Comment by UltraSane

16 hours ago

YouTube is a kind of moat for Google.

YouTube is not the moat, ad block is.

No YouTube competitor can rise because ad blocking is so pervasive and celebrated. People think (selfishly) that ad blocking is some niche thing, the but the reality is that it's around 30% on average, and up to 70% if you have a tech literate audience.

So we have paid competitors, like nebula and curiosity stream, but those are essentially dead because they have to compete with "free" YouTube.

The internet is, pretty predictablely, totally unwilling to look in the mirror.