It's just going to push the smart people with self respect to other platforms. YouTube will then cater to the captive ad tolerant audience that's left and the quality of the whole platform will degrade. More people will leave, the quality will drop, the number of ads will go up, etc. This will reduce the quality of video on YouTube until what you basically have now on reddit: a hot trash fire. Sure you can milk these people for a while, but eventually they'll follow the crowd elsewhere. Cable TV -> Netflix.
Can that progression even happen anymore? Call me cynical but I think we are long past the days of “the digg migration to Reddit”, “MySpace exodus to Facebook”, leaving vbulletin forums en masse for social media, leaving irc and Usenet for vbulletin forums, etc
How could a viable competitor to YouTube even begin to pull away YouTube’s inertia without massive vc funding? That VC would want the platform to eventually end up with the same shitty ux issues, intrusive ads, and data collection as YouTube. Guaranteed. Unless someone finds a way to store and serve tons of hi def video for free.
Not to mention even if you get past that step you’re going up against a Goliath. If you’re actually viable and potentially going to make a serious dent do you think google is just going to do nothing? They’ll leverage their gigantic market share and huge amount of resources to take you down. Whether it’s by suing you for some nonsense, replicating your service model in their own platform to recapture customers, straight up buying your platform, etc
> How could a viable competitor to YouTube even begin to pull away YouTube’s inertia without massive vc funding?
I think it depends on what people are trying to do with youtube.
I doubt any one new service could replace all of it. Plenty of people want to share videos but aren't looking to get rich from it though. For them, I think a competitor that does video delivery well, but doesn't pay for views could exist.
People who want to make videos for money would have a harder time replacing google, but lots of creators get direct support already so it isn't hopeless. A lot of people are already on multiple platforms now too so it doesn't have to be a hard cut off.
Youtube will degrade and smaller competitors will not replace it because of what you said. But isn't that a progression on it's own?
It will be a shittier experience for users, but I think that's the general direction of the web anyway.
Just look at other streaming companies. All of their UXs suck (as far as I have tried them on TV) and there is more and more segregation.
