Comment by somenameforme
3 days ago
There are already numerous competitors to YouTube. Of course they have collectively like 1% marketshare, but that's because it's basically impossible to compete against YouTube right now. But if YouTube died, these sites would rapidly become fully competent replacements - all they're missing is the users.
>these sites would rapidly become fully competent replacements
they wouldn't. For two reasons. Without the capital (that to a large extent comes from ads) nobody could run the herculean infrastructure and software behemoth that is Youtube. Maintaining that infrastructure costs money, a lot. Youtube is responsible for 15% of global internet traffic, it's hard to overstate how much capital and human expertise is required to run that operation. It's like saying we'll replace Walmart with my mom&pop shop, we'll figure the supply chain details out later
Secondly content creation has two sides, there aren't just users but also producers and it's the latter who comes first. Youtube is successful because it actually pays its creators, again in large part through ads.
Any potential competitor would have to charge significantly higher fees than most users are willing to pay to run both the business and fund content creators. No Youtube competitor has any economic model at all on how to fund the people who are supposed to entertain the audience.
A peer comment said something similar to which I responded to here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2g1H5wPmUE
And that's extremely harmful. In theory we have democracies. In practice, if you have the capital, you get to decide for what products and services the world's resources are used for.
How would they pay for the infrastructure required to support all those users? I can't stand ads, but when I was younger, no way would I have paid for YT Premium (though to be fair, ads are much, much worse now).
Let me pay usage based, with full transparency in hosting, infra, and energy costs. Like a utility.
Subscription services are like hungry hungry hippos, you give them $10 a month and next year they want $100.
I honestly think if everyone starts paying, it will only make them remove the free tier quicker. I think society is better with youtube free, even if ads are annoying.
Bandwidth transit prices, peering, and other data for for ISPs and the like tend to be highly classified (lol), but it's very close to $0. Take Steam for instance. They are responsible for a significant chunk of all internet traffic and transfer data in the exabytes. Recently their revenue/profit data was leaked from a court filing and their total annual costs, including labor/infrastructure/assets/etc, was something like $800 million. [1]
Enabling on site money transfers (as YouTube does) and taking a small cut from each transfer (far less than YouTube's lol level 30% cut) would probably be getting close to enough to cover your costs, especially if you made it a more ingrained/gamey aspect of the system - e.g. give big tippers some sort of swag in comments or whatever, stuff like that. It's not going to be enough to buy too many [more] islands for Sergey and Larry, but such is the price we must all pay.
[1] - https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valves-reported-prof...