Ask HN: Why have none of the big companies tried to compete with YouTube?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32330899

by andrewstuart • 4 years ago

3 7 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm constantly hearing about how YouTube content creators are unhappy with YouTube.

But no big company has ever attempted to compete - why?

No YouTube competitor from Microsoft, Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Netflix or Twitter.

YouTube seems the most easily disrupted, and yet none of the big guys are even trying to compete. Why is this?

It seems clear that given choices, many YouTube creators would happily publish to another platform.

It's not like competing with facebook, which is doomed to fail because the value is in the network - all that's needed is the resources to put together the infrastructure, advertise it and reward the content creators. That's well out of the reach of most smaller companies, but Apple, Microsoft or Amazon could easily throw $20billion at it and not even notice the money was gone.

The puzzling thing is that none of them have even tried.

Anyone got any idea why none of the big guys are raising a finger to take what YouTube's got?

matt321• 4 years ago

Last I read YouTube is not profitable

zaphar• 4 years ago

It has been a while since I was at Google so the story could have changed I suppose but Youtube was quite profitable when I was there about a decade ago. I'm struggling to see why it would have changed now.

IceMetalPunk• 4 years ago

I would assume TikTok and the (unfortunate, IMHO) societal trend away from medium-to-long-form video plays a role. Sure, they're trying to compete with YouTube Shorts (to my chagrin), but I think it's a strenuous competition at the moment. Not to mention things like Adpocalypse and stricter decisions about what content is monetizable, and the knock-on effects of influencer decisions that both of those created.

PaulHoule• 4 years ago

The trouble with Microsoft’s search was that it never had an effective monetiszation engine, ads on Bing pay pennies on Google’s dollars.

Building a YouTube clone would be expensive for Microsoft and they probably don’t believe they can make money at it.

So far as competition the real competition could be for advertisers which would probably make things worse for creators.

superchroma2• 4 years ago

Microsoft actually experimented with the video streaming model with Mixer, I completely forgot about it.

superchroma2• 4 years ago

Microsoft, Apple, Spotify and Netflix aren't trying to build out social communities, and therefore vending user-created video doesn't really align with their corporate vision. Also, none of these are ad companies (Spotify maybe). Netflix already has a process by which they carefully fund programmes to be produced, and comparatively, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch and Tik-tok, do compete with youtube in the video and ad space, in a sense, however except for Twitch and Facebook they don't pass revenue to creators.

Anyway, Google has demonstrated the model is a money-fire, even if you operate the largest ad network on the planet. Videos are increasingly expensive to vend, particularly as video quality expectations only get higher, digital rights management is a unending nightmare and moderating content like that is a non-trivial proposition too, particularly to keep advertisers happy. Vimeo has demonstrated this too, as revealed by the service charges they slap on uploaders for popular videos. For google, however, youtube is a loss leader, I guess, as it builds out their ecosystem, and also it has clear market dominance, which is easy to lose and difficult to acquire later if you want it.

So, in short, consider what the purpose of a tube site today is: 1) Eyeballs on ads, and, 2) A community, to facilitate point 1. It's clear why companies don't rush to this.

I would say that maybe the only outstanding opportunity is some substack-like setup where people directly pay for user-made content and hosting costs are embedded in there? Google is starting to tap this market as well, with channel memberships, early video access and rewards, and also through superchats in livestreams, so maybe there's not even an opportunity there.

-edit- In fact, thinking it over, Microsoft did actually throw their hat in the game with Mixer, which was an expensive failure. This is actually a great example of the difficulty in moving into a dominated market. Unless you can burn money for years (mixer) to maybe make it, or outclass the competition technologically and find a new paradigm (twitch, tik-tok), it's very hard to get in there. Look at how hard Epic Games have been trying to unseat Steam as a dominant sales platform; it's been years and they have spent truckloads of cash on game studios and giveaways and they're still not an equal player. Mixer agreed to transfer their content to Facebook's streaming service in the end.

lajosbacs• 4 years ago

Spotify will be the first one to do this

Ask HN: Why have none of the big companies tried to compete with YouTube?

Related Stories