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.
"to just ignore people capable of speaking two or more languages"
I'm terribly annoyed by this, and even more so with their latest push to translate the titles, so now you have to click and listen in on the video in order to know which the original language is.
I speak 3 languages, and I want the title and voice to be in the original language. And I won't bother nor would settle with watching an AI translated video even if it is translated from a language which I do not understand. Then I simply do not want to see that video.
Me too. I hate the auto-translation feature. Both on YouTube and other websites that force it on you, such as the new Reddit (I'll just stop using Reddit when they turn off Old Reddit).
Likewise. Reddit just took the preference for old UI away on mobile for my account (seems to be some sort of testing they are doing maybe?). The new UI is jarring an not useful to me. And "old*" always seems to have a broken failure mode, that some links within reddit default to new.
I strongly advise any 3rd party app (I use Relay for Reddit) and it costs me $3/mo for decently heavy usage. About half of that goes to API fees and half to the developer. I consider that fair given the excellent features and lack of ads
And if paying for reddit is unacceptable, it's easy to get it for free.
Either use one of the still-supported third party apps with an accessibility exemption (RedReader for Android or Dystopia for iOS), or use any of the classic 3rd party apps with your own API keys - which you can get for free, if you mod your own subreddit. Takes 5 minutes to set up.
It isn't a feature, at least not for users. I strongly suspect youtube's autotranslate has more to do with regulatory compliance and content moderation. Rather than having people who speak X/Y/Z languages, they want each every video to be translated into English by default so they can be feed more easily into the the system that vets content. Having translated and non-translated copies floating around is probably seen as a needless complication.
Once a monopoly has been established, the next step is to actively make the product worse in order to either reduce costs or push users towards premium features.
I speak at least 3 languages at a native level.
Google's autotranslate 80% of the time selects a language I'm not just unfamiliar with, but can't even read due to the writing system difference (i.e. sudden arabic appears).
Considering I'm using it with an account that is about 20 years old now, that gave Google all of the permissions in the world and has all the possible data one might need to make the conclusions on which language I prefer, it is absolutely absurd that it cannot make a solid guess.
As another multilingual person, I keep getting reminded how bad software "features" can be for us. First, from early computers up to at least the Windows XP era, things sucked due to code pages and all that, but that was understandable, technical limitations after all. Now things suck due to what's supposed to be convenient UX.
Google Chrome broke Ctrl-F functionality for my native language ages ago and it's still broken because the breakage is apparently by design.
The Amazon website for my country appears to mostly auto-translate the English product pages into the local language. Product titles sometimes mean totally ridiculous things because of course the translation is poor.
Nobody cares about the Accept-Language header. Way too many websites like to use GeoIP and switch to the local language. Sometimes the geolocation is wrong, sometimes their location-language mappings are, and even when everything is working "correctly" it's a pain if I'm traveling. I have my browser set up with a correct Accept-Language list, but during travel I definitely see websites switch to a language I can't read.
Then of course there's the huge problem, related to autodetection, that you cannot deduce a user's language from their residence. Countries don't have a surjective mapping onto languages.
Because it ignores diacritics. Searching for ā will find a, searching for š will highlight s. This may make sense for some languages where diacritics are used sparingly to indicate an aspect of pronunciation, but in my language and many others diacritics are used for entirely different letters. The letter ā is not a. Treating them as equivalent makes as little sense as treating e and o as equivalent would in English.
If I'm trying to find kāzas (wedding) in a page, I will get hits for kazas (goats). If I'm looking for šauš, a letter sequence that words about shooting begin with, I will also get hits in šausmas (horror) or sauss (dry). It's nonsense. Windows 3.1 notepad.exe could find the actual word I entered in a text file (though the input required setup), the dominant browser in 2025 cannot do that and finds entirely unrelated words because an English speaker has decided they're visually similar.
Go into your Google account settings, under General, then add any languages that you watch YouTube videos in. I did this for Spanish and all my Spanish videos stopped getting dubs and translated titles.
They still track you? Is there much of a difference? Get an account you only use for YT, I can't imagine the difference in data leaking will be that much greater if they track you just by IP/other fingerprinting vs a session?
Thanks, I went there and added spanish since google and youtube were auto translating some stuff for me lately out of nowhere and I saw that there was a language already added for me by google, Uzbek. WTF?
It's especially annoying when you're searching for things that are done very differently in different parts of the world. No, I don't want to learn how to build walls or wire up electricity from e.g. Americans.
Watching any dubbed video is a big no for me. You lose ALL original expression, this was already the case with TV dubbing and it's far worse with anything auto generated. People with accents get translated poorly at best, resulting in garbadge.
The excuse is "most people want it so we force it", hooray for the dictatorship of the masses (by assumption, I've seen no research papers on the matter published by any platform).
It unfortunately could be true. I mean I hear people in my own family listen to the always same sounding auto generated narrator voices on YouTube and it has me thinking: "Oh my god why do you even listen to this crap???" and the portrayed ideology that comes along with such content is very questionable as well. Usually some low effort (a)social drama shit. It has zero worth. No, it is net negative! But apparently people watch or listen to that crap.
And so we see it playing out over and over again. Dumb masses creating market incentives for bullshit products and product decisions, ruining everything. If you want it with a pinch of capitalism critique: Oh right capitalism makes it so that we get the best products!!! lol
I was so confused by this when it first happened to me....
Watching quite some youtube content, and more than willing to pay any content provider for a worthy dose of content... I refuse to hand youtube any money and will happily play the adblocker cat and mouse and use clunky scripts to remove shorts. Starting to archive the most interesting channels myself. Thanks yt-dlp.
so many websites do this. ebay is another offender, where if you buy international items and speak english, it just gets in the way and introduces mistakes, which is especially bad if you're about to pay money for something. And of course, no way to turn it off.
This feature is so annoying. YouTube is always trying new stupid features that I wonder who they make sense to. The hype thing now, the games, I wonder for who are these things useful and if it's relevant in any sort of metric. I use unkook on desktop and Newpipe or my phone for a more minimal watching experience now
If I click I’m not interested on every short presented to me and I’ve never watched a short, why can’t YouTube get the point? At least give us the option to remove them. I don’t deal with the translation issue but not giving you the option is what is beyond frustrating for me.
If you're using ublock, you can remove elements on webpages, including the area where shorts are on the YT pages. It's what I did on my mobile to stop watching them.
if your on firefox or one of its clones, firefox can auto run javascript scripts to remove shorts with the extension Greasemonkey, scripts can be found at 'the greasy fork'. there is also a decent youtube abdroid app called litube which can be found on f-droid which has a built in option to remove shorts (among other great options)
It took a little while but YouTube has stopped recommending shorts after doing exactly this. They still appear in my subscription feed but it’s less bothersome because they’re from channels I actually watch.
No, you don't understand! Being interested in anything works only in one direction, and that is the direction of getting you to engage with content that brings ad money!
What's even more bullshit is that this is easily fixable on their side without impacting the goal of the feature. They just need to take into account all the languages of the user, not just the first one.
A similar case: for those who haven't seen it, Jimmy Kimmel's "Unnecessary Censorship" videos are regular videos with added bleeps to make it sound as if the person is talking about something censorship-worthy.
YouTube auto-translates these videos, with the end result being a random toss between the original uncensored speech, the modified speech with some sex term added in there (and unbleeped!), and random nonsense - all of it read in a robotic monotone voice.
The end result is completely unwatchable, except perhaps as a dadaist experiment. I can't understand how someone hasn't noticed it yet.
I currently dislike and comment every video that has out dubbing enabled.
I hate this approach but it is the only way to somehow make this awful feature more visible.
Yeah this is infuriating. I read 4 languages and now I'm left trying to reverse-engineer/guess what the title I'm reading was supposed to mean.
Add on top of that googles persistent (14 years and counting) inability to decide which of the three countries I've lived in they attribute my account to (sometimes it still opens maps centered on Stockholm 12 years after I left) and I understand why I watch way less video these days...
> 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.
Almost every reply has pointed to TikTok as some sort of counterfactual.
1. TikTok exists today, and the author still feels like YouTube is a monopoly. If TikTok was actually a viable alternative to YouTube, this article wouldn't exist.
2. Futhermore, TikTok is not a substitute for YouTube, especially for the kinds of content that the author is watching. People don't treat TikTok as a video library - how many TikTok videos are posted straight to HN? TikTok does not have the same diversity of content as YouTube.
3. TikTok addressed point (2) of my post - ByteDance launched in the US with the acquisition of Musically, and even then still had to pay for content. The creator fund, and now also the TikTok shop is a huge part of TikTok's content strategy.
>The vast majority of YT content is not monetized by creators, often not even eligible for it in the first place.
This is a social quirk, not something that a newcomer can replicate. The problem is, for a new platform, your best content creators will quickly defect to other more monetizable platforms once they get the eyeballs. This is what happened to Vine. If you want to have a sustainable platform you have to keep your creators. YouTube doesn't have the existential threat of the next PewDiePie defecting off the platform. TikTok paid AlixEarle millions to ensure they didn't lose her.
>1. TikTok exists today, and the author still feels like YouTube is a monopoly. If TikTok was actually a viable alternative to YouTube, this article wouldn't exist.
Or the article might have just wrongly failed to take into consideration TikTok as a viable alternative. Imagine that?
>2. Futhermore, TikTok is not a substitute for YouTube, especially for the kinds of content that the author is watching. People don't treat TikTok as a video library -
>how many TikTok videos are posted straight to HN? TikTok does not have the same diversity of content as YouTube.*
HN is a niche platdorm mostly for older farts. Doesn't say anything about the viability of TikTok as YouTube replacement in general.
And an argument can be made about TikTok's viability to replace YouTube in its own thing, not that it already has done that. Unlike other platforms, TikTok has brand recognition, viewers, younger demographics, advertising and payments sorted out, and lots of initial content. If it can make a good proposition for longer YouTube style content, it has everything else sorted to be a viable alternative.
>YouTube doesn't have the existential threat of the next PewDiePie defecting off the platform.
WTF YouTube wont have it? If another platform starts to be seen as a cooler alternative, creators can jump ship on a heartbeat...
"TikTok does not have the same diversity of content as YouTube."
Maybe this is true but it is also easy to get the impression because of algorithmic differences.
I think YouTube quite aggressively tries to find a global optimum for your viewing preferences and for that constantly throws a certain fraction of random content at you to test if you like it. At the same time there is high inertia for active engagement to influence your feed.
TikTok is completely different. Once you are locked into your niche it tries to keep you engaged there as much as possible but never strays into
other niches by itself. If you actively search for content outside your niche it is quick to adapt.
So, if you are just a lurker on TikTok it is very easy to get the impression that content diversity is low there.
Fwiw, the only content on youtube I see as both interesting and irreplaceable are music videos. News clips, recipes, sharing of opinions, etc are all on tiktok and don't waste my time. Virtually all long-form content is better presented in prose. Documentaries with critical clips can be purchased without having to watch ads or found on archive.org. Interviews and monologuing work just fine with podcasts and without having to be subjected to the most obnoxious ads known to man. The incentive to make videos long makes 95% of the clips shared with me unbearably boring, and I can't exactly search or scan the video for the interesting parts like I can text. Plus, did I mention how the ads make me want to rip my eyes and ears out?
Maybe if I had children, it would seem more attractive, but I just don't get the appeal outside of that.
TikTok is a fluke, created by the condition of how it was originally born as Douyin in China. It is also the only app that translated well from the domestic China market to international markets.
Being backed by lots of VC cash and Bytedance's revenues in China is a key factor in getting TikTok established overseas.
TikTok is the most prominent one, for a number of reasons, but other platforms that pioneered or copied the format also reached considerable prominence. Instagram Reels, Snapchat Stories, etc. And tellingly, when YouTube wanted to compete, they needed to build an experience quite separate from the rest of the site. There is a qualitative difference in how people perceive and consume this type of content. It's not just "vertical YouTube".
Of course each one of these platforms was backed by VC or stock market money, but that's the nature of the industry. Over the years, VCs ended up throwing a lot of money at Google and YouTube killers and that didn't get them anywhere, so that in itself isn't the winning formula.
Vine had more active users than Musically, and look what happened to Vine. It would have never had the investment internationally if not for the blow-out success it had inside Mainland China.
Combination of factors, but mostly the success Douyin had in Mainland China leading to the investment in TikTok internationally, given that no other Chinese social app had reach this level of penetration.
> 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.
They go to Spotify and Apple Music to listen to music, they turn on cable TV or go to a website to get their news, they get the Netflix algorithm to suggest them related videos. Etc.
I wonder though, are all those YouTubers blissfully unaware of the problems created by making YouTube a monopoly for videos? Why not simply upload your videos on another platform as well? Or is YouTube engaging in this anti competitive stuff like "if you monetize here you are not allowed to upload elsewhere"?
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.
I agree with this. For example some tech creators are using peertube or similar.
University Lectures now posting in other websites as backup and people that do courses also have them in their website. What I think what will happen it's that YouTube will still be used for discovery to drive the traffic to these other sites until people finally migrate to the smaller ones.
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.
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.
There are also lot of experts (obviously its the internet so anyone could be anyone) who post educational content on their field of expertise in the 20min - 1 hour length video format. I don't see that type of content anywhere else.
It truly is amazing the sort of learning resources on the internet you can find if you are really truly interested in a topic.
>
There are also lot of experts (obviously its the internet so anyone could be anyone) who post educational content on their field of expertise in the 20min - 1 hour length video format. I don't see that type of content anywhere else.
Exactly. This is the kind of content that I love to watch (in particular also lecture recordings from top experts).
In my observation, this kind of content is hard to monetize by showing ads: I notice that the ads shown at such videos (for me and friends - which may be a biased sample) simply neither fits my interests nor the subject area of such videos.
Imagine watching a dev talk and get a very loud/bright/cheesy ads about some construction tool. That's the kind of stuff that makes me download those videos instead.
While it's a different niche, the worry for YouTube is that younger viewers generally consume a lot of short form video. They might eventually shift to watching more long form content as they get older, but if they're accustomed to one provider it's going to be easier for that provider to expand into long form content than for YouTube to persuade them to switch or use a second provider. So YouTube feels it has to move into short form in order to ensure long term maintenance and growth of its user base.
YouTube used to be mostly short videos. 2-3 minutes was typical. They've moved to longer videos by changing their algorithms to encourage creators to waffle on.
Every three days I have to close the "shorts" bar in YouTube, which has been returning ever more quickly when I remove it. I yearn for the days before even the "Okay, we'll remove it for two weeks" or whatever. It was obvious that things wouldn't stay that way.
TikTok, SnapChat, and Instagram had the capital and the advertising parts completely figured out. They sidestepped a lot of legal troubles by limiting the length and by insisting on the vertical video format, unsuitable for pirated movies, shows, and most musical clips.
Those are very hard but also very solvable problems with a lot of capital. It's the same basic idea as creating a new media company, albeit a lot more costly to build. This is way too expensive to do in a seed round, but one of the other FAANG giants could try if they wanted to.
The even harder problem is just answering the basic question of why the viewer side should care, and why they should change their deeply-ingraned habit of going to YouTube to find something to watch. "YouTube isn't fair and transparent to creators" is not going to be compelling to very many people, if the experience of the likes of Tidal competing with Spotify is any indication. YouTube is valuable to creators because it aggregates a huge audience of viewers, those viewers stick around because it's addictive and there is a content flywheel already.
But if you actually had a truly good answer for why the average person should switch their YouTube habit to watching some other site instead, the resulting payoff is huge enough (and there's enough crazy risk-hungry investors in the world) that the capital and the moat problems could theoretically be overcome.
What was unique about Youtube is that it got to claim the first search result for "Lazy Sunday", a popular SNL skit at the time. That is how everyone came to learn of it. The "homemade" videos that followed were also necessary for its longevity, but initial discovery was critical.
Disrupting YouTube is difficult because the rampant piracy isn't as easy to pull off anymore.
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.
> 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.
The main reason youtube has no competitors is because people want free (no ads, no subscription) content. And people will gleefully ad-block your service.
Look up the story of Vid.me
It exploded in popularity around 2015-17. Many youtube creators moved to it.
Then they went bankrupt because no one wanted to pay a subscription, and no one wanted to view ads.
Internet users desperately need to look in the mirror to figure out why so many services have strangleholds and why so many services plain suck for users - the users aren't paying for anything in any form, and they celebrate that fact.
There is no paying by users - which is replaced by ads. But in my experience the number of ads on YouTube sky-rocketed. I had no problem watching 15 seconds of an ad, skipping and then watching the rest of the video. But I used to watch long-form videos - and now I have skip ads every 7-8 minutes.
I almost stopped watching YT. In the few instances I watch I will for a8 minutes or so and at the first ad I am leaving. I am wondering if behavior like this explains the drop in views, but the fact that revenue stayed the same....
On Youtube you also have a choice between watching ads or subscription, I don't see the difference. Yes you can use an ad-blocker, but they're making it harder and harder.
Youtube has no competition because it's a winner-takes-all market, and they won.
Creators go where viewers are. Viewers go where creators are. Rinse and repeat, and sooner or later you end up with a monopoly.
> 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)
I don't think that's as big as a problem as you do, as long as you don't care about exclusivity.
Think of the streaming music market: Youtube Music, Spotify, Tidal, Amazon Music, ect, generally have mostly the same content and little exclusivity.
For example, you could have a feature where all uploaded videos are automatically uploaded to YouTube and all of your competitors.
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.
Or, as the algorithm seemed to be rewarding 10min+ videos at one point and a bunch of creators put out filler content, people no longer enjoy forced long form content.
This has been a huge thing in car YouTube, a drag race that’s over in 11 seconds stretched out to a 19 minute video. Realistically 5-7 minutes would’ve been heaps of time.
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.
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.
The US government is extremely active in going after governments which attempt to impose digital service taxes. It was proposed in the UK, and quickly vanished without a trace.
Indeed they are, IMO this is the real number 1 reason behind the US tariffs, as well as behind his anger against Brazil, even more so than the prosecution of his fash club buddy.
What you do is get together with a bunch of other countries and announce it as a block. The US can only keep shooting itself in the foot so much. The thing they should've done is, very soon after the US tariffs were announced, say "We think this is a fantastic idea by Mr. Trump. Aligned with his views, we are instituting accompanying digital tariffs to fix the digital trade deficit. We're sure he'll agree that the trade balance should be corrected in both the physical as well as digital worlds".
The UK is effectively a colony of the US so them backing out is entirely expected. Luckily, other countries aren't. I think Brazil, Vietnam (?), Thailand (?) are ones that have already set a date for when it's being instated, and I haven't heard of them backing out. There's probably more. The EU has also confirmed today that they won't be cancelling the Google fine, though we'll have to wait and see what happens to their DST proposals. Given their serious lack of spine as well as how far the EU has gone to the right, I do expect them to cancel it, but who knows.
And again, there's a hundred other protectionist barriers that can be put up. This is the smartest way, salami slicing, as China has figured out decades ago. You begin very small and just ramp it up. You begin with something like banning Twitch because of moral concerns. Maybe even just from 8 to 8, when kids are up. Then you say national security concerns mean data centers of critical infrastructure all have to be hosted in the country. Then you expand that. Then you make Whatsapp (or whatever is the most popular messaging app) do a JV with a local player because it's a national security risk. And so on.
But Western governments don't have the wit to execute this, in which case a cruder measure such as a digital tariff is what's left.
That's the nice thing - they don't need to create one. They just need to put up some barriers, and there will be plenty local entrepeneurs who will be happy to create a competitor unencumbered by those same barriers.
This is not some wild theory, this is how it has generally played out in real life in the countries that did put up such meaningful barriers.
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.
Majors CDN already exists. They can build on top of cloudfare or Amazon services.
If you think about it Amazon it's on a good position to build an alternative,they already have experience with ads and hosting video content
> how the terabytes of content and bandwidth will be sponsored - by what?
How does it work in the Internet itself? By decentralization, i.e., different servers serve their own small part. The same can work with the videos: see PeerTube.
This is why YouTube should be treated, like all large social media, as a utility. There isn’t a real path to competition here. Things like censorship or Google having exclusive rights to train their AI on YouTube data have a lot of negative impact on the world.
If YouTube dies, I doubt there will ever be a replacement.
Meta, Bytedance, Snap, and even X could fill the void relatively easily. a few new views focussing specifically on video, and video focussed apps that don't require a login for all the platforms.
YouTube is incredible, YouTube is poorly run. If I were making the laws, I'd do something similar to mandatory licensing of songs for radio: mandate that YouTube, as a sort de-facto content monopilist, provide third-party access to its database (upload, discovery, view counts, recommendations, etc). Devil is in the details, but well-done it would strictly improve the world.
Independent competitive companies are great, but things tend to devolve into de-facto mini-governments once things stabilize, and from there I think the (real) government using its power to force a little more competition could really improve things.
Absolutely. TikTok and Instagram are usurping the social video space with 3,590M MAUs between them (compared to YouTube's 2,530M MAUs). Although YouTube continues to do fine, it's far from a monopoly, and I personally don't think it can be assumed that it will retain its flagship position.
There are aspects of YT that I simply cannot see TikTok or Instagram disrupting. Music is one of them. I just searched for one of my favourite musicians Lisa O'Neill on TikTok. There are literally 6 videos in the results, mostly just short clips of her singing live. On YouTube she has her own channel with 16k subscribers, all her official music videos, and several live performances, plus countless other channels like BBCMusic or TradTG4 with videos of her doing live performances. There's no comparison.
You don't have to be an exact copy of another company to disrupt them. YouTube had supported short form videos being uploaded long before TikTok came along.
The other platforms added shorts because they realized they were being disrupted and were losing users to TikTok.
Not being similar helped tiktok disrupt youtube. Framing losing users to competitors as "finding your sweet spot" is cope. There's a reason youtube built shorts instead of conceding to tiktok.
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
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.
This is incredibly funny considering AI generated content is currently endemic thrash on YouTube. AI generated fake trailers, universally hated zombodubbing, weird "touches" on shorts…
Which to be clear isn't a contradiction to your comment at all. It'll take work and time though, at minimum.
In a theoretical future The Algorithm would include content generation so that the platform can generate content for you instead of just suggesting it. Could apply to TikTok, Spotify, etc. if the generated content is good enough.
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.
I read it as they're enabled to feel that way--and express it publicly--because their digital life and livelihood is not held hostage to the capricious monopoly.
I did implicate that Youtube has monopolized the market, allowing a lower bar of service to become the norm. This latest move, seems to make every aspect of youtube's value proposition worse.
They said an LTT store message directed them to the Brodie Robertson video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hVwUjcsl6s so they did their own investigation which confirmed similar things.
It looks like Youtube might be measuring views differently and perhaps getting rid of unmonetizable views which doesn't impact the number of likes or revenue. I think the annoyance is over the lack of transparency and the power Youtube holds over content creators rather than any immediate concern over loss of income etc.
> rather than any immediate concern over loss of income etc.
I don't know if that's necessarily true. Apparently there's not a significant loss of revenue _from YouTube_ from the reports of these creators. But some sponsor deals might be structured based on CPM, and so a suddenly decreased view count could have a direct revenue impact from those sponsorship deals.
They probably would prefer zero third party sponsors, because adding sponsored content dilutes the value of the on-platform ads. Features like “commonly skipped section” and the timeline view intensity histogram reduce the value of sponsorships.
But if they eliminated sponsors, creator revenue would drop significantly and so would content production.
The nuclear option would be to require all sponsored segments to register with YouTube. That would give YouTube way more control and dramatically reduce creators’ business flexibility (how do you tax a donated 3d printer?).
The Wan Show is very long and waffley and strictly for fans. LTT clip segments of the show but the relevant segment is still nearly 40 minutes long https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JJ8dur6unc
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.
Mux is new to me. Looks like a video-first headless CMS with some neat AI integrations.
Vimeo does have monetization tools [1] but they’re focused on direct sales.
YouTube is just way ahead… even if you ignore the ads platform, a YouTube premium subscription gives you WAY more ad free content than a Vimeo purchase or Floatplane/Nebula subscription.
> 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 realized this back in 2009 and tried really hard to start using other platforms, but wound up just not watching YouTube as often instead. I hope this changes. The only true competitors are places like TikTok and Instagram, but they don't feel like a true replacement to the rest of us who don't want to be tied to "social media" but YouTube shorts are evidence that it does compete with YouTube directly.
I think YouTube even tried to have "IG Stories" at one point iirc.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
As someone who was subbed to Nebula, this matches my experience. Especially the lack of comments, spending time on Nebula just felt cold and isolating, even if the content was good.
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.
Seconded! Funniest content out there right now. I’d recommend Game Changer season 2 or Make Some Noise. Good old funny improv games. Like whose line meets modernity with younger people.
Dropout annoys me with some of their UX decisions. I know it's a younger app, but every time I go to watch a longer-run show (Game Changer for example) it defaults me to Season 1, Episode 1. I want the latest stuff, not the oldest!
theyre a comedy company, not a tech company. would be nice if there was a way to leave feedback from developers... like heck i'd send a PR or two just to hang out with the crew a bit
Same. I like the idea of Nebula, but I'll often find videos on YouTube, then switch to Nebula to watch. Definitely speaks to a failure of whatever the Nebula discovery algorithm is.
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?
> Why miss the comments? Is it a video sharing platform or social media?
Because Nebula has a lot of complex content. Things like history, science, making stuff.
And those things have a lot of room for things like the maker messing something up, or struggling with something, or not explaining something properly.
On Youtube if somebody makes an obvious mistake, or is obviously incompetent to an expert, somebody will point it out. If a hobbyist doesn't quite have the skills to do a thing sometimes an expert will show up and help them. If an educative video doesn't include crucial details, somebody will ask.
Like look at say, Inheritance Machining or Alec Steele on Youtube, who take on challenging projects they struggle with and often get advice from expert viewers.
It's weird not to have this on Nebula. On one hand it seems to sell itself as "smart content", on the other hand it's a return to the old TV model of "shut up and consume".
I get why; the comments section can be a terrible place on YouTube so it makes an intuitive amount of sense. But surely the paywall keeps the low quality comments out?
…and make copious use of 'Not Interested' and 'Don't ever show this channel to me again'.
I do keep having to whack it with more of that but it's expected. My recommendations sidebar is not actively obnoxious and if it hints at it, well, rinse and repeat. If it's gonna try to pander to me I will set extremely loud boundaries, and there's every opportunity to do that.
Subscription are easily ignored as soon as you have watched some other topics for half a day.
Youtube's algorithm has an exxagerated recency bias and it tends to ignore in my case most of the topics I'm subscribed to as soon as I don't watch those topics for few days.
The only thing it gets right, the only one, is sort of figuring out my usage depending on the time and device I'm using. On desktop I use it mostly for music streaming, on tv/phone I use it mostly for other content, that's the only thing it gets right.
But otherwise, it's an utter mess when Spotify or Tik Tok do an infinitely better job with way less information and guidance.
If the algorithm is temporarily not giving you good recommendations, there's always the Subscriptions tab, which only shows your subscriptions and no recommendations. Good also for those who hate recommendations.
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.
Do you happen to know if there are any project or talk of not archiving the video content itself, but instead the transcripted content instead? I feel that this would be very advantageous to archive knowledge based (versus delivery based, such as prank and stand up comedy) videos much more efficiently than the videos themselves.
Someone below brought up a very good point about many of these videos being much longer than they need to be (mainly for reimbursement and ad reasons). If the transcripted content can be archived, it could also be abridged and/or summarized as well as being combined with other similar video content as well.
I'm sort of thinking as I go here now, but I would think that perhaps Youtube has an API that lets you access the closed captions of videos?
No. yt-dlp downloads most videos without needing a yt (or any) login. A very few end up gated behind some form of login, but I suspect those are creator specific.
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.
If music, video or writing is something you want to see again, download a copy to own it yourself. Trusting a for-profit streaming company is simply idiotic.
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.
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.
If stuff disappeared (even just the Youtuber rage quit, not necessarily end of the platform) and people were talking about being bothered about it I tend to think people like you would pop up with archives.
It's the really niche stuff that few if anyone would notice or care enough to talk about that would be properly lost. And if it's niche but there's a lot of care from the few, then that's one way that archivists are made.
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.
I worry about that as well. I guess we assume nothing is going to happen because it's Google. But Google just dodged a bullet with Chrome which, if they had been hit, had a real chance to harm the entire web. Youtube could be next.
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 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.
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.
I don't know what their licensing deals look like, but they should sell subscriptions in foreign countries.
I pay $5cad/mo to get ad free access to the CBC catalog. I would gladly pay the same or even double for the BBC catalog or iPlayer (whatever its called).
They don't even offer that in the UK. Madness, imo, but true.
(iPlayer is free if you're a licence fee payer, but it's nothing close to the full back catalog, it's more like an 'aired recently' DVR with a tuner for every channel. Wouldn't at all be surprised if it's not even everything current though.)
(The Britbox joint venture with ITV was arguably closer to that, but still not, a curated collection.)
It looks cool though, I hadn't heard of it. It seems like not many of the example websites had enough video traffic to have any of the upload offloaded from the servers to any peers though.
It is technically different and there are trade offs, but that isn't much of an argument - at the end of the day we need to send yea many bytes of data from server to client with a known format. I watched a PeerTube video yesterday and it was the same experience as watching a YouTube one. Some company could implement YouTube by running large servers as peers if the unit economics made sense and it'd work.
The problem PeerTube has is that there isn't demand for what it is doing because YouTube is a pretty good video custodian. Although everyone seems to be sensibly alert to the risk that they eventually go bad, right now it works. Obviously don't expect any video currently on YouTube to be available in 20 years though.
That's nice in theory. In practise though im doubtful. Churn is going to be much higher on something like peer tube than something like traditional bit torrent. Access patterns might also potentially be distributed badly for some videos.
Not to mention the long tail of less popular vidros.
If the issues you are worried about aren't present yet, then logically right now it would be a comparable to and a competitor with YouTube. People in the main don't avoid web services because of hypothetical technical problems that might exist in the future but that the design seems superficially resistant to.
PeerTube actually does have technical issues in there here and now, but the number one problem is just that YouTube is an excellent service preferred by both users and advertisers and PeerTube doesn't seem able to outdo it in any meaningful way.
That's because it's a winner-take-all market. Any of those could have won and get the monopoly instead, and Youtube would have starved, but Youtube is the one who won.
And don't say Youtube was first, Dailymotion is slightly older than Youtube.
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".
Some people think dealing with the following are fun.
Handling massive amount of video ingestion from content creator; Transcoding to various format that is optimal for various devices, Live streaming with Live to VOD, Geo restriction, Live Commenting, Ad insertion and penalise adblocker, Recommendation engine.
There are many features and challenges that are unique to OTT streaming applications and running at YouTube scales makes it even more challanging, or fun to some, to handle.
I am somewhat in that class. Figuring out ways to horizontally scale video processing at the scale of YouTube sounds like a neat problem.
Obviously pretty much anyone here can get an extremely basic YouTube clone done in an afternoon or two. Spin up RabbitMQ, write an upload web server, transcode the video with ffmpeg and store it somewhere, serve it via HTTP. That’s trivial, but YouTube has to deal with 500 hours of new video every minute [1]. At those levels, the basic “senior engineer solutions” to problems stop being as appropriate, and I think those kinds of problems are ridiculously fascinating.
The annoying thing is that since YouTube has a monopoly and I have somehow managed to fail Google’s personality test multiple times, I don’t think I’ll ever get a chance to work on that kind of problem.
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
Soapbox was their competitor way way back. More recently they had Mixer, though that was more of a Twitch like service. They spent a ton of money paying streamers to use it, but the network effects are just too strong.
People have to be sufficiently discontent with the current offering. It's like game publishers throwing money at buying exclusives for their game stores. People have to not like Steam first.
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.
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.
This is extremely false, where are you getting this information? Bandwidth is ludicrously expensive, no matter what your scale.
Why do you think Netflix gives ISPs server racks filled with the entire Netflix catalog, or Microsoft/Google/Meta spend billions on their own private submarine cables? Nobody would do that if bandwidth was cheap, but it isn't.
Why do you think every single streaming provider and platform does checks every so often to see if you're still watching? It's not because they are being nice; it's because it is costing them money, even the huge companies.
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.
I think this network effect and the discoverability aspect are the main reasons why it's extremely hard to compete with YouTube. Why would people use another site if the content they want to see is not there, or is too difficult to find? Why would creators put videos there if they can't find a large audience?
The YouTube algorithm is problematic in many ways but it does succeed in viewers being suggested videos they want to see, even if the signal-to-noise ratio is not very good. That's hard to replicate when starting a new service.
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.
> 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.
Then why isnt everyone jumping at the opportunity to make a competitor? If it is soooo easy, we should have competitors. Nobody is stopping you from launching margalabargalatube.com and win the market.
Nobody, including Jeff Geerling, has an exclusive deal with YouTube to distribute the videos. Make it happen!
I mean, if that's how we're going to talk to each other, I can engage on your level...
You are soooo right! There's no such thing as a network effect or a first mover advantage! If something exists and is self sustaining (my original point), therefore creating that thing is trivial and anyone can do it (your invaluble contribution)! Your logic is flawless. Have you considered going into freelance consulting? Someone with such good and original ideas should be charging money for them.
There's definitely some very large critical mass necessary for the network effects to kick in. Is that mass such that there can only be one? Or could there be three or four, like other social media? Arguably Instagram is as large a video platform, though obviously very different. Same with tiktok; the individual videos might be shorter but the bandwidth costs scale with watch time.
you don't need youtube scale - but you need to be a lot bigger than most others are. You need to be big enough that ads pay for a full time ad salesperson as well as your other overhead.
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.
YouTube has the highest monopoly tax in all of tech.
They take 45% of YouTube premium subscription revenue. That’s higher than the App Store (30%), Spotify (30%), and any other content marketplace on the internet.
I think they get a free pass for now because they allow creators to monetize with their own native ads within videos. If I had to guess, this may become a point of contention in the future…
The fact that we’ve accepted such ridiculously high profit margins from tech companies is simply due to their network effects monopolies, and the impossibility of competing with them.
Just look at any other marketplace business with more competition, like say a grocery store or any brick and mortar retail. Their net margins are often sub-5%. Physically shipping goods across the world is far more expensive than delivering video.
Only other monopolies, like Governments, can get away with charging 45% taxes. Having known a few Youtube employees and also a few federal government employees, I would say the low stress, low effort, low fear of layoffs, low work output expectations are...ahem...similar.
Youtubes profit margin isn't that high so it is pretty close to that, it took a long time for it to get profitable even with Google ads, unlike the digital stores that serves customers for basically nothing compared to how much revenue they bring in.
Twitch also takes around that much from streamers and they still aren't profitable since it costs more to serve the streams than they make.
Does Alphabet split out YT revenue numbers in the financial reports? The latest one listed the YT revenues, but I didn't see where the line item for YT costs was.
> Physically shipping goods across the world is far more expensive than delivering video.
Are you sure? It is a logistics issue, not a technology issue. Streaming video, near instantly, around the world, without any perceivable user-experience issues, infinite times, for infinite users is a massive-massive technology issue.
Amazon same day deliver was problably the most revolutionary thing that came to the domain, but otherwise shipping 1000 cars across the world, while impressive, is a pretty straight forward task. The technology that you need are ships and trucks. You can use a 1950s era technology to do that.
It's not shipping infinite times, the number of views (and hence, cost to stream) are proportional to the fees withheld. Whether 45% is too much, I can't say, don't think it can be determined apriori. It kinda does make sense to me that it would be more than the app store fees, but I also feel those app store fees are too high as well.
Bandwith isn't free for sure but at googles scale the costs are close to the cost you have copying data to your own NAS in your LAN. Multiple orders of magnitued below what AWS charges for bandwidth.
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.
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 am subscribed to more than 70 YouTube channels, and I have never seen any of them getting kicked out, and the only videos that get removed are due to some bullshit music copyright claims.
If you see Youtubers getting kicked out constantly you might be subscribing to some weird stuff...
I am subscribed to ~270 channels through newpipe and I get "failed to fetch subscription" like maybe once a month only to see the channel is dead (usually temporarily). If you are just using youtube's app directly you won't notice when they get delisted.
I just scrolled through my subscriptions and it's mostly music, comedy, gaming, entertainment, and science channels.
I always assume it is for DMCA or for saying curse words. Every once and a while it will be because they said something politically incorrect or used the wrong chemicals or showed a gun or something.
I think that pretty much anything except for porn and gore should be allowed. I am just scrolling and I think that this video is a good example of a vid that only lasts about a month on the site, even though it should be allowed:
It has "guns", it has "drugs", it has political figures, and it has minecraft so therefore it must qualify as a children's video. This channel is basically a magnet for getting wrongfully demonetized and banned by AI or some guy working in an indian call center. But 12 years ago this would be a normal video.
Another example I can think of is "youtube poops" which are unconventional mashups of copyrighted content. They constantly get taken down and need to be reuploaded:
I wonder about the influence of the language. I regularly watch videos in English, Spanish (my mother language), and Japanese (my girlfriend's language).
English-speaking channels are usually more "polite" in the way they speak, while Spanish-speaking channels are way crazier, using expressions that no American would dare to use xD
Regarding Japanese, I don't understand enough to have a judgement, but Japanese people are usually very careful and non-confrontational.
70 channels is nothing, I add to my subscription list 700 channels per each year and listen to Youtube no less than 5 hours daily. Your weird stuff statement seems like victim-shaming.
It’s an extremely hard problem to solve unfortunately. The political tides keep shifting. One day it’s unthinkable to non censor a gender critical video.
Another day it is okay.
The YouTube management has to be adaptive enough to work in the small window that society allows at that time.
It isn't society they're kicking people off of YouTube for, it's whatever their advertisers do or don't want at any given moment. The advertising companies are their customers, and everyone else is just grist for the mill.
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.
That model already exists, it is called the internet. There you pay for hosting and advertisements and everything, and you also get all the revenue.
It isn't very popular since the internet doesn't advertise your content for you, youtube do that so its much easier for content creators to get big on youtube. Also it is free to upload on youtube, so small creators start there, small creators later grow to big creators and stay on youtube.
serving video costs money not just uploading. so there has to be fixed and variable costs - but if that is accounted for then it could work but we are putting all the risk on the creator.
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 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.
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.
They do have karma! Once upon a time I have insulted some bot account by the most insulting word possible (some foreign analog of f-word) and a lot of interesting thing happened in the same day and still happens during maybe one year. I become shadowbanned on most of my favorite big channels (chat posts in streams are visible to only me). Also most of my comments in comment section under videos become visible only if press "sort by" then "recent", this action is not just sorting comments but it recounts the number of comments and reveals comments of persons like me!
I believe there are positive cases of karma when a person becomes moderator.
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.
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?
Nothing special about YouTube other than the interface being about as offensive as possible. Rumble is light-years better in terms of speed and has an instant CSS based dark theme unlike the monolyth. I'm concerned many users that continue to use any sort of modified version of YouTube are going to eventually have their Google account sniffed out and banned. Many creators have shifted over to publishing to multiple platforms at once so that platforms like Rumble and Odysee don't seem as siloed with certain types of content. Rumble is sharp and stays out of the way, and that matters, as unlike the YouTube experience on iOS, you can still get a video to play audio only in background; it makes YouTube feel like an ad machine cesspool.
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.
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.
It is a choice. But as you are probably aware; not one many makes.
While I do prefer to read as well I do like some of the better videos. Sometimes the information density is not as high as I would like - there are reasonable efforts.
Sure, there is amateur content. But there is a surprising amount of original researched content with a high production value.
A recent example with a scientific approach to cooking with some fun high quality references to Breaking Bad:
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.
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
If I chose from your list I prefer anything with 10 views. Little channels is the place where the best possible content is concentrated. And BTW little channels never use arrows and similar lowball clickbait strategies.
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.
This is gonna be unpopular with the most of the commenters so far…
Regardless I don’t think youtube is a monopoly.
A monopoly caries with it strict anti-competitive practices along with meddling in government affairs and great public harm. Just because something has market dominance does not make it a monopoly.
Facebook is a monopoly. Complete dominance of the entire social graph, aggressively buying competitors to silence them… direct government meddling not just in the us but abroad creating untold deaths and suffering in the process… to the point they rebrand themselves to skirt responsibility… thats a monopoly.
Live nation buying up entire cities worth of venues, artist managers, booking agents, artists themselves, ticketing, promotion companies, subsequently entire production staff, blacklisting anyone they dont like, meddling with politics, obfuscating their activities through subsidiaries, destroying entire communities and cultures in the process… thats a monopoly
Youtube could be a monopoly but I dont see them squashing their most successful creators from creating their own streaming services, I dont see them directly meddling with politics on a large scale (granted there was that time the algorithm would tend towards promoting fascism, but rather than keep that going or doubling down I see the opposite which implies active intent to the contrary), I dont see them aggressively purchasing competitors… I see them as ridiculously huge and I find their censorship annoying that if government was working I would think should be examined from a public responsibility stance but I dont see them engaged in monopolistic practices… in fact I see them actively avoiding most activities that would make them a monopoly that is of course other than being really really huge.
> Just because something has market dominance does not make it a monopoly.
Isn't that the definition of a monopoly though? Just because something is a monopoly, that doesn't mean it necessarily has anti-competitive practices or meddles in government. (though that usually follows)
For what it's worth I agree that YouTube isn't abusing their market position, but it's important the semantics are clear.
I guess so, but thats the problem with language that isnt specific enough. What I feel people are discussing and what I was referring too was more properly called an illegal monopoly… technically having market domination is also a monopoly, but thats not a crime.
The Hypothetical Monopolist Test is a primary method used to define relevant markets in antitrust cases. It assesses whether a hypothetical monopolist could profitably impose a small but significant and non-transitory increase in price (SSNIP).
Steps in the Test
Market Definition: Identify the relevant product and geographic market.
Price Increase
Assessment: Determine if a hypothetical monopolist could raise prices without losing too many customers.
Iterative Process: If the price increase is profitable, the market is correctly defined. If not, the market definition is expanded to include substitutes.
To establish a monopolization claim, two main elements must be proven:
Possession of Monopoly Power: The firm must have significant and durable market power.
Willful Acquisition or Maintenance: The firm must have obtained or maintained this power through improper means, rather than through competition on the merits.
From what I can tell latest consensus is that views haven't actually dropped, just how yt discloses them. i.e. What constitutes a "view" in the stats appears to have changed. The other engagement metrics (likes etc) seem to have not moved suggesting nothing has changed in real world. LTT went into it in a fair bit of detail
Way too much discussion of Youtube is mired in monetization. Not platform sustainability, but how much wealth content creators can extract from it. It's a bit perverse and views the audience as a source to sqeeze revenue from. It's like making open source software or wikipedia only about how much creators can make.
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 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.
I wonder if dynamic ads are even necessary.
Meaning that it seems like the most creators more money from sponsors, meaning that companies directly sponsor creators. It could work similar to podcasts people post podcasts and they are available in RSS, and multiple podcasts platforms, for the videos they could be available in something like pee tube or similar to podcasts where there is multiple players created. And for creators they get directly contracted by companies, as this might present problems there could be a company that acts as the mediator between sponsors and creators
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.
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.
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.
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?
Breaking up a monopoly must follow sustainable business lines. The court’s early idea of forcing Google to spin off Chrome risked crippling the product and disrupting the market without restoring competition. The remedy was later scaled back, leaving Google with little more than a slap on the wrist. By contrast, the AT&T and Microsoft cases succeeded because they targeted natural, profitable divisions that could stand alone. Addressing areas like Azure or MacBooks, which are not monopolies, does nothing to reduce monopoly power. A more effective remedy in Google’s case would have been dividing its multiple monopolies, rather than divesting loss-leading but essential units. Profitability alone does not define a monopoly, but once one is identified, ensuring that each division can operate as a viable business is crucial.
Sometime in 2009 or 2008 I realized we were screwed and wanted to support alternatives and stop using it same with Chrome. Something told me Google was going to swallow the internet. Sadly I still wish we would have propped up serious competitors. Where does one go when YouTube or any part of Google bans you? I have a friend or two who get banned any time he makes a Google account. Years of his personal data completely forfeited.
I have been moving off Google for a while, and will continue doing so.
I get that YouTube creators are worried about the drop in views, but honestly, this isn’t much different from what happens in every other industry. For the rest of us, markets change, laws change, inflation hits, taxes go up, new tariffs appear… and we all have to adapt. The market is never static, and everyone else works under constantly shifting conditions. So instead of complaining, maybe it’s time to adjust, just like the rest of us do.
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.
Premium pays out to creators by minutes viewed (vs AdSense which pays out by ads viewed)
I've heard some creators say that in total, they make more money from all their Premium viewers than they make from all their AdSense viewers, even though the former are a small fraction of the latter.
This argument is repeated on other comments as well, but I think it's fundamentally a parralel fact.
YouTube giving some of the Premium money to creators doesn't make Premium a good product. If'm not that utilitarian to think any single additional penny going to some creators is good whatever YouTube takes in the process and the general impact on the the whole field.
YouTube seems to be pretty explicit that it is paying 55% of revenue from watching videos to creators:
> If a partner turns on Watch Page Ads by reviewing and accepting the Watch Page Monetization Module, YouTube will pay them 55% of net revenues from ads displayed or streamed on their public videos on their content Watch Page. This revenue share rate also applies when their public videos are streamed within the YouTube Video Player on other websites or applications.
As you point out, that revenue split has a set of conditions, which also require a level of contract on Youtube and other requirements (not being DMCA stroke for instance)
So where does your Premium money go when you watch a very small creator ? where does it go for a demonetized video ? etc.
That might sounds like a subtle difference, but consider the gap with channel membership, super chats (which are also roughly 50% split I think?) or patreon for instance.
A "demonetized" video is technically called a "limited or no ads" video in YouTube Studio - it means YouTube has determined that advertisers do not want their ads seen on the video for reputational reasons. Premium views still pay out for them since they are not paid through showing ads.
Sorry I wasn't referring to videos the creator decides to forgo revenue, as you point there's a better term for that.
I was thinking about the videos that were supposed to make money but got shut off monetization for whatever reason. DMCA strike is one, YouTube flagging it as risque is another common one.
I was referring to your latter example - when YouTube decides a video is inconvenient, it means they're afraid advertisers don't like it. Those videos still get paid from Premium views.
Youtube premium users on average give creators more revenue per view than non-premium users. 55% of the premium revenue is split between the creators you watch.
Monetizing your marketplace monopoly with 45% rents is even more egregious than the App Store which people complain about at 30%.
In fact, it might be the highest monopoly tax in all of tech. Even Spotify only takes 30% from the same musicians who post the same music videos on each platform.
Video especially with high-bit rates is most expensive medium to deliver and store. Well, I suppose Youtube could move to model where they charge for creators for both of those and drop their cut to 30%...
Well, it is not cheap if we look at the massive server racks they have, but in the scale of the world? Watching 1h of a video probably costs them like $0.00001 or something equally minuscule.
How would you see it if your phone company spammed your calls and SMS and offered to remove the annoyances for some random fixed fee that is not tied to your usage of the service ?
If we care about Youtube's infra, the expected business structure should follow that assumption.
You pay the same fixed Premium fee per month whatever you do with YouTube.
You can quit YouTube for weeks or watch it 22h every day, you still pay the same. Same way you can exclusively watch non monetized streams or only watch top monetized creators, you'll be paying exactly the same.
The only difference will be how much YouTube gets to keep.
> You can quit YouTube for weeks or watch it 22h every day, you still pay the same
This has always been in subscription model, like mobile data plan, or exclusive club membership. I won't argue if it's good or not, just saying it has been a thing for a long time.
> you can exclusively watch non monetized streams or only watch top monetized creators, you'll be paying exactly the same.
Well, the server do not care if the video's creator is paid or not, it still has to store the same data, and you have to pay for it.
I likewise don't use one on my apple TV, but my friend recently told me there are proxy apps for Apple TV which use DNS-based ad blocking and which can get you the US Netflix library while abroad.
Oh, I'm not against paying for a service. I'm willing to pay more, but that's the issue: companies will happily sell you their basic enshittified product and never provide you with an option of actual good usable one.
I do feel entitled to unlimited video streaming for free. Since the invention of bittorrent there is no need to have a client-server middleman for distributing large files like videos.
If the bandwidth bankrupts them, then boo hoo. They take advantage of network effects so no one can go anywhere else.
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.
My gripe with Youtube Music is that the bitrate quality of their music is lower than Tidal or even Spotify. YTM audio files that are actually on Youtube will only stream in 128kbps.
I’m surprised to hear that. I just switched from Spotify to Youtube Music and found the audio quality to be way better, even though I had Spotify set to high.
> 1) I watch youtube more than any streaming service
I would amend that to say "any *other streaming service". To me Youtube provides more and better content than the other streaming services, and I don't think people should balk at $14 for youtube when they happily pay that for netflix, disney+, hulu, or spotify.
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.
To stay in the metaphor, wouldn't see some other business model that would allow them to provide the soup to people who order without having to threaten to spit into it ?
It's not a particularly crazy idea that free users get a lesser experience. I'm perfectly happy to pay for youtube since it provides by far the best content and the price is reasonable.
The fact that people can get all of that for free with some minor limitations is fairly generous.
> It's not a particularly crazy idea that free users get a lesser experience.
Agreed, but it's the difference between a restaurant serving a mid-tier soup for cheaper versus giving customers a really good soup that the chef spit's in to encourage people to pay for the more expensive version of it.
It feels bad as a consumer, but the alternative is usually worse.
The "stop spitting in your soup if you pay us extra" is really efficient market segmentation. If you don't do that you need to find actual value props that separate the market in just the right way to generate the financials that allow the product to keep going as is. 9 times out of 10 the result is that failing PMs totally fuck up the product and everyone loses.
It's the SSO kerfuffle in a different package - terrible, but the right choice surprisingly often.
There’s an excellent free ios app called “Unwatched” which lets you make playlists, set defaults per channel such playback speed, and lets you play videos in the background. I use it for “podcasts” which are video only.
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.
Paying to remove ads is negotiating with terrorists.
YouTube stays in the dominant position either way, it's not like tomorrow you'll go watch Nebula exclusively (you'd already have done it at this point). They're not providing anything materially, so the amount you pay is bound to nothing except how much you're willing to pay. And how much you're willing to pay depends on how much you're annoyed.
So YouTube's main incentive for this program is to annoy you as much as you can tolerate to optimize the most money you get extracted.
It sounds like you're arguing that YouTube should be free and also ad-free, which makes no sense.
YouTube is expensive to operate. They give me an option of paying by watching ads or paying money. That's much better than my options most other places, which is just to be forced to see ads.
I'm arguing that youtube should be paid for actual features. For instance membership and super chats are clearly labeled as extra content. Member only content is the same.
You pay for a specific thing that is produced by a creator and provided by Youtube. "Pay to remove the ads we're pushing" is none of that.
On Youtube being free, this is their business choice, and also the way they crush the competition and cement a near monopoly on the market. If it was a public service NGO I'd see it from a different angle, but it's not.
I'd argue that regulators should have a serious look at the effect of Youtube on that specific market, and if the only solution is the Youtube free tier disappearing I'll be fine with it.
We're in a skewed situation with a near monopoly that only companies at the size of Bytedance can challenge, and I'm not sure why we should see the status quo as something to be protected or encouraged.
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 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.
YouTube is it's own CDN, taking up real-estate in almost every ISP NOC.
Even if a firm has a cool new gimmick to get through a successful launch, the incremental cost of hosting "free content" will pose a liability due to higher operational margins.
YT are not a true monopoly, but rather "free" content from a spam heavy competitor is a foolish business plan. =3
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.
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.
Love YouTube, but between the price hikes and being fed nothing but shorts and doom-scroll bait, they’re pushing me to the edge. For the former, it feels like every streaming service (audio or video) is starting pave the way for a new golden age of piracy and personal content collections.
> 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.
As someone under the age of 30, it took me a while to realize that this wasn't a parody post.
Making a post with this title without mentioning TikTok or Instagram is like making a post titled "Pepsi is a mysterious monopoly" without once mentioning Coke.
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.
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.
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.
No one will disrupt YouTube unless they offer better compensation to creators. YouTube is probably the single best place to monetize content online right now, nowhere else comes close; not TikTok, Instagram, even Twitch...
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).
Out of the box, I agree. I've got my feed well-curated at this point such that I get very little of that type of garbage pushed my way. I recently viewed the YouTube main page in an incognito window and, good lord, the default experience is an absolute cesspool of AI-generated nonsense, ragebait, and straight-up spam.
I'm not sure it's a hot take. I don't learn as easily from video as I do from text, but I seem to have curated my video recommendations to videos that I do like to watch as 'infotainment'.
e.g, Veritasium is a channel I quite like for their longer 'mini-documentary' like videos. And then there are just entertainment channels like Linus Tech Tips.
Not _everything_ has to be micro-optimized in my life, so I don't mind occasionally just sitting in the sofa watching a video that could have been a 3 minute blog :)
YouTube is great, but most content is unwatchable at 1.0x speed. Without the Video Speed Controller extension (still better than the built-in speed controls), I doubt I'd watch at all.
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 also find that they block incognito mode a lot too - esp. on android when you use a hacked client like revanced (less so in the browser, but i use firefox and have seen incognito mode causing youtube to block you from viewing without logging in).
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.
I didn't make the comment you're replying to, but views can exist independent of comments and likes, and bots can just as easily like and comment.
Likes and comments by real humans can remain steady and bot views can vary dramatically. Likes and comments aren't metrics that produce revenue for creators.
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 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.
Every monopoly is predicated upon abusive, anti-competitive and unlawful practices, as well as exemptions and unearned subsidies from governments. Always. Many people aligning with megacorporations wouldn't support "capitalism" if the playing field was even.
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!
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 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.
Have no idea what your last sentence means..
But that said - if you're claiming that YT search is broken I wholeheartedly agree. I don't understand how search on YT can be so bad given that it's owned by a search engine company.
Then again, their search engine is also subpar nowadays.. :)
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]
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.
> 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!).
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.
My point is that I don't have my own definition of words!
We should all use the common definition of words. That makes communication possible!
dictionary.com gives this definition: "exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of prices."
That's... not what I expected. To me having a monopoly means being the only provider, but I'll bend the knee to the dictionary.
In this case though, with competitors at 10% or 25% market share, you can easily publish videos at a cheaper vendor.
When the entire pool of competitors is only 10%, it's not so easy. You can put a video up but nobody will see it. The network effect of viewers is one of the big reasons to want multiple major sites.
If Google is really a monopolist on some markets, any other market from the dozen is needed to support the Google's monopoly. Kind of Apple's Facetime when decreasing number of clients for a tiny messenger makes a big support for rest of the Apple.
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 wrote up notes here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45180555 but this wasn't coordinated. As I mentioned in the first paragraph of the post, I was following a thread on Bluesky where Adrian and Jeff were chatting. I posted the article there. I didn't know Jeff had posted on Hacker News about this already, and I didn't know he would post my piece. I definitely would have done another editing pass if I had known!
> How did Jeff even get to know about this post? Unless the author sent it over to him?
Google search alerts are a thing (https://www.google.com/alerts). I'd expect a public figure, however niche their following is, would set them up to track the conversation about them.
Uh, there have been dozens of videos of senior YouTube creators who have independently voiced alarm about this within the past few days. It's now been long enough since the algorithm change that statistical time series analyses can detect it. It is no coincidence or surprise that there should be several concerns raised here today. Many livelihoods depend on this. It's pretty serious for certain "celebrities".
Not to be rude, but this is one of several accusations of astroturfing I've seen on HN lately. They have all been so clearly off the mark that it makes me wonder if there was some event that triggered users here to be so paranoid?
Do you really think that Friendly Jordies, Jeff Geerling, Second Wind, Red Letter Media, Brodie Robertson, Game Grumps, Vinesauce, Dead Meat, Dark Viper, and Linus Tech Tips, for example, are in the same Discord channel (Friendly Jordies is an Aussie political channel for goodness sake, he couldn't care less about tech), and are part of a conspiracy to fabricate viewership data... to get sympathy? To draw attention to their channels? And as part of this plan, they astroturfed multiple social networks with this fake data for the last week?
Pretty sure YouTube made an algorithm change and it's causing problems. Again.
I didnt say any of that. You dont need to put words into my mouth to "win an argument".
I think it is reasonable to assume that most popular YTers are in a discord/telegram/whatsapp/text chain together. This is their community, so it makes sense to have a quick line of comms between them.
Just like how HN is a place for .. hackers to socialize, it is conceivable there's a $place where they meet and discuss inside-baseball stuff.
Okay, I am happy to hear that is not what you were implying; a bit extreme, but that's how I read your comments in light of the reality, taking the skepticism to its apparent conclusion. I genuinely did not intend to provide a straw man or to argue and apologize for doing so; I'm just not sure what else you were implying.
We know that large groups of YouTubers, particularly the "elite" ones, are in chats with each other, this is true. But the sheer variety of them talking about this from across different spaces on YouTube and different tiers makes it seem unlikely to me they are all in the same exclusive social space. I think we operate with different priors though.
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.
"to just ignore people capable of speaking two or more languages"
I'm terribly annoyed by this, and even more so with their latest push to translate the titles, so now you have to click and listen in on the video in order to know which the original language is.
I speak 3 languages, and I want the title and voice to be in the original language. And I won't bother nor would settle with watching an AI translated video even if it is translated from a language which I do not understand. Then I simply do not want to see that video.
Me too. I hate the auto-translation feature. Both on YouTube and other websites that force it on you, such as the new Reddit (I'll just stop using Reddit when they turn off Old Reddit).
Likewise. Reddit just took the preference for old UI away on mobile for my account (seems to be some sort of testing they are doing maybe?). The new UI is jarring an not useful to me. And "old*" always seems to have a broken failure mode, that some links within reddit default to new.
I strongly advise any 3rd party app (I use Relay for Reddit) and it costs me $3/mo for decently heavy usage. About half of that goes to API fees and half to the developer. I consider that fair given the excellent features and lack of ads
And if paying for reddit is unacceptable, it's easy to get it for free.
Either use one of the still-supported third party apps with an accessibility exemption (RedReader for Android or Dystopia for iOS), or use any of the classic 3rd party apps with your own API keys - which you can get for free, if you mod your own subreddit. Takes 5 minutes to set up.
It isn't a feature, at least not for users. I strongly suspect youtube's autotranslate has more to do with regulatory compliance and content moderation. Rather than having people who speak X/Y/Z languages, they want each every video to be translated into English by default so they can be feed more easily into the the system that vets content. Having translated and non-translated copies floating around is probably seen as a needless complication.
Once a monopoly has been established, the next step is to actively make the product worse in order to either reduce costs or push users towards premium features.
I speak at least 3 languages at a native level. Google's autotranslate 80% of the time selects a language I'm not just unfamiliar with, but can't even read due to the writing system difference (i.e. sudden arabic appears).
Considering I'm using it with an account that is about 20 years old now, that gave Google all of the permissions in the world and has all the possible data one might need to make the conclusions on which language I prefer, it is absolutely absurd that it cannot make a solid guess.
As another multilingual person, I keep getting reminded how bad software "features" can be for us. First, from early computers up to at least the Windows XP era, things sucked due to code pages and all that, but that was understandable, technical limitations after all. Now things suck due to what's supposed to be convenient UX.
Google Chrome broke Ctrl-F functionality for my native language ages ago and it's still broken because the breakage is apparently by design.
The Amazon website for my country appears to mostly auto-translate the English product pages into the local language. Product titles sometimes mean totally ridiculous things because of course the translation is poor.
Nobody cares about the Accept-Language header. Way too many websites like to use GeoIP and switch to the local language. Sometimes the geolocation is wrong, sometimes their location-language mappings are, and even when everything is working "correctly" it's a pain if I'm traveling. I have my browser set up with a correct Accept-Language list, but during travel I definitely see websites switch to a language I can't read.
Then of course there's the huge problem, related to autodetection, that you cannot deduce a user's language from their residence. Countries don't have a surjective mapping onto languages.
Why is ctrl-f broken?
Because it ignores diacritics. Searching for ā will find a, searching for š will highlight s. This may make sense for some languages where diacritics are used sparingly to indicate an aspect of pronunciation, but in my language and many others diacritics are used for entirely different letters. The letter ā is not a. Treating them as equivalent makes as little sense as treating e and o as equivalent would in English.
If I'm trying to find kāzas (wedding) in a page, I will get hits for kazas (goats). If I'm looking for šauš, a letter sequence that words about shooting begin with, I will also get hits in šausmas (horror) or sauss (dry). It's nonsense. Windows 3.1 notepad.exe could find the actual word I entered in a text file (though the input required setup), the dominant browser in 2025 cannot do that and finds entirely unrelated words because an English speaker has decided they're visually similar.
It’s typical Google… “here’s the 80% solution that will never go beyond 90%… NEVER… you got that? Stop asking!”
My favorite is Google street view for my EU account translates streets in any random EU city to Japanese. Because why not?
There is a simple fix to disable auto dubbing.
Go into your Google account settings, under General, then add any languages that you watch YouTube videos in. I did this for Spanish and all my Spanish videos stopped getting dubs and translated titles.
What about video titles themselves? It's very annoying.
Didn't work for me, at least instantly. Maybe it takes a while to process through their services. No idea
Err, from a quick check, this might actually work. Thanks I guess, but how come this isn't an easy option in the YouTube UI?!
Doesn't always work, I irregularly get autodubbing on certain creators, like Mark Robber
This only works if you login to YouTube, something I will never do.
They still track you? Is there much of a difference? Get an account you only use for YT, I can't imagine the difference in data leaking will be that much greater if they track you just by IP/other fingerprinting vs a session?
You would need a Google account and that requires another mobile phone number burned.
You used to be able to make a google account without a phone number through Android TV. Not sure if that still works.
Google requires a phone number?
Only if you use a bad / risky ip or browser.
What's a bad browser?
Thanks, I went there and added spanish since google and youtube were auto translating some stuff for me lately out of nowhere and I saw that there was a language already added for me by google, Uzbek. WTF?
It's especially annoying when you're searching for things that are done very differently in different parts of the world. No, I don't want to learn how to build walls or wire up electricity from e.g. Americans.
Watching any dubbed video is a big no for me. You lose ALL original expression, this was already the case with TV dubbing and it's far worse with anything auto generated. People with accents get translated poorly at best, resulting in garbadge.
The excuse is "most people want it so we force it", hooray for the dictatorship of the masses (by assumption, I've seen no research papers on the matter published by any platform).
It unfortunately could be true. I mean I hear people in my own family listen to the always same sounding auto generated narrator voices on YouTube and it has me thinking: "Oh my god why do you even listen to this crap???" and the portrayed ideology that comes along with such content is very questionable as well. Usually some low effort (a)social drama shit. It has zero worth. No, it is net negative! But apparently people watch or listen to that crap.
And so we see it playing out over and over again. Dumb masses creating market incentives for bullshit products and product decisions, ruining everything. If you want it with a pinch of capitalism critique: Oh right capitalism makes it so that we get the best products!!! lol
I was so confused by this when it first happened to me....
Watching quite some youtube content, and more than willing to pay any content provider for a worthy dose of content... I refuse to hand youtube any money and will happily play the adblocker cat and mouse and use clunky scripts to remove shorts. Starting to archive the most interesting channels myself. Thanks yt-dlp.
so many websites do this. ebay is another offender, where if you buy international items and speak english, it just gets in the way and introduces mistakes, which is especially bad if you're about to pay money for something. And of course, no way to turn it off.
This feature is so annoying. YouTube is always trying new stupid features that I wonder who they make sense to. The hype thing now, the games, I wonder for who are these things useful and if it's relevant in any sort of metric. I use unkook on desktop and Newpipe or my phone for a more minimal watching experience now
If I click I’m not interested on every short presented to me and I’ve never watched a short, why can’t YouTube get the point? At least give us the option to remove them. I don’t deal with the translation issue but not giving you the option is what is beyond frustrating for me.
If you're using ublock, you can remove elements on webpages, including the area where shorts are on the YT pages. It's what I did on my mobile to stop watching them.
if your on firefox or one of its clones, firefox can auto run javascript scripts to remove shorts with the extension Greasemonkey, scripts can be found at 'the greasy fork'. there is also a decent youtube abdroid app called litube which can be found on f-droid which has a built in option to remove shorts (among other great options)
It took a little while but YouTube has stopped recommending shorts after doing exactly this. They still appear in my subscription feed but it’s less bothersome because they’re from channels I actually watch.
You can use unhook or similar extension
No, you don't understand! Being interested in anything works only in one direction, and that is the direction of getting you to engage with content that brings ad money!
What's even more bullshit is that this is easily fixable on their side without impacting the goal of the feature. They just need to take into account all the languages of the user, not just the first one.
I've even seen it happening on pure music videos. It was the pinnacle of how brainlessly this feature was implemented.
A similar case: for those who haven't seen it, Jimmy Kimmel's "Unnecessary Censorship" videos are regular videos with added bleeps to make it sound as if the person is talking about something censorship-worthy.
YouTube auto-translates these videos, with the end result being a random toss between the original uncensored speech, the modified speech with some sex term added in there (and unbleeped!), and random nonsense - all of it read in a robotic monotone voice.
The end result is completely unwatchable, except perhaps as a dadaist experiment. I can't understand how someone hasn't noticed it yet.
I currently dislike and comment every video that has out dubbing enabled. I hate this approach but it is the only way to somehow make this awful feature more visible.
Yeah this is infuriating. I read 4 languages and now I'm left trying to reverse-engineer/guess what the title I'm reading was supposed to mean.
Add on top of that googles persistent (14 years and counting) inability to decide which of the three countries I've lived in they attribute my account to (sometimes it still opens maps centered on Stockholm 12 years after I left) and I understand why I watch way less video these days...
> 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.
Almost every reply has pointed to TikTok as some sort of counterfactual.
1. TikTok exists today, and the author still feels like YouTube is a monopoly. If TikTok was actually a viable alternative to YouTube, this article wouldn't exist.
2. Futhermore, TikTok is not a substitute for YouTube, especially for the kinds of content that the author is watching. People don't treat TikTok as a video library - how many TikTok videos are posted straight to HN? TikTok does not have the same diversity of content as YouTube.
3. TikTok addressed point (2) of my post - ByteDance launched in the US with the acquisition of Musically, and even then still had to pay for content. The creator fund, and now also the TikTok shop is a huge part of TikTok's content strategy.
>The vast majority of YT content is not monetized by creators, often not even eligible for it in the first place.
This is a social quirk, not something that a newcomer can replicate. The problem is, for a new platform, your best content creators will quickly defect to other more monetizable platforms once they get the eyeballs. This is what happened to Vine. If you want to have a sustainable platform you have to keep your creators. YouTube doesn't have the existential threat of the next PewDiePie defecting off the platform. TikTok paid AlixEarle millions to ensure they didn't lose her.
>1. TikTok exists today, and the author still feels like YouTube is a monopoly. If TikTok was actually a viable alternative to YouTube, this article wouldn't exist.
Or the article might have just wrongly failed to take into consideration TikTok as a viable alternative. Imagine that?
>2. Futhermore, TikTok is not a substitute for YouTube, especially for the kinds of content that the author is watching. People don't treat TikTok as a video library -
>how many TikTok videos are posted straight to HN? TikTok does not have the same diversity of content as YouTube.*
HN is a niche platdorm mostly for older farts. Doesn't say anything about the viability of TikTok as YouTube replacement in general.
And an argument can be made about TikTok's viability to replace YouTube in its own thing, not that it already has done that. Unlike other platforms, TikTok has brand recognition, viewers, younger demographics, advertising and payments sorted out, and lots of initial content. If it can make a good proposition for longer YouTube style content, it has everything else sorted to be a viable alternative.
>YouTube doesn't have the existential threat of the next PewDiePie defecting off the platform.
WTF YouTube wont have it? If another platform starts to be seen as a cooler alternative, creators can jump ship on a heartbeat...
"TikTok does not have the same diversity of content as YouTube."
Maybe this is true but it is also easy to get the impression because of algorithmic differences.
I think YouTube quite aggressively tries to find a global optimum for your viewing preferences and for that constantly throws a certain fraction of random content at you to test if you like it. At the same time there is high inertia for active engagement to influence your feed.
TikTok is completely different. Once you are locked into your niche it tries to keep you engaged there as much as possible but never strays into other niches by itself. If you actively search for content outside your niche it is quick to adapt.
So, if you are just a lurker on TikTok it is very easy to get the impression that content diversity is low there.
Fwiw, the only content on youtube I see as both interesting and irreplaceable are music videos. News clips, recipes, sharing of opinions, etc are all on tiktok and don't waste my time. Virtually all long-form content is better presented in prose. Documentaries with critical clips can be purchased without having to watch ads or found on archive.org. Interviews and monologuing work just fine with podcasts and without having to be subjected to the most obnoxious ads known to man. The incentive to make videos long makes 95% of the clips shared with me unbearably boring, and I can't exactly search or scan the video for the interesting parts like I can text. Plus, did I mention how the ads make me want to rip my eyes and ears out?
Maybe if I had children, it would seem more attractive, but I just don't get the appeal outside of that.
That's the thing YouTube works for so many different people. Some just listen to music. Others just for tutorials, others for news etc
That's kind of my point: music videos is the only thing on which youtube has a monopoly.
It has also the monopoly on having every kind, which makes the brand strong.
TikTok is a fluke, created by the condition of how it was originally born as Douyin in China. It is also the only app that translated well from the domestic China market to international markets.
Being backed by lots of VC cash and Bytedance's revenues in China is a key factor in getting TikTok established overseas.
TikTok is the most prominent one, for a number of reasons, but other platforms that pioneered or copied the format also reached considerable prominence. Instagram Reels, Snapchat Stories, etc. And tellingly, when YouTube wanted to compete, they needed to build an experience quite separate from the rest of the site. There is a qualitative difference in how people perceive and consume this type of content. It's not just "vertical YouTube".
Of course each one of these platforms was backed by VC or stock market money, but that's the nature of the industry. Over the years, VCs ended up throwing a lot of money at Google and YouTube killers and that didn't get them anywhere, so that in itself isn't the winning formula.
Wasn't TikTok originally Musicaly that already popular then acquired by ByteDance?
Vine had more active users than Musically, and look what happened to Vine. It would have never had the investment internationally if not for the blow-out success it had inside Mainland China.
well yeah, crossing the giant youtube moat took a lot of money, both invested and prexisting
but what makes it a fluke?
Combination of factors, but mostly the success Douyin had in Mainland China leading to the investment in TikTok internationally, given that no other Chinese social app had reach this level of penetration.
Not to mention that TikTok has now been clearly also been brought to heel by the ruling cabal of narcissistic psychopaths.
> 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.
They go to Spotify and Apple Music to listen to music, they turn on cable TV or go to a website to get their news, they get the Netflix algorithm to suggest them related videos. Etc.
I wonder though, are all those YouTubers blissfully unaware of the problems created by making YouTube a monopoly for videos? Why not simply upload your videos on another platform as well? Or is YouTube engaging in this anti competitive stuff like "if you monetize here you are not allowed to upload elsewhere"?
I wish I could go somewhere other than YouTube, but if, say, the artist only posts their live videos there, there's not much I can do about it.
Yeah but tiktok is not youtube meaning a long format video platform.
They tried to put longer videos but it didn't take off. Also search sucks so I can't got a search for a tutorial.
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.
I agree with this. For example some tech creators are using peertube or similar. University Lectures now posting in other websites as backup and people that do courses also have them in their website. What I think what will happen it's that YouTube will still be used for discovery to drive the traffic to these other sites until people finally migrate to the smaller ones.
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.
I confirm. I used to be subscribing RSS on slashdot but it's been rubbish only appearing there since a few years ago.
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 feel like that is a different niche. Most of the videos i watch on youtube are long form, although i have no idea how much that is the norm.
A data point: I watch highlights of sport events, videos that explain how to do things, some music videos (rarely.) Those are only on YT at scale.
The silly funny videos I see people looking at on TikTok all day long? Not interested.
There are also lot of experts (obviously its the internet so anyone could be anyone) who post educational content on their field of expertise in the 20min - 1 hour length video format. I don't see that type of content anywhere else.
It truly is amazing the sort of learning resources on the internet you can find if you are really truly interested in a topic.
> There are also lot of experts (obviously its the internet so anyone could be anyone) who post educational content on their field of expertise in the 20min - 1 hour length video format. I don't see that type of content anywhere else.
Exactly. This is the kind of content that I love to watch (in particular also lecture recordings from top experts).
In my observation, this kind of content is hard to monetize by showing ads: I notice that the ads shown at such videos (for me and friends - which may be a biased sample) simply neither fits my interests nor the subject area of such videos.
Imagine watching a dev talk and get a very loud/bright/cheesy ads about some construction tool. That's the kind of stuff that makes me download those videos instead.
While it's a different niche, the worry for YouTube is that younger viewers generally consume a lot of short form video. They might eventually shift to watching more long form content as they get older, but if they're accustomed to one provider it's going to be easier for that provider to expand into long form content than for YouTube to persuade them to switch or use a second provider. So YouTube feels it has to move into short form in order to ensure long term maintenance and growth of its user base.
YouTube used to be mostly short videos. 2-3 minutes was typical. They've moved to longer videos by changing their algorithms to encourage creators to waffle on.
TikTok is much closer to how YouTube started out.
Every three days I have to close the "shorts" bar in YouTube, which has been returning ever more quickly when I remove it. I yearn for the days before even the "Okay, we'll remove it for two weeks" or whatever. It was obvious that things wouldn't stay that way.
TikTok, SnapChat, and Instagram had the capital and the advertising parts completely figured out. They sidestepped a lot of legal troubles by limiting the length and by insisting on the vertical video format, unsuitable for pirated movies, shows, and most musical clips.
>It’s not unheard of, that even millennial couples, will spend and evening together in bed scrolling TikTok instead of watching tv together.
We're doomed
What if one is scrolling HN and the other instagram? Or if they are reading different books?
The commenter mentioned instead of an activity together "watching tv" so other activities that they could do together is the actual alternative
Those are very hard but also very solvable problems with a lot of capital. It's the same basic idea as creating a new media company, albeit a lot more costly to build. This is way too expensive to do in a seed round, but one of the other FAANG giants could try if they wanted to.
The even harder problem is just answering the basic question of why the viewer side should care, and why they should change their deeply-ingraned habit of going to YouTube to find something to watch. "YouTube isn't fair and transparent to creators" is not going to be compelling to very many people, if the experience of the likes of Tidal competing with Spotify is any indication. YouTube is valuable to creators because it aggregates a huge audience of viewers, those viewers stick around because it's addictive and there is a content flywheel already.
But if you actually had a truly good answer for why the average person should switch their YouTube habit to watching some other site instead, the resulting payoff is huge enough (and there's enough crazy risk-hungry investors in the world) that the capital and the moat problems could theoretically be overcome.
What was unique about Youtube is that it got to claim the first search result for "Lazy Sunday", a popular SNL skit at the time. That is how everyone came to learn of it. The "homemade" videos that followed were also necessary for its longevity, but initial discovery was critical.
Disrupting YouTube is difficult because the rampant piracy isn't as easy to pull off anymore.
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.
> 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.
What if I told you it did?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Original_Channel_Initi...
https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/investing-in-future-of-...
The main reason youtube has no competitors is because people want free (no ads, no subscription) content. And people will gleefully ad-block your service.
Look up the story of Vid.me
It exploded in popularity around 2015-17. Many youtube creators moved to it.
Then they went bankrupt because no one wanted to pay a subscription, and no one wanted to view ads.
Internet users desperately need to look in the mirror to figure out why so many services have strangleholds and why so many services plain suck for users - the users aren't paying for anything in any form, and they celebrate that fact.
There is no paying by users - which is replaced by ads. But in my experience the number of ads on YouTube sky-rocketed. I had no problem watching 15 seconds of an ad, skipping and then watching the rest of the video. But I used to watch long-form videos - and now I have skip ads every 7-8 minutes.
I almost stopped watching YT. In the few instances I watch I will for a8 minutes or so and at the first ad I am leaving. I am wondering if behavior like this explains the drop in views, but the fact that revenue stayed the same....
On Youtube you also have a choice between watching ads or subscription, I don't see the difference. Yes you can use an ad-blocker, but they're making it harder and harder.
Youtube has no competition because it's a winner-takes-all market, and they won.
Creators go where viewers are. Viewers go where creators are. Rinse and repeat, and sooner or later you end up with a monopoly.
> 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)
I don't think that's as big as a problem as you do, as long as you don't care about exclusivity.
Think of the streaming music market: Youtube Music, Spotify, Tidal, Amazon Music, ect, generally have mostly the same content and little exclusivity.
For example, you could have a feature where all uploaded videos are automatically uploaded to YouTube and all of your competitors.
> People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.
It also helped that tons of copyrighted content was uploaded and the policing and take down was originally pretty lax.
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.
Or, as the algorithm seemed to be rewarding 10min+ videos at one point and a bunch of creators put out filler content, people no longer enjoy forced long form content.
This has been a huge thing in car YouTube, a drag race that’s over in 11 seconds stretched out to a 19 minute video. Realistically 5-7 minutes would’ve been heaps of time.
Instead of one or the other, think about it like both have their purpose with the same topic.
Shorts have been shown to cause more issues in the brain than not.
Long slows the brain down to actually be able to sit with an idea.
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
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.
The US government is extremely active in going after governments which attempt to impose digital service taxes. It was proposed in the UK, and quickly vanished without a trace.
Indeed they are, IMO this is the real number 1 reason behind the US tariffs, as well as behind his anger against Brazil, even more so than the prosecution of his fash club buddy.
What you do is get together with a bunch of other countries and announce it as a block. The US can only keep shooting itself in the foot so much. The thing they should've done is, very soon after the US tariffs were announced, say "We think this is a fantastic idea by Mr. Trump. Aligned with his views, we are instituting accompanying digital tariffs to fix the digital trade deficit. We're sure he'll agree that the trade balance should be corrected in both the physical as well as digital worlds".
The UK is effectively a colony of the US so them backing out is entirely expected. Luckily, other countries aren't. I think Brazil, Vietnam (?), Thailand (?) are ones that have already set a date for when it's being instated, and I haven't heard of them backing out. There's probably more. The EU has also confirmed today that they won't be cancelling the Google fine, though we'll have to wait and see what happens to their DST proposals. Given their serious lack of spine as well as how far the EU has gone to the right, I do expect them to cancel it, but who knows.
And again, there's a hundred other protectionist barriers that can be put up. This is the smartest way, salami slicing, as China has figured out decades ago. You begin very small and just ramp it up. You begin with something like banning Twitch because of moral concerns. Maybe even just from 8 to 8, when kids are up. Then you say national security concerns mean data centers of critical infrastructure all have to be hosted in the country. Then you expand that. Then you make Whatsapp (or whatever is the most popular messaging app) do a JV with a local player because it's a national security risk. And so on.
But Western governments don't have the wit to execute this, in which case a cruder measure such as a digital tariff is what's left.
Why would a country decide to create and fund a free platform for sharing videos????
That's the nice thing - they don't need to create one. They just need to put up some barriers, and there will be plenty local entrepeneurs who will be happy to create a competitor unencumbered by those same barriers.
This is not some wild theory, this is how it has generally played out in real life in the countries that did put up such meaningful barriers.
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.
Majors CDN already exists. They can build on top of cloudfare or Amazon services. If you think about it Amazon it's on a good position to build an alternative,they already have experience with ads and hosting video content
AWS-based youtube would be astronomically expensive and much slower than dedicated video servers. Youtube shapes the entire internet total bandwidth.
> how the terabytes of content and bandwidth will be sponsored - by what?
How does it work in the Internet itself? By decentralization, i.e., different servers serve their own small part. The same can work with the videos: see PeerTube.
This is why YouTube should be treated, like all large social media, as a utility. There isn’t a real path to competition here. Things like censorship or Google having exclusive rights to train their AI on YouTube data have a lot of negative impact on the world.
TikTok emerged very quickly as an alternative to Youtube. Different kind and form of content, but something that Youtube ended up replicating.
I am sure if YouTube somehow died overnight, TikTok or some other player would work very quickly to get the alternative out there.
If YouTube dies, I doubt there will ever be a replacement.
Meta, Bytedance, Snap, and even X could fill the void relatively easily. a few new views focussing specifically on video, and video focussed apps that don't require a login for all the platforms.
> Disrupting" YouTube is difficult because the social conditions that created YouTube do not exist anymore.
I think the Zero Interest Rate era made a lot of business like this.
I can think about YouTube, Uber, several food delivery apps, Fintechs, and so on.
I never understood why an upstart couldn't just identify the top revenue producers on YouTube and compensate them extra for moving to their platform.
Maybe it can be replaced by something like Anna's archive, but for videos.
The big thing with content: They were really relaxed to care about copyright, till they had agreements (and content id etc.) in place.
A competitor needs a good legal department willing to take up that fight.
> "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.
YouTube is incredible, YouTube is poorly run. If I were making the laws, I'd do something similar to mandatory licensing of songs for radio: mandate that YouTube, as a sort de-facto content monopilist, provide third-party access to its database (upload, discovery, view counts, recommendations, etc). Devil is in the details, but well-done it would strictly improve the world.
Independent competitive companies are great, but things tend to devolve into de-facto mini-governments once things stabilize, and from there I think the (real) government using its power to force a little more competition could really improve things.
On the other hand, an alternative without all the "content creators" that are just in it for the money sounds really great to me.
TikTok disrupted YT and gained over a billion MAU.
Does TikTok have the long form content that YT is also associated with? Otherwise I would say "disrupted" is a generous term
Long form YT is a gold mine of
- documentaries (hobbyist and professional)
- informative content (literally any hobby you can imagine from gardening to warhammer to free diving)
- educational content, similar to above but world class institutions hosting their lectures for free
- musical content, live performances ranging from tiny amateur bands to top names and performances of now dead artists
- sports events, the entire 6 hour+ Wimbledon 08 final is there
I can go on but for a while now I have seen YouTube as the Video Internet (where web 1.0 was the Document Internet).
Yes
And how many people consume the long form content compared to YT? Does it span all age categories?
Absolutely. TikTok and Instagram are usurping the social video space with 3,590M MAUs between them (compared to YouTube's 2,530M MAUs). Although YouTube continues to do fine, it's far from a monopoly, and I personally don't think it can be assumed that it will retain its flagship position.
There are aspects of YT that I simply cannot see TikTok or Instagram disrupting. Music is one of them. I just searched for one of my favourite musicians Lisa O'Neill on TikTok. There are literally 6 videos in the results, mostly just short clips of her singing live. On YouTube she has her own channel with 16k subscribers, all her official music videos, and several live performances, plus countless other channels like BBCMusic or TradTG4 with videos of her doing live performances. There's no comparison.
TikTok focused on shorts, not what Youtube does.
Now, the other platforms certainly have added shorts.
You don't have to be an exact copy of another company to disrupt them. YouTube had supported short form videos being uploaded long before TikTok came along.
The other platforms added shorts because they realized they were being disrupted and were losing users to TikTok.
For sure Youtube had short videos, I'm just not sure the UX interactions with shorts was similar to Tiktok.. until it might be.
Each platform can find it's sweet spot on shorts and longs.
Not being similar helped tiktok disrupt youtube. Framing losing users to competitors as "finding your sweet spot" is cope. There's a reason youtube built shorts instead of conceding to tiktok.
All this means is its a public good and should be made a utility. Either directly or strip mined and mirrored.
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.
Counterpoint: TikTok
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
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 don't know. TikTok was able to take on Youtube. May have even won by now if the government hadn't intervened.
Youtube relies on human creators.
Youtube will be disrupted by AI created, better content.
Who builds AITube? AITok?
This is incredibly funny considering AI generated content is currently endemic thrash on YouTube. AI generated fake trailers, universally hated zombodubbing, weird "touches" on shorts…
Which to be clear isn't a contradiction to your comment at all. It'll take work and time though, at minimum.
Why the AI-wielding creators would choose to use a new, different service, and not an existing service with a colossal audience?
In a theoretical future The Algorithm would include content generation so that the platform can generate content for you instead of just suggesting it. Could apply to TikTok, Spotify, etc. if the generated content is good enough.
Hundreds of people are probably building those at the moment. The more relevant question is why would anyone watch it?
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.
So .. you dont use YouTube since you detest the service so much?
I read it as they're enabled to feel that way--and express it publicly--because their digital life and livelihood is not held hostage to the capricious monopoly.
The problem with monopolies is that it's very hard to boycott them.
> And yet you live in society. Curious!
Please don't gaslight. My critique is pointed.
I did implicate that Youtube has monopolized the market, allowing a lower bar of service to become the norm. This latest move, seems to make every aspect of youtube's value proposition worse.
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.
They said an LTT store message directed them to the Brodie Robertson video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hVwUjcsl6s so they did their own investigation which confirmed similar things.
It looks like Youtube might be measuring views differently and perhaps getting rid of unmonetizable views which doesn't impact the number of likes or revenue. I think the annoyance is over the lack of transparency and the power Youtube holds over content creators rather than any immediate concern over loss of income etc.
> rather than any immediate concern over loss of income etc.
I don't know if that's necessarily true. Apparently there's not a significant loss of revenue _from YouTube_ from the reports of these creators. But some sponsor deals might be structured based on CPM, and so a suddenly decreased view count could have a direct revenue impact from those sponsorship deals.
I wonder how YouTube thinks about that.
They probably would prefer zero third party sponsors, because adding sponsored content dilutes the value of the on-platform ads. Features like “commonly skipped section” and the timeline view intensity histogram reduce the value of sponsorships.
But if they eliminated sponsors, creator revenue would drop significantly and so would content production.
The nuclear option would be to require all sponsored segments to register with YouTube. That would give YouTube way more control and dramatically reduce creators’ business flexibility (how do you tax a donated 3d printer?).
May I ask for a link for myself and others who may be interested?
The Wan Show is very long and waffley and strictly for fans. LTT clip segments of the show but the relevant segment is still nearly 40 minutes long https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JJ8dur6unc
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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.
Vimeo is not working to view random videos in the EU, I saw last week to my surprise.
https://help.vimeo.com/hc/en-us/articles/30298226209169-Chan...
Mux is new to me. Looks like a video-first headless CMS with some neat AI integrations.
Vimeo does have monetization tools [1] but they’re focused on direct sales.
YouTube is just way ahead… even if you ignore the ads platform, a YouTube premium subscription gives you WAY more ad free content than a Vimeo purchase or Floatplane/Nebula subscription.
[1] https://vimeo.com/solutions/video-monetization
Mux is more of a video API but they have plugins with Headless CMS such as Strapi https://market.strapi.io/plugins/strapi-plugin-mux-video-upl...
> 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 realized this back in 2009 and tried really hard to start using other platforms, but wound up just not watching YouTube as often instead. I hope this changes. The only true competitors are places like TikTok and Instagram, but they don't feel like a true replacement to the rest of us who don't want to be tied to "social media" but YouTube shorts are evidence that it does compete with YouTube directly.
I think YouTube even tried to have "IG Stories" at one point iirc.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
As someone who was subbed to Nebula, this matches my experience. Especially the lack of comments, spending time on Nebula just felt cold and isolating, even if the content was good.
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.
Seconded! Funniest content out there right now. I’d recommend Game Changer season 2 or Make Some Noise. Good old funny improv games. Like whose line meets modernity with younger people.
Dropout annoys me with some of their UX decisions. I know it's a younger app, but every time I go to watch a longer-run show (Game Changer for example) it defaults me to Season 1, Episode 1. I want the latest stuff, not the oldest!
it also doesn't track where you left off inside an episode at all. Their content is pretty good, but the site is VERY minimal.
theyre a comedy company, not a tech company. would be nice if there was a way to leave feedback from developers... like heck i'd send a PR or two just to hang out with the crew a bit
Same. I like the idea of Nebula, but I'll often find videos on YouTube, then switch to Nebula to watch. Definitely speaks to a failure of whatever the Nebula discovery algorithm is.
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?
> Why miss the comments? Is it a video sharing platform or social media?
Because Nebula has a lot of complex content. Things like history, science, making stuff.
And those things have a lot of room for things like the maker messing something up, or struggling with something, or not explaining something properly.
On Youtube if somebody makes an obvious mistake, or is obviously incompetent to an expert, somebody will point it out. If a hobbyist doesn't quite have the skills to do a thing sometimes an expert will show up and help them. If an educative video doesn't include crucial details, somebody will ask.
Like look at say, Inheritance Machining or Alec Steele on Youtube, who take on challenging projects they struggle with and often get advice from expert viewers.
It's weird not to have this on Nebula. On one hand it seems to sell itself as "smart content", on the other hand it's a return to the old TV model of "shut up and consume".
I have to agree, really weird choice not having commentaries
I get why; the comments section can be a terrible place on YouTube so it makes an intuitive amount of sense. But surely the paywall keeps the low quality comments out?
> Why would you particularly care about the title is that's a videomaker you follow anyway?
Because you don't necessarily enjoy everything they produce?
> The recommendation algorithm is weaker too
That's a low bar to be honest, because google's recommendation algorithm is absolutely atrocious.
YouTube's recommendation algorithm is a modern miracle if you take care to:
- Like
- Subscribe
- Dislike
…and make copious use of 'Not Interested' and 'Don't ever show this channel to me again'.
I do keep having to whack it with more of that but it's expected. My recommendations sidebar is not actively obnoxious and if it hints at it, well, rinse and repeat. If it's gonna try to pander to me I will set extremely loud boundaries, and there's every opportunity to do that.
Subscription are easily ignored as soon as you have watched some other topics for half a day.
Youtube's algorithm has an exxagerated recency bias and it tends to ignore in my case most of the topics I'm subscribed to as soon as I don't watch those topics for few days.
The only thing it gets right, the only one, is sort of figuring out my usage depending on the time and device I'm using. On desktop I use it mostly for music streaming, on tv/phone I use it mostly for other content, that's the only thing it gets right.
But otherwise, it's an utter mess when Spotify or Tik Tok do an infinitely better job with way less information and guidance.
If the algorithm is temporarily not giving you good recommendations, there's always the Subscriptions tab, which only shows your subscriptions and no recommendations. Good also for those who hate recommendations.
It's clearly not made for the people using it.
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
Do you happen to know if there are any project or talk of not archiving the video content itself, but instead the transcripted content instead? I feel that this would be very advantageous to archive knowledge based (versus delivery based, such as prank and stand up comedy) videos much more efficiently than the videos themselves.
Someone below brought up a very good point about many of these videos being much longer than they need to be (mainly for reimbursement and ad reasons). If the transcripted content can be archived, it could also be abridged and/or summarized as well as being combined with other similar video content as well.
I'm sort of thinking as I go here now, but I would think that perhaps Youtube has an API that lets you access the closed captions of videos?
I would be kinda worried that one day youtube just send them a take down notice because it violates something in their eula.
and you can use yt-dlp to download bits you want to save yourself.
Yeah that is what ArchiveTeam is using.
Just wonder can't we just start web torrent/torrent or IPFS these video files with some kind #YTPubArchive tag?
Don't you need to have an account for that? Already a barrier I am not willing to take.
No. yt-dlp downloads most videos without needing a yt (or any) login. A very few end up gated behind some form of login, but I suspect those are creator specific.
I find login walls on YT only when needing to confirm age for some reason: explicit or suicidal content, age checks, etc
Same.
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.
THIS!
If music, video or writing is something you want to see again, download a copy to own it yourself. Trusting a for-profit streaming company is simply idiotic.
HD space is cheap these days, so no excuses.
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.
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.
I have been personally archiving the channels with content I enjoy. I know that doesn't help the general population…
If stuff disappeared (even just the Youtuber rage quit, not necessarily end of the platform) and people were talking about being bothered about it I tend to think people like you would pop up with archives.
It's the really niche stuff that few if anyone would notice or care enough to talk about that would be properly lost. And if it's niche but there's a lot of care from the few, then that's one way that archivists are made.
You are way too optimisitc. Even for videos that thousands of people have saved, chances are you won't be able to find any of them.
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.
I doubt YouTube will ever roll out DRM. It doesn't help serving more ads.
I worry about that as well. I guess we assume nothing is going to happen because it's Google. But Google just dodged a bullet with Chrome which, if they had been hit, had a real chance to harm the entire web. Youtube could be next.
If things disappear, that is ok. Everything is fleeting.
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 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.
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.
> A video platform could build community by letting people know if their friends and family have enjoyed watching the same programmes.
The answer is "no", which is why YT is so amazing
I don't know what their licensing deals look like, but they should sell subscriptions in foreign countries.
I pay $5cad/mo to get ad free access to the CBC catalog. I would gladly pay the same or even double for the BBC catalog or iPlayer (whatever its called).
They don't even offer that in the UK. Madness, imo, but true.
(iPlayer is free if you're a licence fee payer, but it's nothing close to the full back catalog, it's more like an 'aired recently' DVR with a tuner for every channel. Wouldn't at all be surprised if it's not even everything current though.)
(The Britbox joint venture with ITV was arguably closer to that, but still not, a curated collection.)
BBC are going in the opposite direction by locking down BBC Sounds/iPlayer against overseas users, presumably for licensing reasons.
> Youtube is not social media.
But it is (as you point out) parasocial media.
>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...
Peertube is not comparable. P2P has tradeoffs.
It looks cool though, I hadn't heard of it. It seems like not many of the example websites had enough video traffic to have any of the upload offloaded from the servers to any peers though.
It is technically different and there are trade offs, but that isn't much of an argument - at the end of the day we need to send yea many bytes of data from server to client with a known format. I watched a PeerTube video yesterday and it was the same experience as watching a YouTube one. Some company could implement YouTube by running large servers as peers if the unit economics made sense and it'd work.
The problem PeerTube has is that there isn't demand for what it is doing because YouTube is a pretty good video custodian. Although everyone seems to be sensibly alert to the risk that they eventually go bad, right now it works. Obviously don't expect any video currently on YouTube to be available in 20 years though.
> I watched a PeerTube video yesterday
But did you watch it from a site operating at scale? Its easy to be youtube at low scale.
PeerTube is built to scale, the more users the better bandwidth because you stream from peers
That's nice in theory. In practise though im doubtful. Churn is going to be much higher on something like peer tube than something like traditional bit torrent. Access patterns might also potentially be distributed badly for some videos.
Not to mention the long tail of less popular vidros.
Why don't you go and watch some videos on PeerTube and see the practice for yourself?
Because peertube is not operating at scale so the issues i mentioned wouldn't be present.
If the issues you are worried about aren't present yet, then logically right now it would be a comparable to and a competitor with YouTube. People in the main don't avoid web services because of hypothetical technical problems that might exist in the future but that the design seems superficially resistant to.
PeerTube actually does have technical issues in there here and now, but the number one problem is just that YouTube is an excellent service preferred by both users and advertisers and PeerTube doesn't seem able to outdo it in any meaningful way.
> If the issues you are worried about aren't present yet, then logically right now it would be a comparable to and a competitor with YouTube
By that logic, AWS free tier is a competitor to youtube.
That's because it's a winner-take-all market. Any of those could have won and get the monopoly instead, and Youtube would have starved, but Youtube is the one who won.
And don't say Youtube was first, Dailymotion is slightly older than Youtube.
> 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".
Some people think dealing with the following are fun.
Handling massive amount of video ingestion from content creator; Transcoding to various format that is optimal for various devices, Live streaming with Live to VOD, Geo restriction, Live Commenting, Ad insertion and penalise adblocker, Recommendation engine.
There are many features and challenges that are unique to OTT streaming applications and running at YouTube scales makes it even more challanging, or fun to some, to handle.
I am somewhat in that class. Figuring out ways to horizontally scale video processing at the scale of YouTube sounds like a neat problem.
Obviously pretty much anyone here can get an extremely basic YouTube clone done in an afternoon or two. Spin up RabbitMQ, write an upload web server, transcode the video with ffmpeg and store it somewhere, serve it via HTTP. That’s trivial, but YouTube has to deal with 500 hours of new video every minute [1]. At those levels, the basic “senior engineer solutions” to problems stop being as appropriate, and I think those kinds of problems are ridiculously fascinating.
The annoying thing is that since YouTube has a monopoly and I have somehow managed to fail Google’s personality test multiple times, I don’t think I’ll ever get a chance to work on that kind of problem.
[1] https://www.globalmediainsight.com/blog/youtube-users-statis...
YouTube already has a very big albeit usual competitor - PornHub.
I can't seem to find any car related videos on the competitor. :)
Disproportionate amount of bus and taxi related videos though.
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
Pretty sure Microsoft also tried to compete with Youtube once upon a time. Forgot the name...
Soapbox was their competitor way way back. More recently they had Mixer, though that was more of a Twitch like service. They spent a ton of money paying streamers to use it, but the network effects are just too strong.
People have to be sufficiently discontent with the current offering. It's like game publishers throwing money at buying exclusives for their game stores. People have to not like Steam first.
Facebook tried "Facebook Watch"
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.
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.
> Bandwidth is really cheap at scale.
This is extremely false, where are you getting this information? Bandwidth is ludicrously expensive, no matter what your scale.
Why do you think Netflix gives ISPs server racks filled with the entire Netflix catalog, or Microsoft/Google/Meta spend billions on their own private submarine cables? Nobody would do that if bandwidth was cheap, but it isn't.
Why do you think every single streaming provider and platform does checks every so often to see if you're still watching? It's not because they are being nice; it's because it is costing them money, even the huge companies.
The problem is that video quality increased to meet availability.
In the past 480p would be okay. Now everyone wants 4k.
In fact, in the past IMAGES were normal. Imgur was an image website. Now everything is about short videos. Even memes are now videos.
I'm pretty sure if we make Internet faster and storage cheaper, we'll also invent a new sort of media to waste that speed and storage.
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.
I think this network effect and the discoverability aspect are the main reasons why it's extremely hard to compete with YouTube. Why would people use another site if the content they want to see is not there, or is too difficult to find? Why would creators put videos there if they can't find a large audience?
The YouTube algorithm is problematic in many ways but it does succeed in viewers being suggested videos they want to see, even if the signal-to-noise ratio is not very good. That's hard to replicate when starting a new service.
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.
> 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.
Then why isnt everyone jumping at the opportunity to make a competitor? If it is soooo easy, we should have competitors. Nobody is stopping you from launching margalabargalatube.com and win the market.
Nobody, including Jeff Geerling, has an exclusive deal with YouTube to distribute the videos. Make it happen!
I mean, if that's how we're going to talk to each other, I can engage on your level...
You are soooo right! There's no such thing as a network effect or a first mover advantage! If something exists and is self sustaining (my original point), therefore creating that thing is trivial and anyone can do it (your invaluble contribution)! Your logic is flawless. Have you considered going into freelance consulting? Someone with such good and original ideas should be charging money for them.
That's a big assumption.
It's very possible that it's only that profitable at Youtube-sized scale.
There's definitely some very large critical mass necessary for the network effects to kick in. Is that mass such that there can only be one? Or could there be three or four, like other social media? Arguably Instagram is as large a video platform, though obviously very different. Same with tiktok; the individual videos might be shorter but the bandwidth costs scale with watch time.
you don't need youtube scale - but you need to be a lot bigger than most others are. You need to be big enough that ads pay for a full time ad salesperson as well as your other overhead.
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.
YouTube has the highest monopoly tax in all of tech.
They take 45% of YouTube premium subscription revenue. That’s higher than the App Store (30%), Spotify (30%), and any other content marketplace on the internet.
I think they get a free pass for now because they allow creators to monetize with their own native ads within videos. If I had to guess, this may become a point of contention in the future…
Serving video infinite times is vastily different to serving apps once for installation.
It’s not 45% of revenue expensive.
The fact that we’ve accepted such ridiculously high profit margins from tech companies is simply due to their network effects monopolies, and the impossibility of competing with them.
Just look at any other marketplace business with more competition, like say a grocery store or any brick and mortar retail. Their net margins are often sub-5%. Physically shipping goods across the world is far more expensive than delivering video.
Only other monopolies, like Governments, can get away with charging 45% taxes. Having known a few Youtube employees and also a few federal government employees, I would say the low stress, low effort, low fear of layoffs, low work output expectations are...ahem...similar.
> It’s not 45% of revenue expensive.
Youtubes profit margin isn't that high so it is pretty close to that, it took a long time for it to get profitable even with Google ads, unlike the digital stores that serves customers for basically nothing compared to how much revenue they bring in.
Twitch also takes around that much from streamers and they still aren't profitable since it costs more to serve the streams than they make.
Does Alphabet split out YT revenue numbers in the financial reports? The latest one listed the YT revenues, but I didn't see where the line item for YT costs was.
> Physically shipping goods across the world is far more expensive than delivering video.
Are you sure? It is a logistics issue, not a technology issue. Streaming video, near instantly, around the world, without any perceivable user-experience issues, infinite times, for infinite users is a massive-massive technology issue.
Amazon same day deliver was problably the most revolutionary thing that came to the domain, but otherwise shipping 1000 cars across the world, while impressive, is a pretty straight forward task. The technology that you need are ships and trucks. You can use a 1950s era technology to do that.
It's not shipping infinite times, the number of views (and hence, cost to stream) are proportional to the fees withheld. Whether 45% is too much, I can't say, don't think it can be determined apriori. It kinda does make sense to me that it would be more than the app store fees, but I also feel those app store fees are too high as well.
> Only other monopolies, like Governments, can get away with charging 45% taxes.
And then charge even higher rate if you give them more money. Ask them how they spend it? Proudly poorly. /rant
If you think you can do better, you are welcome to set up your own server and stream your own video.
Do you think bandwidth and storage are free?
Bandwith isn't free for sure but at googles scale the costs are close to the cost you have copying data to your own NAS in your LAN. Multiple orders of magnitued below what AWS charges for bandwidth.
$0.0015 per gigabyte. Average video is about 300MB, so $0.0005 per view. How much do you think you can make from ads?
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.
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 only use YouTube via safari browser and have hidden shorts and community posts using Userscripts.
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
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 am subscribed to more than 70 YouTube channels, and I have never seen any of them getting kicked out, and the only videos that get removed are due to some bullshit music copyright claims.
If you see Youtubers getting kicked out constantly you might be subscribing to some weird stuff...
I am subscribed to ~270 channels through newpipe and I get "failed to fetch subscription" like maybe once a month only to see the channel is dead (usually temporarily). If you are just using youtube's app directly you won't notice when they get delisted.
I just scrolled through my subscriptions and it's mostly music, comedy, gaming, entertainment, and science channels.
I always assume it is for DMCA or for saying curse words. Every once and a while it will be because they said something politically incorrect or used the wrong chemicals or showed a gun or something.
I think that pretty much anything except for porn and gore should be allowed. I am just scrolling and I think that this video is a good example of a vid that only lasts about a month on the site, even though it should be allowed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1B_EdVnKFg
It has "guns", it has "drugs", it has political figures, and it has minecraft so therefore it must qualify as a children's video. This channel is basically a magnet for getting wrongfully demonetized and banned by AI or some guy working in an indian call center. But 12 years ago this would be a normal video.
Another example I can think of is "youtube poops" which are unconventional mashups of copyrighted content. They constantly get taken down and need to be reuploaded:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwgPraTb_64
I wonder about the influence of the language. I regularly watch videos in English, Spanish (my mother language), and Japanese (my girlfriend's language).
English-speaking channels are usually more "polite" in the way they speak, while Spanish-speaking channels are way crazier, using expressions that no American would dare to use xD
Regarding Japanese, I don't understand enough to have a judgement, but Japanese people are usually very careful and non-confrontational.
70 channels is nothing, I add to my subscription list 700 channels per each year and listen to Youtube no less than 5 hours daily. Your weird stuff statement seems like victim-shaming.
Lol - congrats? In another era, people would say... get a life!
You know nothing about my Youtube consumption pattern - neither my typical device nor my body position while doing it nor even whether I do it indoor.
It’s an extremely hard problem to solve unfortunately. The political tides keep shifting. One day it’s unthinkable to non censor a gender critical video. Another day it is okay.
The YouTube management has to be adaptive enough to work in the small window that society allows at that time.
It isn't society they're kicking people off of YouTube for, it's whatever their advertisers do or don't want at any given moment. The advertising companies are their customers, and everyone else is just grist for the mill.
What advertisers want is downstream from society
Downstream from rich society FWIW. They aren't changing ads to cater to people without money.
YouTube censors a lot more than it is legally required to.
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.
Fair price to pay for hosted content no? Either watch ads or pay for the subscription.
> Fair price to pay for hosted content no? Either watch ads or pay for the subscription.
Or option 3 - don't use the site. Which is what the person you are responding to decided to do.
Nobody is obligated to buy anything, whether priced fairly or not. Its always valid to simply walk away if you feel like it.
Would this model work?
Creators themselves PAY to upload/host something. Their in-video ads are what allows monetization.
No adds at all from youtube. Uploading COSTS money, maybe a few dollars.
Creators make their money solely from sponsors or selling/advertising something themselves.
That model already exists, it is called the internet. There you pay for hosting and advertisements and everything, and you also get all the revenue.
It isn't very popular since the internet doesn't advertise your content for you, youtube do that so its much easier for content creators to get big on youtube. Also it is free to upload on youtube, so small creators start there, small creators later grow to big creators and stay on youtube.
serving video costs money not just uploading. so there has to be fixed and variable costs - but if that is accounted for then it could work but we are putting all the risk on the creator.
For some definition of well, that includes forcing shorts on everyone and getting most of the youth addicted to your product.
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 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.
so much this
you tube is close to perfect using third party clients, like PipePipe.
it automatically skips paid adverts in the video. not even a shadow of actual ads. background music only. etc.
but now they are adding those dumb features, such as translating titles, as if i'm a peasant who don't speak several languages. so lame.
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.
They do have karma! Once upon a time I have insulted some bot account by the most insulting word possible (some foreign analog of f-word) and a lot of interesting thing happened in the same day and still happens during maybe one year. I become shadowbanned on most of my favorite big channels (chat posts in streams are visible to only me). Also most of my comments in comment section under videos become visible only if press "sort by" then "recent", this action is not just sorting comments but it recounts the number of comments and reveals comments of persons like me!
I believe there are positive cases of karma when a person becomes moderator.
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.
> 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.
That's fairly menial compared to other tech company drama. Facebook livestreaming shootings, ChatGPT telling kids to kill themselves, etc.
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?
Nothing special about YouTube other than the interface being about as offensive as possible. Rumble is light-years better in terms of speed and has an instant CSS based dark theme unlike the monolyth. I'm concerned many users that continue to use any sort of modified version of YouTube are going to eventually have their Google account sniffed out and banned. Many creators have shifted over to publishing to multiple platforms at once so that platforms like Rumble and Odysee don't seem as siloed with certain types of content. Rumble is sharp and stays out of the way, and that matters, as unlike the YouTube experience on iOS, you can still get a video to play audio only in background; it makes YouTube feel like an ad machine cesspool.
I also like Rumble, but the recommendation algorithm isn’t as good and there are just fewer content creators on the platform
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.
I remember that before I knew a lot f people that used to watch movies on YouTube
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.
It is a choice. But as you are probably aware; not one many makes.
While I do prefer to read as well I do like some of the better videos. Sometimes the information density is not as high as I would like - there are reasonable efforts.
Sure, there is amateur content. But there is a surprising amount of original researched content with a high production value.
A recent example with a scientific approach to cooking with some fun high quality references to Breaking Bad:
https://youtu.be/NnzADfbBBFo
Yes - they want to (discretely) sell thermometers as well. Not all is good. But very far from amateur.
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.
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
If I chose from your list I prefer anything with 10 views. Little channels is the place where the best possible content is concentrated. And BTW little channels never use arrows and similar lowball clickbait strategies.
Nicely summarized in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHEXAjdo44A
My first thought when I read AI search was that people might use it for instructions rather than tutorials and troubleshooting videos.
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 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.
In August, Youtube received about 6 billion clicks from organic search. That is 20% of Youtube's total website traffic. I think that is significant.
Source: Similarweb, world-wide
Did they drop support for the YouTube app on very old TVs or ban a bunch of those cheap Android TV boxes with a lot of spyware on them by any chance?
While I have no idea, I just think it would be funny if this is YouTube blocking a massive number of bots/scrapers.
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.
As TFA says, you can't even be sure what constitute "a view" and if Youtube keeps that consistent.
This is gonna be unpopular with the most of the commenters so far…
Regardless I don’t think youtube is a monopoly.
A monopoly caries with it strict anti-competitive practices along with meddling in government affairs and great public harm. Just because something has market dominance does not make it a monopoly.
Facebook is a monopoly. Complete dominance of the entire social graph, aggressively buying competitors to silence them… direct government meddling not just in the us but abroad creating untold deaths and suffering in the process… to the point they rebrand themselves to skirt responsibility… thats a monopoly.
Live nation buying up entire cities worth of venues, artist managers, booking agents, artists themselves, ticketing, promotion companies, subsequently entire production staff, blacklisting anyone they dont like, meddling with politics, obfuscating their activities through subsidiaries, destroying entire communities and cultures in the process… thats a monopoly
Youtube could be a monopoly but I dont see them squashing their most successful creators from creating their own streaming services, I dont see them directly meddling with politics on a large scale (granted there was that time the algorithm would tend towards promoting fascism, but rather than keep that going or doubling down I see the opposite which implies active intent to the contrary), I dont see them aggressively purchasing competitors… I see them as ridiculously huge and I find their censorship annoying that if government was working I would think should be examined from a public responsibility stance but I dont see them engaged in monopolistic practices… in fact I see them actively avoiding most activities that would make them a monopoly that is of course other than being really really huge.
> Just because something has market dominance does not make it a monopoly.
Isn't that the definition of a monopoly though? Just because something is a monopoly, that doesn't mean it necessarily has anti-competitive practices or meddles in government. (though that usually follows)
For what it's worth I agree that YouTube isn't abusing their market position, but it's important the semantics are clear.
I guess so, but thats the problem with language that isnt specific enough. What I feel people are discussing and what I was referring too was more properly called an illegal monopoly… technically having market domination is also a monopoly, but thats not a crime.
The Hypothetical Monopolist Test is a primary method used to define relevant markets in antitrust cases. It assesses whether a hypothetical monopolist could profitably impose a small but significant and non-transitory increase in price (SSNIP).
Steps in the Test Market Definition: Identify the relevant product and geographic market.
Price Increase Assessment: Determine if a hypothetical monopolist could raise prices without losing too many customers.
Iterative Process: If the price increase is profitable, the market is correctly defined. If not, the market definition is expanded to include substitutes.
To establish a monopolization claim, two main elements must be proven:
Possession of Monopoly Power: The firm must have significant and durable market power.
Willful Acquisition or Maintenance: The firm must have obtained or maintained this power through improper means, rather than through competition on the merits.
From what I can tell latest consensus is that views haven't actually dropped, just how yt discloses them. i.e. What constitutes a "view" in the stats appears to have changed. The other engagement metrics (likes etc) seem to have not moved suggesting nothing has changed in real world. LTT went into it in a fair bit of detail
Way too much discussion of Youtube is mired in monetization. Not platform sustainability, but how much wealth content creators can extract from it. It's a bit perverse and views the audience as a source to sqeeze revenue from. It's like making open source software or wikipedia only about how much creators can make.
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 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'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..
I wonder if dynamic ads are even necessary. Meaning that it seems like the most creators more money from sponsors, meaning that companies directly sponsor creators. It could work similar to podcasts people post podcasts and they are available in RSS, and multiple podcasts platforms, for the videos they could be available in something like pee tube or similar to podcasts where there is multiple players created. And for creators they get directly contracted by companies, as this might present problems there could be a company that acts as the mediator between sponsors and creators
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.
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.
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.
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?
Breaking up a monopoly must follow sustainable business lines. The court’s early idea of forcing Google to spin off Chrome risked crippling the product and disrupting the market without restoring competition. The remedy was later scaled back, leaving Google with little more than a slap on the wrist. By contrast, the AT&T and Microsoft cases succeeded because they targeted natural, profitable divisions that could stand alone. Addressing areas like Azure or MacBooks, which are not monopolies, does nothing to reduce monopoly power. A more effective remedy in Google’s case would have been dividing its multiple monopolies, rather than divesting loss-leading but essential units. Profitability alone does not define a monopoly, but once one is identified, ensuring that each division can operate as a viable business is crucial.
Sometime in 2009 or 2008 I realized we were screwed and wanted to support alternatives and stop using it same with Chrome. Something told me Google was going to swallow the internet. Sadly I still wish we would have propped up serious competitors. Where does one go when YouTube or any part of Google bans you? I have a friend or two who get banned any time he makes a Google account. Years of his personal data completely forfeited.
I have been moving off Google for a while, and will continue doing so.
I get that YouTube creators are worried about the drop in views, but honestly, this isn’t much different from what happens in every other industry. For the rest of us, markets change, laws change, inflation hits, taxes go up, new tariffs appear… and we all have to adapt. The market is never static, and everyone else works under constantly shifting conditions. So instead of complaining, maybe it’s time to adjust, just like the rest of us do.
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 issue is you're still not paying for the content nor paying the creators.
You're paying YouTube to stop annoying you, and they then decide what to do with that money, incidentally paying some creators.
Premium pays out to creators by minutes viewed (vs AdSense which pays out by ads viewed)
I've heard some creators say that in total, they make more money from all their Premium viewers than they make from all their AdSense viewers, even though the former are a small fraction of the latter.
This argument is repeated on other comments as well, but I think it's fundamentally a parralel fact.
YouTube giving some of the Premium money to creators doesn't make Premium a good product. If'm not that utilitarian to think any single additional penny going to some creators is good whatever YouTube takes in the process and the general impact on the the whole field.
YouTube seems to be pretty explicit that it is paying 55% of revenue from watching videos to creators:
> If a partner turns on Watch Page Ads by reviewing and accepting the Watch Page Monetization Module, YouTube will pay them 55% of net revenues from ads displayed or streamed on their public videos on their content Watch Page. This revenue share rate also applies when their public videos are streamed within the YouTube Video Player on other websites or applications.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/72902?hl=en#zippy=...
As you point out, that revenue split has a set of conditions, which also require a level of contract on Youtube and other requirements (not being DMCA stroke for instance)
So where does your Premium money go when you watch a very small creator ? where does it go for a demonetized video ? etc.
That might sounds like a subtle difference, but consider the gap with channel membership, super chats (which are also roughly 50% split I think?) or patreon for instance.
> where does it go for a demonetized video
A "demonetized" video is technically called a "limited or no ads" video in YouTube Studio - it means YouTube has determined that advertisers do not want their ads seen on the video for reputational reasons. Premium views still pay out for them since they are not paid through showing ads.
A DMCA strike is something else.
Sorry I wasn't referring to videos the creator decides to forgo revenue, as you point there's a better term for that.
I was thinking about the videos that were supposed to make money but got shut off monetization for whatever reason. DMCA strike is one, YouTube flagging it as risque is another common one.
I was referring to your latter example - when YouTube decides a video is inconvenient, it means they're afraid advertisers don't like it. Those videos still get paid from Premium views.
Youtube premium users on average give creators more revenue per view than non-premium users. 55% of the premium revenue is split between the creators you watch.
Monetizing your marketplace monopoly with 45% rents is even more egregious than the App Store which people complain about at 30%.
In fact, it might be the highest monopoly tax in all of tech. Even Spotify only takes 30% from the same musicians who post the same music videos on each platform.
Streaming video requires excruciatingly expensive infrastructure. It's one of reasons why there are no competitors to be seen.
It requires less expensive infrastructure than AI, and AI has tons of competitors.
YouTube simply enjoys a classic network effects monopoly, and that’s why their margins are high compared to any other business in the S&P500.
There will be no competitors if one of the player in the field does it for free for enough time. We'd call that "dumping" if it was a manufacturer.
It would be dumping if they took much less than 55%, but they actually do make profits so its not dumping.
YouTube has been in the red at least until 2010 under most estimations.
For reference that's around the point Vimeo started pivoting to different strategies and blocking long content as they couldn't pay for the infra.
That's also around that time that Dailymotion went down the pipes with the French gov stepping in to save the remains.
YouTube thrived from there as creators and advertisers had nowhere else to go at that point. That's the dumping part.
Video especially with high-bit rates is most expensive medium to deliver and store. Well, I suppose Youtube could move to model where they charge for creators for both of those and drop their cut to 30%...
YouTube pays creators more for each Premium view.
I don't see why it's the issue. Youtube infrastructure is not cheap.
Well, it is not cheap if we look at the massive server racks they have, but in the scale of the world? Watching 1h of a video probably costs them like $0.00001 or something equally minuscule.
How would you see it if your phone company spammed your calls and SMS and offered to remove the annoyances for some random fixed fee that is not tied to your usage of the service ?
If we care about Youtube's infra, the expected business structure should follow that assumption.
> that is not tied to your usage of the service
Could you explain this more ?, i'm sure i only get Youtube Ads when watching videos, which is "usage of the service".
You pay the same fixed Premium fee per month whatever you do with YouTube.
You can quit YouTube for weeks or watch it 22h every day, you still pay the same. Same way you can exclusively watch non monetized streams or only watch top monetized creators, you'll be paying exactly the same.
The only difference will be how much YouTube gets to keep.
> You can quit YouTube for weeks or watch it 22h every day, you still pay the same
This has always been in subscription model, like mobile data plan, or exclusive club membership. I won't argue if it's good or not, just saying it has been a thing for a long time.
> you can exclusively watch non monetized streams or only watch top monetized creators, you'll be paying exactly the same.
Well, the server do not care if the video's creator is paid or not, it still has to store the same data, and you have to pay for it.
Maybe some never experienced an ad because they have been using an ad blocker since before ads on Youtube became a thing?
Or used YouTube a lot in the years before it all went downhill.
Well, we grew up in the Great Pirate Era
Why don't you use ad blockers?
Don’t exist on Apple TV box.
I likewise don't use one on my apple TV, but my friend recently told me there are proxy apps for Apple TV which use DNS-based ad blocking and which can get you the US Netflix library while abroad.
Absolutely. I've been too lazy to do anything like this.
Oh, I'm not against paying for a service. I'm willing to pay more, but that's the issue: companies will happily sell you their basic enshittified product and never provide you with an option of actual good usable one.
I will happily pay YouTube for just one feature: dub all content I see into my native language.
I do feel entitled to unlimited video streaming for free. Since the invention of bittorrent there is no need to have a client-server middleman for distributing large files like videos.
If the bandwidth bankrupts them, then boo hoo. They take advantage of network effects so no one can go anywhere else.
Don't feed the bears. That's what I say
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.
My gripe with Youtube Music is that the bitrate quality of their music is lower than Tidal or even Spotify. YTM audio files that are actually on Youtube will only stream in 128kbps.
I’m surprised to hear that. I just switched from Spotify to Youtube Music and found the audio quality to be way better, even though I had Spotify set to high.
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.
> 1) I watch youtube more than any streaming service
I would amend that to say "any *other streaming service". To me Youtube provides more and better content than the other streaming services, and I don't think people should balk at $14 for youtube when they happily pay that for netflix, disney+, hulu, or spotify.
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
Aside from Music, these are all negative features that are valuable only because YouTube is so obnoxious.
I'm in vehement agreement with parent to be honest. "We'll stop spitting in your soup if you pay us extra" isn't a nice value proposition.
"We'll stop spitting in your soup if you pay us extra" isn't a nice value proposition
so you want people to freely watch videos without paying anything or watching ads ???
how this works then, creator need to be paid, bandwidth need to be paid, infrastructure is not cheap
it is a nice value proposition, if its not somebody would already make a better alternative that not require those 2 (without paying and without ads)
the fact there is not then its not possible
To stay in the metaphor, wouldn't see some other business model that would allow them to provide the soup to people who order without having to threaten to spit into it ?
lol, there is no spit on it
it is the soup, people free to eat the soup or not
the fact that people always focusing on youtube flaw but never recommend alternative is simply saying that they are the best
That's the hallmark of a monopoly: people can complain about it as much as they want, it won't have any material difference.
"That's the hallmark of a monopoly"
but there is no monopoly ???? are you saying that you simply cant use another website/platform ????
this is ridiculous
if its android/ios then I can understand why its monopoly. but we have bazillion other video/streaming website
Youtube are simply the best, deal with it
It's not a particularly crazy idea that free users get a lesser experience. I'm perfectly happy to pay for youtube since it provides by far the best content and the price is reasonable.
The fact that people can get all of that for free with some minor limitations is fairly generous.
> It's not a particularly crazy idea that free users get a lesser experience.
Agreed, but it's the difference between a restaurant serving a mid-tier soup for cheaper versus giving customers a really good soup that the chef spit's in to encourage people to pay for the more expensive version of it.
> fairly generous.
Is Google "generous" ?
It feels bad as a consumer, but the alternative is usually worse.
The "stop spitting in your soup if you pay us extra" is really efficient market segmentation. If you don't do that you need to find actual value props that separate the market in just the right way to generate the financials that allow the product to keep going as is. 9 times out of 10 the result is that failing PMs totally fuck up the product and everyone loses.
It's the SSO kerfuffle in a different package - terrible, but the right choice surprisingly often.
There’s an excellent free ios app called “Unwatched” which lets you make playlists, set defaults per channel such playback speed, and lets you play videos in the background. I use it for “podcasts” which are video only.
And you don’t have to log in.
You also get >2x playback speed and higher bitrates on some videos.
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.
> Personally, though, I don't have a problem with search (maybe because I set a lot of channels as "do not recommend/show").
Previously search was just search. It wasn't great, but it wasn't too bad.
Now it shows 5-7 results from actual search (often really bad results).
The next section is "People also watch" which quite often has very passing relevance to what you look for.
Then there are shorts.
Then there's "explore more" which may or may not be relevant to your search, and it has "+N more" underneath.
And then there's the rest of the search which, again, may or may not be relevant to your search at all.
---
I think it was slightly fixed recently, so the results are a bit more relevant, but it still is just ... weird
I use Brave and it's the premium experience already.
You should be paying (or taking some other action) to extricate ads from your life as much as possible.
Paying to remove ads is negotiating with terrorists.
YouTube stays in the dominant position either way, it's not like tomorrow you'll go watch Nebula exclusively (you'd already have done it at this point). They're not providing anything materially, so the amount you pay is bound to nothing except how much you're willing to pay. And how much you're willing to pay depends on how much you're annoyed.
So YouTube's main incentive for this program is to annoy you as much as you can tolerate to optimize the most money you get extracted.
It sounds like you're arguing that YouTube should be free and also ad-free, which makes no sense.
YouTube is expensive to operate. They give me an option of paying by watching ads or paying money. That's much better than my options most other places, which is just to be forced to see ads.
I'm arguing that youtube should be paid for actual features. For instance membership and super chats are clearly labeled as extra content. Member only content is the same.
You pay for a specific thing that is produced by a creator and provided by Youtube. "Pay to remove the ads we're pushing" is none of that.
On Youtube being free, this is their business choice, and also the way they crush the competition and cement a near monopoly on the market. If it was a public service NGO I'd see it from a different angle, but it's not.
Would you then argue for Youtube to take the Netflix path and not provide non-paying users anything?
I'd argue that regulators should have a serious look at the effect of Youtube on that specific market, and if the only solution is the Youtube free tier disappearing I'll be fine with it.
We're in a skewed situation with a near monopoly that only companies at the size of Bytedance can challenge, and I'm not sure why we should see the status quo as something to be protected or encouraged.
> if the only solution is the Youtube free tier disappearing I'll be fine with it.
That'd be something most people wouldn't agree with. People always ask for free link anytime a paywalled article posted.
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.
Yeah it's hard to compete with Ublock Origin and youtube-shorts-block.
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.
YouTube is it's own CDN, taking up real-estate in almost every ISP NOC.
Even if a firm has a cool new gimmick to get through a successful launch, the incremental cost of hosting "free content" will pose a liability due to higher operational margins.
YT are not a true monopoly, but rather "free" content from a spam heavy competitor is a foolish business plan. =3
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.
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.
Love YouTube, but between the price hikes and being fed nothing but shorts and doom-scroll bait, they’re pushing me to the edge. For the former, it feels like every streaming service (audio or video) is starting pave the way for a new golden age of piracy and personal content collections.
> 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.
Let me find some Blender and Unreal Engine tutorials on this Netflix site, thanks for directing me to this indieweb marvel! :)
(maybe a tear-down of my washer is there too!)
"McDonalds is a monopoly in fast food"
"But there's more Subway restaurants than McDonalds restaurants"
"I can't get a burger at Subway, therefore McDonalds is a monopoly."
As someone under the age of 30, it took me a while to realize that this wasn't a parody post.
Making a post with this title without mentioning TikTok or Instagram is like making a post titled "Pepsi is a mysterious monopoly" without once mentioning Coke.
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?
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.
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.
No one will disrupt YouTube unless they offer better compensation to creators. YouTube is probably the single best place to monetize content online right now, nowhere else comes close; not TikTok, Instagram, even Twitch...
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).
Out of the box, I agree. I've got my feed well-curated at this point such that I get very little of that type of garbage pushed my way. I recently viewed the YouTube main page in an incognito window and, good lord, the default experience is an absolute cesspool of AI-generated nonsense, ragebait, and straight-up spam.
I'm not sure it's a hot take. I don't learn as easily from video as I do from text, but I seem to have curated my video recommendations to videos that I do like to watch as 'infotainment'.
e.g, Veritasium is a channel I quite like for their longer 'mini-documentary' like videos. And then there are just entertainment channels like Linus Tech Tips.
Not _everything_ has to be micro-optimized in my life, so I don't mind occasionally just sitting in the sofa watching a video that could have been a 3 minute blog :)
YouTube is great, but most content is unwatchable at 1.0x speed. Without the Video Speed Controller extension (still better than the built-in speed controls), I doubt I'd watch at all.
> 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.
I also find that they block incognito mode a lot too - esp. on android when you use a hacked client like revanced (less so in the browser, but i use firefox and have seen incognito mode causing youtube to block you from viewing without logging in).
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.
I didn't make the comment you're replying to, but views can exist independent of comments and likes, and bots can just as easily like and comment.
Likes and comments by real humans can remain steady and bot views can vary dramatically. Likes and comments aren't metrics that produce revenue for creators.
There’s also black hats bulk producing AI videos and pushing those with bot farms, which reduces slots available to non AI/farm creators.
Survival of the clickbaitiest.
I try and compete with https://UltraHotTV.com but it's not youtube in name.
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's biggest strength is its scale; there is no web service out there that let's you upload literally unlimited amount of data for free.
YouTube needs to be broken up and have the video hosting separate from the viewing platform itself.
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.
Every monopoly is predicated upon abusive, anti-competitive and unlawful practices, as well as exemptions and unearned subsidies from governments. Always. Many people aligning with megacorporations wouldn't support "capitalism" if the playing field was even.
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!
Is it really a monopoly if alternatives like rumble and vimeo exist?
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 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.
Have you looked at Vimeo lately? It's hard to tell it even serves videos anymore, the platform part is completely hidden unless you get a direct link.
No, but that doesn’t matter to me, because I only ever used it as a CDN for my videos, anyway.
Youtube is garbage now. Never use it.
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 ...
Have no idea what your last sentence means.. But that said - if you're claiming that YT search is broken I wholeheartedly agree. I don't understand how search on YT can be so bad given that it's owned by a search engine company.
Then again, their search engine is also subpar nowadays.. :)
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
> 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.
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!).
I’ve watched nearly every video but I may have a different tolerance having grown up with South Park.
Sorry to be cranky, but it's a bit annoying when people call market leaders "monopolies".
Words are best when they have 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.
Monopolies are not illegal or ipso facto anti-competitive.
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.
My point is that I don't have my own definition of words!
We should all use the common definition of words. That makes communication possible!
dictionary.com gives this definition: "exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of prices."
That's... not what I expected. To me having a monopoly means being the only provider, but I'll bend the knee to the dictionary.
In this case though, with competitors at 10% or 25% market share, you can easily publish videos at a cheaper vendor.
When the entire pool of competitors is only 10%, it's not so easy. You can put a video up but nobody will see it. The network effect of viewers is one of the big reasons to want multiple major sites.
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.
Google is active in dozens of markets. It may be a monopolist in some of them.
But you can't say it's a monopoly across the board.
If Google is really a monopolist on some markets, any other market from the dozen is needed to support the Google's monopoly. Kind of Apple's Facetime when decreasing number of clients for a tiny messenger makes a big support for rest of the Apple.
I honestly don't understand the point you're trying to make.
Microsoft was never a monopoly in the personal computer market by this logic.
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.
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Here's an unrelated post by the video game content collective Second Wind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpVnx4_yqTo
Here's a post from another youtuber about a recent video getting restricted: https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxcapSFGmm6m59kSEn62RGOZsmUEK...
I wrote up notes here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45180555 but this wasn't coordinated. As I mentioned in the first paragraph of the post, I was following a thread on Bluesky where Adrian and Jeff were chatting. I posted the article there. I didn't know Jeff had posted on Hacker News about this already, and I didn't know he would post my piece. I definitely would have done another editing pass if I had known!
Two articles is "astro-turfing" and "coordinated"? We're going to need some stronger evidence than that.
The part that is confusing is Jeff himself posting this. There is only but one explanation - to increase the visibility of the issue.
Jeff is known for his rPi experiments, so the question is why this seemingly random blog post.
How did Jeff even get to know about this post? Unless the author sent it over to him?
Soo many questions. Mostly because the author of this blog post isn't a YouTuber (AFAICT)
> How did Jeff even get to know about this post? Unless the author sent it over to him?
Google search alerts are a thing (https://www.google.com/alerts). I'd expect a public figure, however niche their following is, would set them up to track the conversation about them.
And once you see a post about you show up in Google Alerts, is the next step you do post that on HN?
Uh, there have been dozens of videos of senior YouTube creators who have independently voiced alarm about this within the past few days. It's now been long enough since the algorithm change that statistical time series analyses can detect it. It is no coincidence or surprise that there should be several concerns raised here today. Many livelihoods depend on this. It's pretty serious for certain "celebrities".
Not to be rude, but this is one of several accusations of astroturfing I've seen on HN lately. They have all been so clearly off the mark that it makes me wonder if there was some event that triggered users here to be so paranoid?
> senior YouTube creators who have independently voiced alarm
Pretty sure they are all in a discord channel together.
Do you really think that Friendly Jordies, Jeff Geerling, Second Wind, Red Letter Media, Brodie Robertson, Game Grumps, Vinesauce, Dead Meat, Dark Viper, and Linus Tech Tips, for example, are in the same Discord channel (Friendly Jordies is an Aussie political channel for goodness sake, he couldn't care less about tech), and are part of a conspiracy to fabricate viewership data... to get sympathy? To draw attention to their channels? And as part of this plan, they astroturfed multiple social networks with this fake data for the last week?
Pretty sure YouTube made an algorithm change and it's causing problems. Again.
I didnt say any of that. You dont need to put words into my mouth to "win an argument".
I think it is reasonable to assume that most popular YTers are in a discord/telegram/whatsapp/text chain together. This is their community, so it makes sense to have a quick line of comms between them.
Just like how HN is a place for .. hackers to socialize, it is conceivable there's a $place where they meet and discuss inside-baseball stuff.
Okay, I am happy to hear that is not what you were implying; a bit extreme, but that's how I read your comments in light of the reality, taking the skepticism to its apparent conclusion. I genuinely did not intend to provide a straw man or to argue and apologize for doing so; I'm just not sure what else you were implying.
We know that large groups of YouTubers, particularly the "elite" ones, are in chats with each other, this is true. But the sheer variety of them talking about this from across different spaces on YouTube and different tiers makes it seem unlikely to me they are all in the same exclusive social space. I think we operate with different priors though.
This article specifically mentions and links to Geerling’s piece.
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Another yter mailed out to his Patreons saying his views were down. Within the last week. Ze Frank.