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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

Indeed.

I often look at all the internet monopolies and I feel YouTube is quite a hard one to crack.

A competitor could buy some top channels, and then what?

YouTube is on virtually all decides out there, even bundled with smart tvs. So much to invest for a very low chance of return.

Why would top creators even agree unless you throw stupid money at them (they already are making crazy tens of thousands if not more for every video, good luck luring them).

And that's not even counting that Google has insane amounts of data for ads, yet another advantage.

I just don't see anybody being able to really fight YouTube unless Google itself keeps making it worse.

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If I were thinking about trying this, I wouldn't bother trying to appeal to top creators, especially not at first. No matter how much VC you throw at the problem, you'll burn through all of it before you even begin to make a dent. It's also been tried before and failed.

It's been discussed elsewhere in this thread that a lot of the appeal of YouTube is the small-to-mid-size creators. You may not even need to pay more than YouTube is paying in the general case to make it interesting - just offer better terms. Like a guaranteed rate per view and/or per view minute, along with a promise that all of your subscribers will actually be notified when you post new videos. You wouldn't require creators to stop cross-posting to YouTube as well, but you could pay a modest bonus for each platform-exclusive they post, or pay for timed exclusives with a call-out to your platform in the YouTube version.

You would still need to pour billions into it to get anywhere though, and even then, it's not even clear if YouTube is actually profitable as an independent business currently.

Agreed but TikTok kinda shows it’s possible, no?

To an extent yes, but apparently YouTube shorts are bigger than TikTok now.

And I would argue that TikTok targeted short videos, which aren't really YouTubes main thing.

I think they only compete in the space of short videos and mobile devices.

When it comes to longer formats and non-mobile devices YouTube is just the de facto content provider of user-created content.

Like, I lay on my couch and watch YouTube for hours. Car reviews, NBA highlights, documentaries, cooking recipes, travel tips, etc...Not a space/device TikTok can enter easily.

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