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Comment by waterlesscloud | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually happy about this. It will boost YouTube competition, which is sorely needed.

Indie music may not show up on Google's metrics as being all that important, but it's a gateway drug of sorts. The internal data analysis is probably missing that.

Some other video site will pick this up (Vimeo is so primed for it) and pick up a lot of viewers in the process.

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There's no guarantee of that. Several other sites may offer more favorable terms, but if they don't have a fraction of the viewers that YouTube has then those terms will still be worth less than a shitty deal with YouTube. The laws of supply and demand are obvious under perfect competition, but network effects massively change that calculus.

Of course there's no guarantee.

But there's also no guarantee YouTube will retain its viewers.

The viewers are only there for the content, not for YouTube.

If YouTube doesn't have the content, it won't have the viewers.

This is a market segment that can shift much more quickly than people (including Google, apparently) imagine.

Content is still, and will always be, king.

You underestimate the advantages of incumbency. YouTube is arguably the lowest common denominator in terms of quality (eg most Filmmakers prefer Vimeo because it gives more control over quality levels), but that hasn't stopped it being #1 by a mile. Getting a critical mass of people to shift to another platform is pretty hard.

I think I'm at least partially on YouTube because of YouTube rather than the content. I pretty much only watch videos on my phone, and it the only video app that I have, and it's good enough.

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