Comment by PaulHoule
7 months ago
My experience is that if you have a population doing some activity online it is self-perpetuating
https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/the-flywheel.html
and you might think, "I have (say) N=250,000 people playing game A and I can get them playing game B" you are probably going to be disappointed and very lucky if you get somewhere between 250 and 2500 of them playing your new game.
The two-sided market that makes YouTube impossible to dethrone makes it just as hard to change direction. For one thing you have to change the behavior of the viewers, but you also have to change the behavior of the creators, who know how to make videos, who know how to monetize them, all of that.
Myself I find I don't have a big attention span for short videos. I mean, Chinese girls doing the robot turn on my mirror neurons as much as anything. I can watch a 30 second video and get 30 seconds of fun but I don't want to watch another and another and another. However I cannot get enough of Techmoan talking about tape decks and such
I was thinking that Shorts is popular, and it seems like it is. What I estimates I find put it from half as many users as TikTok to on par with TikTok. With regards the flywheel, I think that it works better than your example, and I think that the existence of the myriad product bundles that we see are why. That strategy works so well against competitors that sometimes antitrust comes into the picture, to break something up that's too encompassing.