I dont understand how there isnt a mass exodus from youtube already, whats keeping people there? If they pulled this shit in 2005 itd be done for.
massive backlog of content, only place creators can easily make money from uploading vids I’m pretty sure, so the big creators will never switch, and a lot of smaller creators have at least a fantasy of making it big if their vids go viral, if not a goal. Honestly a government would have to step in a break up YT at this point, it’s got a monopoly on vids and I don’t think any platform will ever be able to break it tbh.
Boomer take
With the attention span of Zoomers and younger generations, TikToks will be everything that anybody needs as nobody can watch videos longer than 3 minutes anyways
There are two types of videos. 3 minute ticktoks and 2 hour video essays about “Hegelian philosophy hidden in the Adventures of the Gummi Bears”
back in my day, we watched 5 hour video essays about Goof Troop
Youtube has that fake tiktok “shorts” feature, but I’m pretty sure it’s just people reposting content from tiktok and other short-form video sites.
Absolute horseshit, the kids watch long form content at 2x speed. They still want it, they just want it ‘faster’. This will also continue to change when they get old and everything slows down for them.
People keep saying this but it really doesn’t hold up. Moistcritikal videos get viewed like crazy and the guy posts 2-3 videos of himself rambling at a camera every day, each 10-20 minutes long, no jumpcuts or loud noises either. The daily Hasanabi videos are all easily 30 minutes long. Hell, MrBeast videos are all well over 10 minutes long as well. Wendigoon has seen a meteoric rise over the past year and his videos are all hour long stories about creeypasta stuff etc. Iceberg videos have been a huge trend and those are all really long as well.
The theory that people’s attention spans keep getting shorter and people can’t watch longer videos anymore doesn’t match up with the trends on Youtube. Videos are not getting shorter, not at all.
Social media changes incredibly quickly. Think of how recently TikTok came onto the scene, and how it changed every other site. Reddit made the worst video player ever to try to copy TikTok.
That is the only example in the last 10 years and they only ‘succeeded’ because bytedance was willing to burn tens of billions of dollars.
People did try to leave in the late 2000s/early 2010s
I remember when all the big critics (which were popular style of video at the time) movied to Blip.TV
i tried to switch to vimeo back in 2011 and they deleted my shit (gameplay videos) because it wasn’t “artistic” enough. instantly went walk of shaming back to youtube
WTF? Vimeo is for finding full episodes ofbshows that get deleted from youtube instantly. When did they get so pretentious?
Whats stopping them? A couple things, is my guess.
How many hours of garbage are uploaded there, every minute? The bar for entry is nonexistent. All you need is a webcam.
YouTube will lose its crown eventually but there is nothing waiting in the wings as a replacement. Yet.
Patiently waiting for China’s video service to show up and be much better.
There isn’t a competing video platform.
Video data is really really big. Not many have the resources to store it forever and send it globally on demand. And also pay money back to the creators who upload the videos in the first place.
Vidme tried and failed, not profitable.
Vimeo is not comparable, it’s for corporate/work/advertising videos. Not for consumers.
What the fuck is Dailymotion?
Netflix is curated shows, not comparable.
Sky is paid sports on TV, not comparable.
Nebula only works because viewers have to pay, not to mention that uploading to Nebula is extremely exclusive due to their high standards for creators. It makes sense that Nebula exists - but it isn’t a YouTube competitor.
The only other free consumer video platform right now is TikTok, which is only suited for short vertical videos.
A competitor to YouTube that does the same thing is not possible. Only a megacorp like Google has the money to throw away.
ByteDance could probably afford to make a western-facing youtube clone, but there’s presumably enough competition in China that they wouldn’t bother doing something just for the west.
This is making me wonder, what are the Chinese youtube equivalents? IIRC Weibo’s more of a twitter. Is it just BiliBili?
They want you to give them money or die
I go out of my way to follow the rules, like watching a sport even on the NBC website with their commercials, and then after ten minutes they say “you must sign in to your tv provider”.
So I get aboard my ship, put on my eyepatch and find the game in an Iranian server farm. I don’t want to be a pirate, they make me.
Trying to find the seasons of the One Piece anime that haven’t been uploaded to Netflix yet (and were taken down from Crunchyroll and Funimation) turned me into the King of the Pirates.
A VPN and a decent sized hard drive with Jellyfin is way cheaper than 12 different streaming services that either all have the same shit, don’t have the shit I want, or has ok original content that gets canceled after 2 seasons.
Kinda off topic but I’m actually mad that one piece (live-action) is good because i know Netflix will ruin it somehow. I’m still about the Witcher
As long as they don’t fire the current showrunners, the show will stay good. At the most they’ll cancel it early.
If they fire Matt Owens or Steven Maeda, that’s when to bail.
At $17M/episode, I imagine they’re just going to drop the series in another year or two.
Textbook enshittification. Rope them in, then pull the rug.
what is happening? Is big tech profitability collapsing? It seems like every big website is trying very hard to cut costs and find new sources of revenue right now
Apparently Google does not reveal YouTube profitability: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/03/google-still-isnt-telling-us-about-youtube-and-cloud-profits.html
my guess is that gulf state monarchy investors (Saudi, Qatar, UAE etc) haven’t been satisfied with the profit margins and are demanding more control over the companies, whereas American/European investors are possibly more focused on market share
could be rising competition from Chinese tech companies as well
It could also be a collapsing bubble where everyone’s realizing personal data sold to advertising companies isn’t as valuable as everyone assumed it was 15 years ago. They ran out of people to scoop data from. Everyone’s already got every possible type of targeted ad pointed directly at their eyeballs 24/7. The market is cornered and there’s nothing left to speculate on
i firmly believe it’s the interest rate hike. the fed rate has been set to “free money” since the GFC in 2007.
[aside from a little blip between 2016 and COVID when rates were gradually increased up to a whopping 2% over 4 years before being flattened to “free money” when COVID hit].
now, in less than 1.5 years, it’s gone from “free money” to 5.5%. that’s enough to make “investors” [aka, people who negotiate giant loans from investment banks to invest in companies] squeamish about negotiating additional operating loans and pressuring executives to find money under the couch cushions, so to speak…
to be fair, i think the enshittification process of trying to squeeze a buck out of everything was inevitable to capitalism, but the rise of interest rates so high over such a short window set a fire under it.
i think the enshittification process of trying to squeeze a buck out of everything was inevitable to capitalism
you could even call it enclosure
Digital enclosure is exactly what it is. Reddit did it to forums but the squeeze right now is to fully enclose the attention economy itself.
it was never profitable. Its all sort of been a big scam from the beginning
the tech industry now is a lot like the 1800s rail industry in that it’s changing society and hype drives investment but profitability just isn’t there
the metaverse is the 21st century equivalent of plots of land next to planned railway developments
Death to America
