Youtube Is a Mysterious Monopoly
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The article discusses YouTube's dominance in the video sharing space and whether it's a mysterious monopoly, with comments debating its strengths and weaknesses, and the potential for disruption or alternatives.
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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.
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.
The fact that people can get all of that for free with some minor limitations is fairly generous.
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.
Is Google "generous" ?
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
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
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
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.
And you don’t have to log in.
You're paying YouTube to stop annoying you, and they then decide what to do with that money, incidentally paying some 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=...
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.
A DMCA strike is something else.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If we care about Youtube's infra, the expected business structure should follow that assumption.
Could you explain this more ?, i'm sure i only get Youtube Ads when watching videos, which is "usage of the service".
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
That'd be something most people wouldn't agree with. People always ask for free link anytime a paywalled article posted.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 creator is getting paid more from my Premium subscription, so I definitely do not want to see their own ads.
Sometimes the answer really is: it is well managed product.
The YouTube management has to be adaptive enough to work in the small window that society allows at that time.
If you see Youtubers getting kicked out constantly you might be subscribing to some weird stuff...
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
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.
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.
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.
Do you think bandwidth and storage are free?
And then charge even higher rate if you give them more money. Ask them how they spend it? Proudly poorly. /rant
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was a few days ago for the AI auto-filter and also Beato copyright claims.
I believe there are positive cases of karma when a person becomes moderator.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
So they started discounting AI data collection bots?
Source: Similarweb, world-wide
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
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.
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...
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...
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.
But did you watch it from a site operating at scale? Its easy to be youtube at low scale.
Not to mention the long tail of less popular vidros.
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.
And don't say Youtube was first, Dailymotion is slightly older than Youtube.
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 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).
(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.)
The answer is "no", which is why YT is so amazing
> Youtube is not social media.
But it is (as you point out) parasocial 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.
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