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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

All businesses must mitigate against big tech companies cutting them off.

If that big cloud hosting company decides they don't like your company anymore, and you've put all your eggs in that one basket - that's your fault.

There's ample evidence now that big tech companies are elephants that don't even notice the ants they're stepping on as they lumber around.

Built your entire company on AWS, or Google or Azure? You're a fool if you haven't built it to survive a cloud chucking you out.

Most unfortunately, there's no alternative platform for YouTubers. Hard to understand why no company has directly taken on YouTube - not Apple, not Netflix, not Amazon, not Microsoft - until there's an alternative platform, YouTubers just have to hope they don't stray in the way of the elephants foot.

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> Hard to understand why no company has directly taken on YouTube

Up until recent history, it was a money losing business. I’m sure that’s turned around now but mainly through heavily injecting ads. It would be difficult to disrupt them because of the network effects of all the content, viewers, and creators. And it would be hard to compete on price (whether subscription cost or amount of ads) without having the kind of infrastructure Google has.

It might be done in the future, but it will be anything but easy.

Exactly, it is the same philosophy with which VCs will pour billions of dollars into a business to prioritize growth over everything. When all competition is eliminated, there is no one left to challenge you and you get all the benefits of a monopoly.

> mainly through heavily injecting ads

HNers are more likely to use an ad blocker so they may not quite appreciate how severe this has become. I recently switched my casual/kitchen computer from an old MacBook Air (where I’d browse with Firefox and uBlock Origin) to an iPad (where I use the YouTube app) so I got to experience the difference first hand. The amount of adverts is horrendous - two sometimes-skippable ads every three minutes. I guess they want me to go for YouTube premium, but I have simply been put off from using YT altogether.

So that’s now Twitter and YouTube who have lost me as a user just through sabotaging their own product :-)

> Hard to understand why no company has directly taken on YouTube - not Apple, not Netflix, not Amazon, not Microsoft

Plenty of companies have tried to take on youtube in one way or another - Vimeo was a very similar product before they pivoted; some youtube creators also post to Floatplane, Utreon, Nebula, Odysee etc; and many social media sites that used to be awash in youtube links now have their own video hosting.

But youtube seems very durable.

> Hard to understand why no company has directly taken on YouTube

Nebula and Floatplane did, though both are relatively small.

Onlyfans and Patreon have so far been relatively active as well.

What all these three have in common is that they're for paid subscribers only, the only way this business can be sustainable.

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