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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.

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...

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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 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.

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..

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

Monopolies naturally come from doing a thing the best possible way. YouTube does it. I personally use it very rarely and wouldn't care about its disappearance, but I don't know of other services serving its users needs better.

So: YouTube will cease to be a monopoly if 1) user needs change 2) it stops being the best at serving videos. Until then, it's not mysterious.

YouTube 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

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!

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.

> I also think that YouTube is a monopoly. There are some alternatives — I also pay for Nebula, for example — but they’re tiny in comparison. YouTube is effectively the place to watch video on the internet.

I've heard about an online video website called Netflix. Don't know if anybody is using it though.

I 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

> YouTube views seem to have fallen off a cliff recently

So they started discounting AI data collection bots?

I try and compete with https://UltraHotTV.com but it's not youtube in name.

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.

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.

Views are down reasons: AI bot catchers now live and new ip blocks on vpns and cloud servers.

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 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.

YouTube needs to be broken up and have the video hosting separate from the viewing platform itself.

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.

Is it really a monopoly if alternatives like rumble and vimeo exist?

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.

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 ...

> 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.

since google is tier 1 network. does anyone knows if they pay for bandwidth for serving youtube?

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.

Sorry to be cranky, but it's a bit annoying when people call market leaders "monopolies".

Words are best when they have meaning!

> 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

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.