Youtube is probably the most difficult platform on the internet to replace. Video content delivery is extremely resource heavy and technically complicated, especially once you start to scale. Many, many competitors have attempted it over the years, and while some found their niche, none of them have achieved anywhere close to the scale of Youtube.
It took decades of Youtube to become profitable, only doing so after achieving mind-boggling economy of scale. The majority of humans on earth have used Youtube. About half of all (global) internet users use it monthly. I don’t know if any other platform can claim stats like that.
Youtube is one of those platforms that only exists because it got a head start in the unique conditions of the early internet. I don’t know if it’s even possible to create a true competitor, though I could see multiple platforms taking over different niches.
Laser@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
This is what people always seen to ignore about YouTube. It’s not just another database frontend to use generated content. That is definitely part of it, but behind that is probably the largest public facing content library on the Internet with a full video recoding infrastructure attached. YouTube is the platform for which I understand that they need to monetize.
Sure, nowadays there’s also tiktok as another big video service. But I like to think that YouTube is way bigger in most metrics.