Technology
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YouTube is a bit of a different animal.
YouTube allows creators to monetize content - so there's a sense of shared success. Channels from Tom Scott or Captain Disillusion are amazing, because their production in part relies on that revenue model.
YouTube also understands that without paying for popular content, you won't get the consistent cavalcade of medium content from people that want to earn a living or notoriety through YouTube. And that include anything from videos of cats falling over, blogs about life in remote places, DIY home improvement or niche guitar technique lessons.
Meanwhile on Reddit, if a user gets thousands of upvotes and a million page views for a short story they wrote exclusively for the platform, Reddit won't pay them a cent. The very thought is laughable.
The other thing to consider is that the technology just doesn't exist for there to be a viable 'federated' YouTube. YouTube has 800 million videos - many in HD and many are hours long. That's a big ask in terms of storage and maintenance - even several thousand videos.
Video compression has a long way to go before that changes. For now, it makes sense for leave that storage to the companies with resources.
Text, however... well, all of Wikipedia can fit on around 20 gigs - 60 million odd articles. And for the record, that can pretty much fit on an iPod from 2002.
I do wish that YouTube wasn't a monopoly. Twitch is the only thing that's close, and it has it's own special lane for live streaming. Back in the old days, there was some competition - including Google Video. But that went away when Google bought YouTube. I guess there's Vimeo, but they've got a very different approach.
I mean, the Justice Department is suing Google for monopolizing ad tech - and I think we could see antitrust laws used in the next few years to breakup YouTube. Maybe the successor companies would federate - like when Bell was broken up into what became Verizon and ATT - who now directly compete for customers.
Well, Peertube exists. But I agree it is very hard to get close to the amount of videos YouTube hosts without it becoming too expensive. But that is even true for companies like Google, which is why they are pushing these changes. It seems like people need to accept that a video platform must either show ads, make you subscribe, or receive substantial donations.
I almost can't believe Wikipedia is only 20GB btw. Does that include all the pictures on there?
It can't. 60 million odd articles with pictures only taking 20GB? I doubt it. Just the text taking up so few space that I can believe.
Yeah that's what I thought. That means the server load and cost must be significantly higher than what 20GB implies. It still would probably not come close to YouTube though, but it does make the donation model seem more realistic.
That's English compressed text only, decompressed text is closer to 90GB
@pinwurm @manned_meatball I wonder if if Nvidia Video Upscaling and similar tech could also help 480p videos turn HD. That could help bandwidth reduction but it isn't a solution as much as a workaround.
I think the day will come when YouTube caps uploads or stops them entirely. Maybe limiting user's uploads for videos that don't get high viewership. Eventually this model can't go on forever, I can't even comprehend how it's profitable currently.
YouTube is very profitable.
Targeted ad revenue is massive - and Google owns both the platform and ad delivery system (AdSense). As well, YouTube Premium and YouTube TV exist.
YouTube Premium has 50 million subscribers.
YouTube TV is great for live sports and has something like 6 million subscribers now (compared to Comcast who has around 15 million TV subscribers). It's only going up. At $73/mo, that earns them $5.25 Billion a year in subscription fees alone.
While they have high expenses, they're rolling in money.
As data compression gets better and hardware becomes cheaper - YouTube's operating costs get cheaper... which means bigger paychecks for execs.