The infrastructure to store and deliver seamlessly zettabytes of video all around the world surely doesn't come cheaply.

This is a huge assumption. There are two moats around YouTube right now:

1. Discovery processes and sharing. You claim an assumption that these exist, and specifically don't want to talk their details, so I'll skip details on this as well.

2. Ad revenue share. For good, bad, and sometimes very ugly, a lot of content just doesn't exist without YouTube's monetization. You assume "no ads" and don't mention a business model, how do you expect to pay for content?

Restricting to just the consumer standpoint, the answer is easy: if an app had the content I wanted but a better ad experience than YouTube I'd be very easy to convince to use it. I don't even need "no ads", I don't mind advertising paying for or subsidizing content I watch. (I grew up with broadcast TV.) I do wish there was less tracking involved (and find targeted advertising creepy/terrible) and I do wish for some sort of curation of advertising again. (A broadcast TV station would never interrupt the middle of a 5 minute music video to play an hour long infomercial. A broadcast TV station would also have a lot to answer from, including the FCC, if they allowed nazis and other hate groups to buy hour long infomercials.)

All the other stuff mostly doesn't matter to me as a consumer. I don't care about traffic anonymization via onion routing or if it is peer-to-peer or centralized. I don't care about cryptographically verified channels or censorship resistance. I care about filters obviously, but I only care if they are crowdsourced in so much as I distrust a lot of the biases of ML-based recommendation algorithms and would maybe prefer something with more paid humans (labor) involved.

All I care about as a consumer is does it have the content I want to watch. So indirectly I care a lot about the business model of whatever it is. If it is monetized well and attracts the creators that I care about, then I use it, it's as simple as that. The tech doesn't matter. You just need to be very careful in assuming you can beat today's YouTube on attracting creators given their moats.

True, but that holds only for a small part of YouTube. I think the majority of videos on YouTube are not being paid for.

Up until recent history, it was a money losing business. I’m sure that’s turned around now but mainly through heavily injecting ads. It would be difficult to disrupt them because of the network effects of all the content, viewers, and creators. And it would be hard to compete on price (whether subscription cost or amount of ads) without having the kind of infrastructure Google has.

It might be done in the future, but it will be anything but easy.

A monetized YouTube buries quality under orders of magnitude more shit than a non-monetized one does. Without the ads, you'd get a thousand good videos among ten thousand crap ones; now you get ten thousand good ones among ninety billion crap ones.

Except it kind of is. As I mentioned elsewhere, Youtube has never reported a profit. That doesn’t mean there is not tremendous value they’ll get from it at some point, but for now it’s huge amount of effort for marginal reward.

Is it? If it's more expensive for them to get it right, then maybe not getting involved in the adjudication makes sense.

It does seem like a great reason for creators to not publish on YouTube, however.

Once there is sufficient competition I would expect them to start adjudicating.

And before someone jumps in and blames the money train, capitalism, etc. Please let me know how you would run a business that is not profitable. The money to pay salaries has to come from somewhere.

Well, it is neglibie. Youtube has never been reported to be a profitable business. The last time its finances were reported a few years back it was basically ‘break even’.

Would that decentralised idea work? Seems pretty cool.

Patreon? The only thing is that it still requires a 3rd party discovery tool with a huge reach where Youtube comes in again.

People willing to pay for content.

One one extreme, you will have YouTube and it’s user generated content and ads and the huge moderation costs.

On the other is professionally produced content, like Comcast, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Disney, etc.

It may or may not be economically viable to have an option in the middle, or at least it has not been so far. Vimeo is the only one that came close to making it work, as far as I know.

Vimeo has their VOD service. It works very differently, but still...

I think it depends on what people are trying to do with youtube. I doubt any one new service could replace all of it. Plenty of people want to share videos but aren't looking to get rich from it though. For them, I think a competitor that does video delivery well, but doesn't pay for views could exist.

People who want to make videos for money would have a harder time replacing google, but lots of creators get direct support already so it isn't hopeless. A lot of people are already on multiple platforms now too so it doesn't have to be a hard cut off.

How do you know this?

> It represents 10% of Google revenue.

Revenue != profit. Storing zettabytes of videos across the whole world, with the massive CDNs required to be able to serve that whole world isn't cheap. I can easily see YouTube being among the most costly things Google do.

I thought the success of YouTube was largely due to their low bars for quality of content. Put simply, they allow all kinds of crap as long as it generates views.

Vimeo's model is quality content from indie producers, actually they are similar to SoundCloud in some ways.

Think about this: for example NASA has plenty of quality audio and video materials, where should they upload it? SoundCloud and Vimeo would be the best choice and it's what they do. It's quality content not exactly "publishable" via music labels or television, and yet it's pretty good.

Not everyone wants to be on the Internet's sewage system that's YouTube, and not everyone wants to go the costly publishing route. There has to be a niche for this type of media. I'm sure monetization can be figured out when there's clearly a market for it.

i wish them success, but i doubt they will see the sort of revenue possible with youtube. These premium subscription services are more like netflix, where they need to provide value proposition to the payer. They don't scale tbh, as the majority of the internet is non-paying. I suppose with a large enough backlog, it can start to look attractive for viewers to pay to subscribe.

But then you have to see that every company wants their subscription. If you wanted to have access to each service, you'd end up paying 100's of dollars per month. So more likely to happen is that people see a specific series they want, and pay for just that month.

Youtube's business model is much more broad and does not depend on quality content, but on the existence of a large audience. I think creators go to where the audience is, not the other way around.

Individual content creators get access to the entire world without worrying about any technical issues, and getting access to advertisers (however small it may be).

>the evidence of YouTube losing significant amounts of money.

I don't know the specifics, but I do know that hosting video is in the wheelhouse of many well endowed companies like Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. They all (presumably) have the capability to build a Youtube competitor over the last 15 years, but the fact that they have not indicates that it is not worth it.

Which leads me to think that this business model of Youtube's where anyone can upload anything they want at any time regardless of how garbage it is and it has to be able to be served to the whole world relatively immediately, is only viable with an enormous ad company (Google) backing it.

But as a stand alone service, it would never be a viable business. The proof is that a non Youtube has never existed before and it still doesn't exist. Nobody is stopping someone from putting up data centers everywhere and offering this service that Youtube does, and not even the companies that can afford it are bothering to touch it.

The Microsoft internet browser situation is not comparable, in my opinion.

Highly doubt it. Youtube is one of the hardest thing to compete with, even Google search is much easier to go after. Did you read that article about Youtube where Google pays local ISPs to act as a CDN? That is the best CDN money can buy. A competitor without matching performance is going to be largely ignore by both consumers and publishers.

Why do you think it's profitable? It makes for a decent chunk of Alphabet's income, but they don't break down costs so we have no way of knowing exactly how much it costs to store and seemlessly deliver zettabytes of video.

I wonder what the strategy is for shifting though. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understand was that Youtube was able to hit dominance in part because it ran at a loss for a long time and basically encouraged everyone to just throw stuff on the platform. I don't know how you become the indie version of Youtube if people are nervous about putting experimental, indie, or even crappy videos on the site out of fear that those videos might contribute to their hosting costs.

My feeling is that there are two models:

- B2B hosting, where you shift costs to uploaders but let them interact directly with other businesses/customers without ads or excessive railroading. Basically getting businesses to pay for infrastructure to connect with clients/users.

- A media destination platform, where you shift costs to consumers (either through subscriptions or ads), and away from uploaders/businesses, because you're monetizing their content and they're allowing you to control the ecosystem -- the ecosystem is the monetization.

I'm no expert, nobody should assume I know anything about running a media company. But as a user/creator, I don't understand why I would upload to a media platform where I have to pay for the privilege of having them monetize my content. I tolerate uploading stuff to Youtube and having them monetize my stuff because their hosting is free. I tolerate paying for raw hosting and CDN services because they allow me to own my own ecosystem.

If the hosting isn't free, as a business I think I would want a lot more control over the platform, I wouldn't tolerate Youtube's railroading as much and I wouldn't tolerate Youtube's advertising. If I'm paying for hosting, I kind of expect a B2B solution, and increasing hosting costs if anything makes me expect even more control over the process -- for the cost of a CDN, I expect them to act like a CDN. Maybe other creators feel different about that? If it costs $3600 a year to upload to Youtube, are people going to be sticking a lot of indie music and Let's Plays and Twitch-stream mirrors on Youtube?

I would think that most of the clients who are fine with paying those kinds of costs are themselves businesses/entrepreneurs.