a bunch of legal precedents that this is not a thing you can get sued for. Presumably the AI platform would need to be different or better in some way, so perhaps we'll see a video platform where all the content is generated on the fly by AI, and you can get exactly what you want because it was trained on the videos that humans made. E.g. you can simply tell the AI you want to watch a comedy show called Three and a Half Horses where all the characters are reverse centaurs, and it will spin up as many episodes as you want until you get bored. And YouTube will continue to be an aging monopoly for decades, like Windows, but no one will really care because we'll be watching horses deliver Seinfeld quality jokes [1]
[1] It's not horses and it's not as good as Seinfeld, but someone's already doing this. So all that remains for my prognostication to come true is for a financial crisis to happen, at which point the government can use it as an excuse to print a random $500B and give it to a politically connected billionaire intermediary who will invest a fraction of it into the engineering, and history will continue to march forward as it does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever
Youtube relies on human creators.
Youtube will be disrupted by AI created, better content.
Who builds AITube? AITok?
I don't know. TikTok was able to take on Youtube. May have even won by now if the government hadn't intervened.
The author makes an argument that at least looks like people choose YT over Nebula because YT is free. I, for example, already pay for Nebula, so I can watch it for free, but I still go to YT.
IMO it might be just a product problem. I opened nebula and:
* The same video had a better title on YT that was actually less clickbaity and more informative - assumedly because of YT algorithm for optimization
* Nebula auto set quality to 480p compared to 1080p in YT - if I wasn't tech-savvy I'd assume it's just worse quality.
* The loading times when you seek to part that's not loaded yet are 10x longer
* I missed comments
The recommendation algorithm is weaker too, I can't tell to what extent this is due to YouTube having simply more data and to what extent it's weaker engineering.
just want to also plug dropout.tv, which is way less annoying than Nebula with ads-in-video, and is just a generally entertaining good time + inspiring business story.
> The recommendation algorithm is weaker too
That's a low bar to be honest, because google's recommendation algorithm is absolutely atrocious.
This seems like a very strange perspective. Nebula is for specifically following content creators you really like and enjoy their videos earlier and at a better quality (plus some exclusive content).
Why would you particularly care about the title is that's a videomaker you follow anyway? Why would you care about seeking times? Are you jumping constantly in an ad-free and sponsor-free video you specifically subscribed for? Why miss the comments? Is it a video sharing platform or social media?
Author here. I woke up to a surprising amount of traffic! Some notes based on the discussion.
This wasn't coordinated between Jeff Geerling and myself. However, I did mention the post in the Bluesky thread that Jeff was included in. [0]
I concluded the piece with “[t]his space is ripe for disruption”. That was a really poor choice of words. I've since updated the piece to better match what I was trying to say. Diffs are available. [1]
On YouTube: as I mention in the piece, I think the service is excellent as a consumer, and I pay for Premium.
This piece was mostly written because I've been frustrated that YouTube is effectively the only place for user submitted video on the internet. I wasn't going to write anything until I saw the video from RedLetterMedia that I mentioned in the post. They have a huge following and were blaming something that might be related? Or might not? It's really hard to tell! I'm not a YouTube creator, but I assume having metrics that determine your livelihood shift out from under you as a creator must feel awful.
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/gavin.anderegg.ca/post/3lyeayuckv22...
[1] https://github.com/gavinanderegg/gavinanderegg.github.io/com...
> On YouTube: as I mention in the piece, I think the service is excellent as a consumer, and I pay for Premium
Why? Because the tools that allow them to take almost 50% of the revenue (they say you earn) have low friction?
I would say the opposite. There is no customer service. There are endless legal pit traps that allow larger channels and companies to predate on smaller ones alongside the AI channels, which lead to the same end. The entire point of the platform is to push as much advertising as possible, while mutating a user's search habits. Ironically, this leads to videos becoming borderline useless for many use cases, without taking them off youtube. This is not a good platform.
I'm sure I feel this way because I don't have a bunch of content I'm afraid of being yanked from the platform. Another "benefit" of having a big youtube presence, is I would be forever worried about implied retaliation.
Linus Tech Tips has also noticed some really odd view to like ratio stuff happening recently as well. They discuss it in last weeks WAN show.
Something is going on.
> This piece was mostly written because I've been frustrated that YouTube is effectively the only place for user submitted video on the internet.
Well, technically there's lots of user submitted videos posted to p*rn sites... Apparently even started posting educational videos there, like math and neural networks and stuff.
I host videos on my own server and there's Vimeo and Mux. I guess you're saying it's the free-as-in-beer service that has a social network and recommendation network attached to uploaded videos.
Structurally there's only a few ways disruption can happen to a platform that has existing centralized hosting of metadata and centralized hosting of data. Either the disruptor also centralizes both, decentralizes just the data or decentralizes both.
The second isn't viable in most real world cases until something changes the huge expense of decentralized CDN fetching. My gut says that the third would be on the losing side of almost every network effect.
Hmm,
One of the things that is notable about Youtube is there was once competition (Vimeo and Daily Motion) but they effectively outdistanced it. A bit like Amazon and Ebay. There are related things semi-competing like Twitch.TV etc, also, of course.
I suspect that the situation with the earlier video providers is that they were "bleeding cash" for many years until the process finally reversed - if they were the winner (again like Amazon).
I think this long capital investment process is what means that no one wants to or expects to step into the ring with a large, successful player. It took that player a long time to learn to be successful, that player will fight you to keep their relative monopoly and you will have to risk a lot of money.
Youtube content creators are effectively Youtube's suppliers. Youtube is squeezing and its "normal" - squeezing suppliers is part of the monopolist's playbook. Its unfortunately convenient for Youtube that people have been willing to make good quality video for nearly nothing since the tools to do so became cheaply available.
Why there is "no competition" for Nvidia, Amazon, Youtube, etc. Not that I like the situation but it's not an "unnatural" situation.
I'm worried that if one day YouTube dies, all that content will go down as well. At least you can store full Wikipedia archive.
And don't tell me it will never happen, I'm old enough to have heard that a few times already.
ArchiveTeam is working on backing up selected channels/videos to the Internet Archive, where they can also be watched via their Wayback Machine. You can help them decide what is culturally or historically important enough to save.
ArchiveTeam generally is an interesting project I highly recommend people read about.
Their YouTube project can be seen here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/YouTube
And you can learn how to get involved (by running a virtual machine appliance) here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
It has already happened. A lot of content that used to be available on YouTube is gone because of policy changes (unlisted content automatically changed to private, banned users, videos deleted by the site) and more is already only available to logged in users or only in certain countries even though they used to be public.
Video quality apparently slightly degrades as youtube constantly re-encodes/processes things and there's at least one well-known example of a Neil Cicierega video being completely unplayable https://twitter.com/neilcic/status/911080613733580801?s=20 (not this specific video, but this has happened in the past)
You should be locally saving any video you ever think you will want to watch again. Many of the videos I enjoyed in college of regular people just making stuff for fun (when being a content creator wasn't a thing) have been taken out by reruns of copyright searching bots and creators turning 30 and being embarrassed by what they posted in their 20s. One musical artist I followed decided to take down all of their old content because their latest album wasn't getting enough plays.
I save everything with replay value now, especially music.
On a personal level, you don't need the entire platform to go down to notice the bitrot. Over half of my "Watch Later" and other playlists from 8(?) years ago are now "deleted/private" videos.
I have been personally archiving the channels with content I enjoy. I know that doesn't help the general population…
Anything can disappear in this modern era. Thankfully YouTube is not DRM protected yet and you can do something about it. Any media company can take any video offline and your access to it will be gone. Same for ebooks, not only those tied to your account, but I was thinking, what if Overdrive/Libby terminate the access to particular library.
The steady state idea that most people have about civilization is just not applicable once there is oil-dependent information technology.
Either we go up and eliminate the oil dependence but acceleration eats YouTube in a transformative way, or we go up and eliminate the oil dependence but societal fission eats YouTube in a catabolic way.
I don't think this monopoly is really mysterious. Storage costs money. Bandwidth costs money. Someone needs to pay for it and the only way to cover those costs at any meaningful fraction of Youtube's scale is to have a money printing machine like Google's ads.
In 2005, sure.
Its a bit more mysterious now a days though. Video compression got way better (albeit video quality also went way up), hard drives got way cheaper. Bandwidth is really cheap at scale. People are way better selling ads now then they used to be. A lot of video serving infrastructure got standardized.
Don't get me wrong, its still hard and expensive, but i don't feel that is the moat it once was. Network effects is also a whole other conversation.
I think the idea is that they operate as a black box and work in mysterious ways, not that it's mysterious how they became a monopoly.
I don't thinks it's quite that simple, there are other factors as well:
There are significant network effects. Content creators use youtube because there are a lot of viewers watching content there, and viewers use it because there is lots of content there. Since YouTube already dominates the market, it is extremely difficult for another platform to compete, even if it was better in every way.
Google can promote YouTube using its other monopolies/oligopolies. Most notably, google search prioritizes videos on YouTube over other videos. Also, being able to pay for video ads and search ads with a single vendor is probably actractive for ad space buyers.
Google also already has its own CDN, which probably reduces the cost of distributing the content.
Also youtube is big enough that they can get cache servers in isp datacenters for the popular content - it saves the isp the cost of a bigger pipe so deals not offered in general exist. (Netflix also has this with some - or at least they were working on it years ago)
At the rates I use video, my CDN doesn't care I'm distributing video bits, so at my end of the use spectrum, video bandwidth costs no more than the CDN fees I'm already paying. But yes, that won't work for Netflix or Disney+.
If the quantities of money paid to all the YouTube freelance advertisers is anything to go on, a video platform having their own ad network would itself be highly profitable.
> I think this space is ripe for disruption, but there are only a handful of companies who could make a go of it… and I think they’d lose a lot of money for a long time while they tried.
If you have to lose a lot of money for a long time to compete, how is it ripe for disruption?
YouTube works because it has eyeballs, content/creators, advertisers, a cdn, and has made enough piece with large copyright license holders that it's allowed to continue.
Competing with YouTube is certainly possible, and there's a lot of fun technical work, but there's also a big challenge to attract the people you need to make the thing work. You probably already need to already have two out of four of users, content, advertisers, cdn. And you need to get licenseholders on board quick. And probably law enforcement as well.
I'm not saying it is or isn't a monopoly, but it would be hard to compete with. I think monopoly would depend on the defined market... a broadly defined market might include netflix and even cable tv. A narrowly defined market would include durably published user uploads, which has a lot fewer entrants.
>Competing with YouTube is certainly possible,
It is, but it's hard to gain the same audience share for all the reasons you mention.
Just ask Dailymotion, Vimeo, Twitch, Odysee, Peertube, Rumble, Kick, BitChute...
> and there's a lot of fun technical work
Maybe it's just me, but I don't find such kind of work "fun". I would have a constant feeling of "well, we are simply trying to mimic what YT did, maybe we should just hire someone that worked there and do the same, instead of going through the same inevitable mistakes".
YouTube already has a very big albeit usual competitor - PornHub.
In the UK we have the venerable BBC which is struggling with the revenue model, cost of broadcasting and much else. I am not a fan but I think that under new leadership they could do the disruption.
In what way?
Youtube is not social media. Nobody makes new friends whilst on YT. However, broadcast TV in the olden days before satellite TV and video recorders provided a shared conversation for the whole nation. You could spark up a conversation by asking a friend if they saw something on the TV during the previous evening. Nowadays people say DON'T TELL ME, I HAVEN'T WATCHED IT YET with no further conversation possible without changing topic.
A video platform could build community by letting people know if their friends and family have enjoyed watching the same programmes. Also possible is a mechanism whereby you can have a schedule made just for you. I have two YT faves, one which is fun (parasocial relationship) and another which is intellectual. If it is early in the evening and I am possibly relaxing with food then I will want the former, not the latter. On a daily basis I could have what we had in the olden days, light entertainment in the early evening and stuff that requires some brain cells later.
Revenue is always interesting and the state broadcasters in the English speaking world might as well pool resources and supply content people enjoy as soft propaganda on a free basis with no adverts. If the CDNs are in place with everything cached with a little bit of P2P, the cost model for delivery could be improved on.
Agree, another point is that video content making is a space full of grifters, unlike other form of media.
Take Kick for example, made to compete against Youtube and Twitch, but ended up with mostly people who are banned by those 2 platforms for a good reason. "Kick streamers" is now a negative words.
So new players on this field has to be specific about curating the people posting on their platforms.
nah its too late honestly, if big tech didn't want or care to make competing platform
how can you expect company that has less resource make an alternative ???? I still remember when microsoft throwing money to make mixer (twitch alternative) and yet it failed miserably
tiktok is close as we can get honestly, but youtube also expand toward shorts
YouTube was built on piracy and then Google bought YouTube and got immunity from copyright infringement claims by selling its user data to LE/IC in exchange for legal immunity. YouTube is still powered by piracy world wide. They only enforce copyright controls in western markets where the potential consumer is expected to have the income to afford streaming services. This is on par for the entire Google empire, which is all built on piracy, whether it is putting their ads on other people's content, redistributing other peoples's content without licenses, or building AI built on unlicensed content. And the whole thing works because they give their users personal data to intel and law enforcement in exchange for back door immunity deals.
Monopolies naturally come from doing a thing the best possible way. YouTube does it. I personally use it very rarely and wouldn't care about its disappearance, but I don't know of other services serving its users needs better.
So: YouTube will cease to be a monopoly if 1) user needs change 2) it stops being the best at serving videos. Until then, it's not mysterious.
YouTube has a superior offering to competitors, just like Spotfify has a superior offering to YT music. I pay for both Spotify and YouTube, but I don't listen to music on YT music because Spotify is just a vastly superior solution for delivering the music.
I’m a paying customer, but my biggest issue is that the content and suggestions themselves are still ads. I feel like I am paying to remove ads from within my ads.
The videos I am being recommended are still about how natural McDonalds food is, how this natural supplement from XYZ is disrupting healthcare and how this coffee machine will revolutionize the way I make coffee.
If the recommendation algorithm would be a bit less corporate, I’d be a happy customer. That, plus Apple Watch standalone Youtube Music app.
My personal experience is that the increase in ads has encouraged me to subscribe to creators I like via Patreon and view content on there. If many people are doing this, I wonder if it skews the view statistics and, therefore, lowers the number of recommendations for the best channels. In turn, this makes it less likely for good channels to be discovered. The increase in YouTube ads also makes me much less interested in browsing there, and I am finding other things to do instead.
You just don't make enough money from ads anyway, a lot of creators now see YT as more of top of funnel advertising leading you to a patreon or even more common livestream format where they make the real money from superchats.
“This space is ripe for disruption”. On the contrary I feel like YouTube is extremely well managed. For an application that is this ubiquitous and this well known, it seems to work pretty well. I can’t remember the last time it was in news for something bad.
Sometimes the answer really is: it is well managed product.
Youtube is such a dominant and ubiquitous monopoly that it is almost easy to forget about it as a monopoly because there is so little competition to contrast against and to even remind you that there ought to be. I've wondered for years why it gets so little attention vs so many of the other tech giants that do have more competition.
Well managed? Not so sure about that.. the fact that UMG can harass content creators unchecked is a problem, and it's not just UMG abusing the copyright strike system.
Also, the amount of highjacked accounts and the length of time to regain control is absurdly long.
And Shorts. I wish I could disable Shorts from my feed.
What is the "product"?
A website? ("platform" for advertising) A website's users? ("you are the product") Paid subscriptions? (insufficient revenue to sustain operations)
If YouTube is a "product" does that mean US products liability laws apply? (Please support your answer with facts not opinions)
History so far has shown website popularity varies over time
https://hosting.com/blog/the-most-visited-websites-every-yea...
Would anyone today claim that, for example, Yahoo.com was "extremely well managed"? Yahoo was #1 for many years. Change is inevitable
It is hilarious to see people obsessed with targeting virtually anything for "disruption" until their favorite website becomes the target
In any organisation there is always room for improvement. Monopoly power reduces, perhaps even eliminates, incentive to improve
For some definition of well, that includes forcing shorts on everyone and getting most of the youth addicted to your product.
I don't know it's constantly kicking youtubers I subscribe to off the site, and removing videos. It would be nice if it were more censorship resistant
I do not have a youtube account. I never sign in. If I go to watch a video and I get confronted with a puzzle to solve then I immediately close my browser and go do something else. This has led to a personal trend of using youtube less frequently.
I agree that it is a mostly well managed product, but I can think of a lot of things when it was in the news for something bad. Most controversial is probably the increase in the amount of Ads, unskippable ads, then there was multiple problems with Youtube kids, e.g. how bad people get really bad videos there. There was an outcry when the dislike button was removed, and so on..
I think if anyone disrupts it, its going to be over money.
Either reducing the number of ads (they really have increased quite a lot) or give a bigger piece of the advert pie to creators.
The problem is that if youtube is ever threatened its trivial for them to do both those things, and they can almost certainly outlast any up and coming competitor in a price war.
YouTube comment section can offer more like reddit. Where extended multiple level discussions can happen on the video with user profile and karma and all.
I agree, it's one of the few last places on the Internet where the content is not just rage bait or AI slop. These things are trying to creep in but so far they failed to dominate unlike other places.
My issues with YouTube are usually limited to some UI problems. I think I can even list them all:
1) Thumbnails autoplay but the disclaimer about paid content is so large that often I click to watch the video and get the paid content info page.
2) Translates stuff depending on my browser language and IP. Very annoying
3) The add to queue button sometimes doesn't work and just plays the video right away. Very annoying
4) When I'm listening to songs, sometimes I just let it auto play the next song it picks and often it picks 2 hours long video of songs sticked one after another. Very annoying
5) The share button adds som ID that I have to remove every time, it's probably to track my sharing behavior. Annoying
6) When chromecasting, tapping on a video or receiving it through airdrop used to give me an option to add it to the queue or play it right away. Now just plays right away. Annoying
7) If I navigate from a page and go back I'm presented with a different page and often the video I noticed previously isn't there.
Besides that, I think I don't have much issues with YT. Best money spent on a premium subscription ever.
> I can’t remember the last time it was in news for something bad
It was a few days ago for the AI auto-filter and also Beato copyright claims.
Oh? I remember countless times it's been in the news (well, our news) for copyright abuse, appeals processes that are either an AI pretending to be human or a human pretending to be AI. The de-facto only way to clear up rampant abuse like mass claiming of videos over use of public domain music, is to have clout in social media.
Then there's the issue of AI slop channels, and pre-AI slop directed at children like the infamous Elsa and Spiderman spam.
Every so often they also are in the news for AB testing some anti-adblock measure. And people used to adblock who see it with ads for the first time in a while seem to always be shocked at the level of ads for pure fraud or malware.
YouTube seems to be a terrible place if you put anything up there that you actually care about. But I agree on one thing: it's not "ripe for disruption". Google sank so much losses into it for so many years just to have this monopoly, so it's not going to be easy to replace.
Sometimes the answer really is: it is a monopoly and it doesn't matter what they do.
They have all the eyeballs. All creators that got fucked over YT stay on the platform if their accounts are restored. And who can blame them, where are they going to go, Vimeo?
I don't think "the news" matters here as much as how it works, and it really doesn't work that well if you compare it to how it used to work.
If I open the Youtube app on my phone, I have to click through 3 menus before I can even see the newest video from the users I'm subscribed to, and then I have to watch 2 ads that change the entire layout of the app to present me more information about those ads - or I can pay $30 a month to skip those ads.
If I have spotty connectivity, I also can't buffer a video to watch anymore. I have to wait for some minimal percent to load, watch that part, then wait again. If I skip ahead, the earlier part is lost and has to be re-buffered.
Furthermore, not of immediate consequence to me, but still insufferably annoying is that creators I follow are regularly suspended from earning income on YouTube due to false copyright strikes, or saying a "bad word" that has no clear enforcement guidelines and seems to be different from person to person or day to day, and thus have begun to produce less content or found other platforms to move their videos to first.
It's pretty terrible, from my point of view. It's a bad service where a good service used to be, surviving on the dregs of goodwill and familiarity from its heyday.
Even without directly visiting the YouTube site, it's impossible to avoid contact with YouTube because its videos are embedded everywhere. In that sense, YouTube's influence is extremely large. I feel that the FTC might have been better off trying to separate YouTube from Google rather than Chrome.
The blog mentioned that the forced activation of Restricted Mode could have reduced video views, and while it's true that Restricted Mode blocks live streams, which could affect those who focus on live content, it basically doesn't block soft porn, violent videos, or political content. So, I don't think it's relevant.
> I feel that the FTC might have been better off trying to separate YouTube from Google rather than Chrome.
On what joy? The biggest mistake that DoJ did was asking to court to divest Android & Chrome. Judge took grave offense at that (read the court's opinion) and there's a school of thought that said it distracted from the whole thing.
Once you start being imprecise, all your arguments fall apart.
I am so fascinated by the different worlds everyone lives in.
I haven’t watched a video hosted on YouTube in years. But I hate amateur video. I never watch anything that I can possibly get through reading.
So in my tiny corner of user space, it’s really as if YouTube doesn’t exist except as an annoying thing Google puts at the top of searches I have to scroll past, reminding me to configure this device to use a different search engine.
There is a catch-22 that helps YouTube keep it's monopoly. Nobody will jump to another platform until all their favorite creators/majority of media is there, but no other platform is able to attract a significant portion of creators/media until they have a large base.
Systems that enable multi-platform natively are the answer to change the calculus on this problem. End-user clients such as Grayjay that enable users to view videos from multiple platforms at once can give much-needed views to creators on alternate platforms. A similar solution for creators (not sure if one exists or not) would lower the barrier to upload to all platforms at once.
That phenomenon is called network effects, if you’d like to read more about it.
Have you heard about Russia? Why bother of doing multi-platform if they can just prohibit anything Western and build their own digital platform for everything.
The solution that will actually work, then, is to build a platform that has the YouTube content. Don't try to convince creators to sign up for your new multiplatform thing - just rip it directly from YouTube. Now you're thinking like a VC-backed startup. Yes, it's illegal, so make sure to scale rapidly and become rich before they have time to sue you. Facebook did this to Myspace. Doordash did this to restaurant phone orders.
Wonder what’s the cause of decline in views. One plausible reaction I had was that views might be down because of people using AI search (ChatGPT, etc) which unlike Google don’t show videos prominently. But since likes haven’t gone down that doesn’t seem likely.
Could it be related to mandatory Widevine encryption?
On my phone, the mobile site (m.youtube.com) has introduced Widevine a couple of weeks ago (last week of August IIRC). No idea if I’m just unlucky and part of a shitty A/B experiment, but I definitely had to recompile libc (being on Linux) with patches from Chromium and install Widevine so I could watch videos again.
Whenever I replace my patched libc with the unpatched original, then the Widevine plugin crashes everytime I try to play back a video on m.youtube.com. And it used to work before.
My first thought when I read AI search was that people might use it for instructions rather than tutorials and troubleshooting videos.
While I have no idea, I just think it would be funny if this is YouTube blocking a massive number of bots/scrapers.
My pet theory is the war on ad blocking aka manifestv2 deprecation: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...
I wouldn't think google search is a significant source of views anyway. Last I saw, the top platform for youtube usage is TVs.
Anecdotal, but for a while it felt like YouTube had decent content on whatever I was looking for. I trusted product reviews on there ever so slightly more than text content because of the relatively higher cost of producing videos. Nowadays there’s a glut of low quality stuff. Anything from low-effort videos to outright text-to-speech, non-videos that snare you using a promising thumbnail. The search results only surface about 5-10 relevant videos followed by things that have specious relevance. On top of that, they jammed Shorts into prominent screen real estate. It screams “hey while I’ve got you here, about a few of these distractions!”
So, I stopped going there as much. They stopped respecting visitor intentions. Just like every other platform, they just want to keep you on the site for as long as possible sifting through a feed of dopamine slop.
Apparently very few people use the subscriptions list and rely on the videos they subscribe and watch to appear on the Youtube homepage. And youtube changed what videos they put there. Instead of new videos by people you watch and related ones they show:
videos you just watched
videos you watched 10 years ago
auto dubbed videos on topics you are not interested
clickbait videos with 10 views
anything, but what you are used to watching
As TFA says, you can't even be sure what constitute "a view" and if Youtube keeps that consistent.
The idea that what's needed is for these alternative platforms to switch to "free with ads" is amazingly short sighted and disheartening. Everything bad YouTube does is driven by this business model. Switching to it might make a few people rich at the top of these alternative platforms, but it won't make anything better for any user or creator.
Russia tries to push its population to "alternatives" like Rutube(sic!) and VK Video by interfering into network connectivity (they call it "slowing down", they just drop fraction of packets that goes from YouTube servers), but it seems the success is quite limited.
Have you heard an anecdote about the cat and the mustard?
is it possible that restriced mode is more aggressive for users not logged in?
I feel instead of trying to force google to sell chrome, they should have forced them to spinoff YouTube and other non-search monopolies google has that are insanely profitable.
> they should have forced them to spinoff YouTube and other non-search monopolies google has that are insanely profitable.
I dont think I follow the logic. Having a successful business is not grounds for "forcing" to spin out. Airpods are extremely successful, and does that mean it needs to be a separate company? MacBooks are extremely profitable, so should they be a different company? Azure is widely popular, should they be too?
> I also think that YouTube is a monopoly. There are some alternatives — I also pay for Nebula, for example — but they’re tiny in comparison. YouTube is effectively the place to watch video on the internet.
I've heard about an online video website called Netflix. Don't know if anybody is using it though.
>I also think it would take some doing to get advertisers to jump on a new platform when YouTube has almost all the viewers.
Volume isnt even your main issue here. YouTube ads are powered by adwords... that all advertisers already use. It comes with tracking and user-analytics built in.
You can't compete with YouTube by replicating this business model.
Even so.. direct YouTube ad revenue per view is low. Many successful tubers monetize with sponsors. That is replicable, if a (single) tuber has enough views.
I think there can be markets for smaller, paid video sites... but that's not really a competitor to YouTube. It's more like competition for substack.
The way YouTube is managed, including all the reasons for criticism, are why it is successful.
Legible rules have loopholes. Keeping advertisers "on their toes" with mystery rules is a strategy.
It makes sense to keep the platform as unoffensive as possible. Strict nudity rules, and other such "hard" rules. Demonetization gives yotube a chance to implement soft/illegible rules... many of them simply assumed or imagined. It also makes business sense to suppress politics a little. The chilling effect is intentional.. and understandable.
Honestly, I think the more open alternative to YouTube is podcasting. Podcasting has terrible discovery, and video is underdeveloped but... it also has persistence that proves it is a good platform.
Half of "the problem" with YouTube is Google running the platform and pursuing their own interests. These are somewhat restrictive, but they also make sense.
The other half is intense competition for daily attention. That's what a low friction, highly accessible platform does. You can't have everything.
Without all the restrictions and manipulations that YouTube do, the platforms would be 100% nudity, scandals and suchlike.
YouTube needs to be broken up and have the video hosting separate from the viewing platform itself.
My bet is that some of these channels actually do real and honest reviews. So what’s the point of companies spending millions on YouTube ads if those same channels they criticized get more views—precisely because they’re better and more honest? I feel like this is a kind of selective nerf.
I was a daily, active, and paying Youtube user until recently and am quitting entirely. I was still able to work around many of Google's dark patterns – like the aggressive bot and adblock measures – but it was a chore I do not care to continue, and the emotional distress caused by the extreme hostility and toxicity around everything Youtube is too high a price to pay for content. I support content creators on Patreon but unfortunately many of them still use Youtube for hosting and those videos are not accessible to me any longer.
fwiw I (a YouTube premium subscriber) recently enabled restricted mode myself due to the app showing me completely unrelated and 'scary' videos in searches.
After some searching I found a few threads where others had encountered this and restricted mode was the only thing that seemed to stop these videos and honestly they're jarring and unwanted enough for me to warrant enabling restricted mode and all the features it disables - YouTube please please stop these unrelated 'jump scare' videos!
as an example I'm scrolling through videos on how to fix a leaky tap at 10pm I'll come across a thumbnail 5 videos down with a ghostly face or trypophobia type thumbnail then another 5-10 videos down. in no way are they highlighted as sponsored and I find it hard to believe that Google with it's search skills and other far more relevant videos in the results can be returning these videos as results!
I first thought it would be easy for content creators to start selling their content on other platforms as well. But the algorithms come to play. It is likely valuable that the hardcore fans are watching and liking the videos on YouTube, since that increases the probability of the algorithms to push the videos to new viewers as well.
Good luck competing with youtube. They are something called natural monopoly. Even if you get the technicals right, networks effects will kick in. You would need to bring in something revoliutonary to get people to move. Or youtube to fuck up something really badly.
And getting the technicals right won't be easy. Video delivery is not text. Will need dedicated datacenters if you ever get popular and want to keep prices under control. It's expensive.
TikTok and Instagram seem to be doing just fine..
Grayjay can neutralize the network effect
YouTube is broken plain to see and simple from my pov since 2019 at least as is ggl search. It is awful.
Hijack data-centers with Gorillas. re-claim the community ...
> YouTube views seem to have fallen off a cliff recently
So they started discounting AI data collection bots?
Youtube pretty aggressively blocks automated usage now. If you connect via a VPN it won't show any videos until you log in. Considering that ad income and real engagement seems unchanged, it possibly is just that they started blocking bots better. Something you wouldn't strictly expect a public announcement over.
People cannot deal with today's complexity.
I have seen the argument: all my games in Steam, all my movies in Netflix, all my videos on YouTube, etc.
To have to pick and choose between different apps makes everything more complex, and it is too much for the average user that has other things to worry about.
All this is really bad for capitalism, as it creates monopolies that no competition can fight against. It concentrates power and eliminates competition.
E-mail is still alive because it is the one place that one can get registration messages, invoices, goverment communications, etc. It is based on a standard so I can use my own provider but interact with all the rest of the world without caring what do they use. This is the future of the web.
For example, I should be able to download any movie app an see all the movies from Sony Pictures and Disney, and Ghibli, and all of them. Once purchased, I should be able to see all of them in the same app. The standard offers interfaces so I can choose one provider that connects to the world. Prices are the same on all apps, but they can differentiate themselves thru localization, recommendations, etc. This is feasible but it requires strong regulatory intervention as current monopolies are the best option to maximize profit and eliminate competition.
Ads are also perfectly fine to finance on-line videos. It is the tracking and invasive privacy practices what is dystopian and horrifying. Most of the revenue of YouTubers comes anyway by paying users (Patreon, etc.) or external traditional ads (NordVPN, SkillShare, etc.) that still ask for metrics for the channel but are not individually targeted.
Standards over platforms is the only possible future, but it will require to topple down the current status quo and that is what is difficult to do.
This. Email and text is one of those things were you are not stuck to a single provider. Anything closed and proprietary is a problem. I'd say this is also the case for banking. Banks often require Google Play or iOS, severely constraining the user. Governments somehow need to put a stop to this, especially in the EU where we are becoming a US colony due to all our IT being in the hands of US companies. We need to take back control!
since google is tier 1 network. does anyone knows if they pay for bandwidth for serving youtube?
They aren't a tier 1 but they also aren't paying for most of their bandwdith. They peered very liberally in the past so have zero settlement peering to most networks and if you're a big enough eyeball network you can request a caching server from them where you pay for rack space, power and network and google just pays for the server hardware. [0]
[0]: https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809
Is it really a monopoly if alternatives like rumble and vimeo exist?
I prefer Vimeo, as a content publisher, but I don’t monetize, nor have I posted many vids. I’ve simply used the “pro” option, which I have recently let lapse.
I just feel that Vimeo’s video quality is better, and it gives more direct control of the content.
But I do so little video work, that it hasn’t been worth it to maintain the subscription.
It's a hard question to answer for products that rely on user created content like this.
Rumble and vimeo provide basically the same service, but if you got fed up with YouTube and wanted to take your money (eyeballs) elsewhere, you can't, because rumble and vimeo don't have the same content at all. And if you were a creator you can't take your content elsewhere because there's no viewers.
> I also think that YouTube is a monopoly.
This sentence is just oddly thrown in there and is made the title of the article. Yes they're a monopoly, but so what? As you say they're the best bang for buck subscription service on the market.
The problem is that they are unable to see why their viewership has dropped, that's it. I'm sure Youtube might provide context as to why at some point.
YouTube is a marvelous platform. I know how to live life, thanks to the innumerable passionate souls that produced relevant content and put their voice out there. This library of videos never fails to amaze me on how many weird, fun, informative tidbits of humanity it contains. As much as it is a for-profit endeavor, I wholeheartedly support this well managed space.
I watch my son grow up learning to DIY from youtube videos. I'm marveling at the wealth of instructional video he has easy access to, and I wish I had it too when I had my first home, learned to work on my first car, etc.
YouTube's vast hoard of videos is a crucial piece of human history. If nothing else, it should be preserved via government mandate or something.
Ever seen a colorized video from 1900? It's like a time machine. Imagine looking at today's videos, 100-200 years from now..
Hot Take: Youtube is terrible. It's a time sink that's filled with billions of videos that take 15-20 minutes to talk about a topic that's worth only 1-3 minutes of your time. Text is skimmable and easily absorbable, Video is not.
> ... a topic that's worth only 1-3 minutes of your time
It's even worse sometimes, googling some "how to" queries returns links to yt-videos. Even if the video is 5 minutes, it's a waste of time, because I'm usually in the middle of an ongoing process when dozens variants are evaluated and an average dedicated time for a single one is much shorter.
Transcripts sometimes help. But not the native (no diarization as long as I remember). An example, Lex Fridman podcast is a good source of anecdata from famous science/tech/non-tech people and provides good transcripts on the site (but only starting some point in the past). For transcripts before this point v1.transcript.lol covered many, but amongst other glitches no names for diarization (Speaker 1/ Speaker 2).
The answer is paying/watching ads.
Nobody wants to hear ad-blocking has negative effects. But it does, and it's effectively killed off any YouTube competitor.
All a VC has to do is read a comment section on the topic of yt to say "nope" to funding a competitor.
> Today I saw a video by the RedLetterMedia folks on this topic. If you’re not familiar with their work, be warned that the video is vulgar and juvenile (sorry, I love their stuff).
Huh? RLM is about as inoffensive as it gets
Heh, maybe haven't watched some of their deeper cuts; back in the day they were a lot more edgy especially with series like Plinkett Reviews. They've toned it down a bit, but they're definitely not a 'family friendly' channel in some of the content they release (not in a bad way, just... I wouldn't put on a random RLM video at a grade school function!).
Views are down reasons: AI bot catchers now live and new ip blocks on vpns and cloud servers.
Likes and comments are steady, apparently. How do you reconcile the reduced views with that? Anyway, nearly one-third to one-half of my video suggestions are bot videos. Honestly quite distasteful. They should just ask the users to flag them, instead of employing even more bots who're ever so enthusiastic to kick out those who do not belong to their race.
Sorry to be cranky, but it's a bit annoying when people call market leaders "monopolies".
Words are best when they have meaning!
Microsoft was never a monopoly in the personal computer market by this logic.
Do you agree that Google is a monopoly? Calling Google just a market leader is the situation when the words became too blurred to carry some meaning.
Isn’t a monopoly just a market leader that leverages its dominant position in anti-competitive ways? The article does make a (weak, IMO) argument that YouTube is using its position to screw creators out of revenue by gaming metrics.
What's your definition of monopoly?
They're something like 75% of video hosting, and if you exclude vimeo for being paid-only then it's over 90%. That sounds like a monopoly to me.
People still think that Youtube of today is the Youtube of yesterday. But that is not the case ever since the first adpocalypse.
Youtube began as a video hosting platform where creators got a huge cut from ads being shown on their video page. Today, the ads are injected into the videos and creators get only a tiny portion of the profits - if any. The views are gone as only (highly)monetised content is being promoted by the algorithm. Google simply prioritises making money for themselves instead of providing a service that merely breaks even.
Youtube has done what most businesses do - they pay the initial opex costs and provide some kind of freemium, they get huge number of users, then they monetise the sh.. out of them. And it always ends the same - the platform dies as users leave. Youtube is not any different. It's just so big that this process takes much longer than usual. But do not be fooled, it is happening.
Nowadays, people are slowly realising that there is no more free lunch and that you have to pay for the content(see how many streaming services there are compared to just a few years ago). This is why paywall services like Patreon are so popular(and why I have created my own as well as it is one of few viable online businesses left in the digital space).
Content creators who are relying on anonymous views, that Youtube always provided and which is now slowly dying, will end up out of business and many in debt due to costs of the video gear they bought and oversaturated marked/competition. There is plethora of this "i'm broke" videos on YT itself exposing the harsh reality of digital content creation of today.
On the other hand, smart content creators have realised that the way forward is to build smaller community of reliable fans and use paywalls/pay-per-view model, where they can charge tiny amount whilst getting 95% of it for themselves, which incentivises users to pay(ie. i am willing to pay 10 cents directly to my favourite content creator rather than 5$ to youtube). Some are stuck in the middle with injecting sponsored content into their own, but that will die out soon as well and likely YT will ban it straight up sooner or later. There will be some networks that host multiple creators, like we already have with unauthorized.tv, censored.tv and others. The YT alternatives like Odysee or Rumble will not survive as they are using the same outdated business model as Youtube does but they lack the backing of Google(not just money but infrastructure).
It will take time but people will eventually flock to specific content creators instead of relying on algorithms to recommended them content they might be interested in - as this has been completely broken for a decade now and caused huge amount of great content creators to just quit for good. A huge loss to humanity as a whole.
This will be the next generation of content creators whom will understand that the game has changed.
I keep seeing people say this: "I pay for YouTube Premium. For my money, it’s the best bang-for-the-buck subscription service on the market" and I don't understand.
For me, Premium's only value proposition is removing ads. Recommendations are still the same (quite shitty). Search is unusable (4 relevant results then unrelated recommendations). Shorts are pushed aggressively no matter how many times you hide them. Search in history will often not find even something you just watched a few days ago.
It's the same Youtube.
Yes basically all it does is remove ads. Those of us who are happy with it are those of us who don’t feel entitled to unlimited video streaming for free. Most people think YouTube should just be free and have no ads for some reason, and they probably wouldn’t say Premium is such a great deal.
The new thing that YouTube Premium includes is the one button press to skip over "commonly skipped parts of the video"- typically the in-video promotions. This just showed up last week on my nVidia shield connected to my TV. So finally there is a way to remove ads for real. It would be nice if it did it automatically.
The creator is getting paid more from my Premium subscription, so I definitely do not want to see their own ads.
YouTube music being included effectively replaces an additional music streaming service. From that perspective the family oriented plans in particular carry a lot of value.
I imagine most people have the same value prop I do
1) I watch youtube more than any streaming service
2) I really really value not having ads in my life
So the price for ad-free youtube really seems phenomenal. None of the other features really matter to me - ad free dominates all value discussions.
On top of removing ads and giving you a couple extra minor features, it also has a way better rev split with creators (last I heard). Half of the sub gets divvied up to the people you watched that month, portioned out via watch time.
You also get youtube music, instant skipping over sponsor sections, and the ability to play videos in the background
Full disclousure: I work for Google, but nowhere near YT/YT music. Opinions are my own and I am actually a customer as I pay for YT premium with a family plan for me, my wife, and our son.
While I agree YT without Ads is great, you also get YT music which is really good and for us it replaced Spotify completely.
Personally, though, I don't have a problem with search (maybe because I set a lot of channels as "do not recommend/show"). Shorts, however, they are really annoying.
I use Brave and it's the premium experience already.
Absolutely, If premium sorted out all those problems and generally treated creators better i'd have a subscription.
I come to youtube for the *creators*, the actual platform where I have watch history off and use extensions to block the aggressively pushed slop as it currently stands is not something I want to put money towards.
I'm already a patreon to a few creators and have a Nebula subscription; adding it up it's probably slightly more than a premium subscription.
The other useful Youtube Premium feature is the ability to offline download videos to your device. Useful for long plane rides and elsewhere where internet is limited or nonexistent.
You should be paying (or taking some other action) to extricate ads from your life as much as possible.
Yeah it's hard to compete with Ublock Origin and youtube-shorts-block.