

Ask HN: Why did Youtube became so popular? - ashitvora

There are and were many other video posting apps before youtube came but youtube is still the most popular video posting site today.<p>What made it so popular?
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guimarin
I remember getting into youtube because it was a great place to watch TV
shows. I remember staying on youtube because people (the youtube Community)
were uploading interesting and relevant videos. As a place for random lolcats
and funny videos, I don't think youtube is anything more than a huge personal
library that happens to also be public so you can share it with your friends..

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chrisaycock
Web videos used to be in QuickTime, Windows Media, Real Video, etc. It was a
mess to deal with all of those formats, plus the videos would play in an
external application.

YouTube popularized Flash-based video, which could play directly in the
browser. It's ironic now since the rage is HTML5 and getting away from
Flash...

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ashitvora
But right now also there are many other platforms like Vimeo, Blip.tv, Daily
Motion, etc. but still nobody is even close to Youtube's popularity.

~~~
chrisaycock
First mover's advantage. YouTube got lots of videos in the beginning, so it
had far more content than anyone else for such a long time. The only way to
really usurp that is to have exclusive content, which is what Hulu and
YouTube-owned Vevo both have.

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revorad
Co-founder Jawed Karim explains - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nssfmTo7SZg>

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madh
It was one of the first to use Flash to playback videos, had a pretty quick
upload-to-view time, and had pretty much every Family Guy.

