Simple - youtube doesn't suck!<p>Even in 2025 <i>every</i> other streaming site is unwatchable because of video buffering, videos not loading, and other hiccups in service that make it annoying as hell to use.<p>99% of websites in general suck, and the ones that don't get millions and billions of users.<p>Arrogant programmers think their products are great and they are geniuses, but in general 99.9% of their work is glitchy unusable trash and going nowhere.<p>Say what you want about youtube, it simply works better than anything else.
Because YouTube was created before copyright enforcement got strong. YouTube grew on pirated bootlegs until it got big enough it didn’t need them. You can’t replicate that again the ladder has been pulled after the launch and nobody else can do that.
The idea "to ban" ISP to put servers is not a very good one. (as mentioned in the article). It makes the internet work better and the ISP have lower costs that if there are a free-ish market they usually pass on the consumer. Not every "problem" needs more and more regulation.<p>ISP's are not forced to host these servers, they gladly do, because it's cheaper to colocate a caching server than to clog the uplinks and pay for that traffic. It's a win-win solution.<p>Big CDN providers also have their caching servers in ISPs. That's why building a CDN is a high-capex business. And if Youtube didn't have the money to pay for that traffic/server/code they woudln't have been successful.<p>We had a competing product that we sold to a big media group around 2010. The economy of this kind of platforms is super skewed towards put humongous amount of money beforehand, try to achieve network effect and try to find a way to monetize it. Google might've been the only company that could've done it, because it's a 3 sided market:<p>- uploaders/creators<p>- advertisers<p>- viewers<p>They not only put the money, but they shared the revenue in a meaningful way and that's why their patience and huuuge costs gave them the lead they enjoy now.<p>I am not sure that if you add all expences from the beginning they are net positive on this investment (if we measure the free cashflow generated after all capex has been paid off).
One perspective is thinking about what would happen if YouTube is a separate entity from Alphabet/Google and more importantly adsense and search.<p>I think a lot of people that turned a hobby into a full time content creator job on YouTube will find themselves with much less ad revenue. Adsense is going to start charging a third-party company for services, which YouTube would be at that point, and those costs are likely to eat into any adsense revenue creators make, across the board.<p>There would also be the question of what search will power YouTube and if that can be physically separated from Google. There are likely economies of scale with how Google organizes data for search behind the curtain. That could be lost and increase YT operational costs or be another service YT needs to purchase.
Youtube is a monopoly because it's not a very good business to be in and it basically lives off Google subsidization. It has plenty of openings for competition and none have too much forward movement.
I've always thought of how weird it is that YouTube even exists, as much as I love it. I have tried many times to figure out how it could exist independently of Google or some other tech giant, and watched many competitors try and fail.<p>I'm not sure YouTube can exist outside of being a monopoly. I'd actually argue YouTube is the strongest evidence in existence in favor of monopolies, far better than anything Thiel has suggested.<p>I want to be wrong about this but the evidence suggests it's so.
Aren't there companies that provide the "caching server for free" as a service?<p>If I understand the author right, the big companies are allowed to set up caching servers at ISPs.<p>Isn't this basically a CDN? If you spin up your own screaming start-up you would first go with akamai or whatever and if you reach sufficient scale you set up your own agreements with ISPs.<p>Is the blog basically arguing for making it illegal to cut out the middle man here?
- Vimeo is niche, but still around (and not bad).<p>- YouTube isn't the dominant video player in every country! Niconico is super popular in Japan.
The real reason isn't bandwidth cost, it's visibility in the algorithm. You want a game trailer on your site: you can host it at a better bit rate for a great experience or use a competitor to. But if you do that, you get less views and thus less recommendations in the YouTube algorithm on your version posted there. So you out in a YouTube embed instead.<p>Same with steam or other dominate online stores with recommendation algorithms: you can market your game with ads linking a store with a lower cut. Less sales and views on steam from that means you don't take off in their algorithm. Game flops. Buy ads pointing to steam store and it would have kicked off the self stoking cycle and done well in this hypothetical. The other store can't compete with rate alone even in cases where you are driving the traffic, because you are giving up driving even more traffic at at the other store through the augmentation of the algorithm.
Why would you sabotage YouTube?! Imo it is the best social internet app ever created, at least the one I spent the most time on. You have so much diverse content and everything is free....kind of.<p>But at this point I think the only way to compete with YouTube is decentralized P2P video hosting product because there is no way anyone can afford hundreds of millions of dollars for centralized video hosting product. TikTok was able to pull it off tho but remember that it started as a short form video service and its parent company was beefy enough to invest billions into user and content acquisition.
I don't understand this kind of thinking.<p>Free video hosting is good.<p>The EU doesn't exist to torture every single market until a viable european competitor emerges.<p>It exists to protect the interests of european citizens (most of whom do not own video hosting platforms), which in this case are perfectly served by YouTube.<p>And european public television exists to make video journalism available to everyone, which is also served by YouTube. And it's great that you can see content from public television and independent journalism on the same platform.
One very important factor is creators. Unless you got people to create on your platform, it isn't going anywhere. As far as I know, Youtube has best ad-revenue split of all platforms
It benefits from being bundled with other Google businesses like the ad network and all the data they collect from search. And there’s network effects of creators and users. But given how big it is, the platform should really be regulated like the communication utility and public square that it is.
I used to follow the peertube project years ago. Unfortunately it never rocketstarted despite the fact, that P2P for video streaming is by far the most efficient way to distribute content.