this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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Back in 2005, I never would have thought YouTube would be so popular as it is now. But here we are over 15 years later. Teens probably think Facebook is uncool, and apparently they're not all on Instagram "almost constantly" the same way as TikTok. Yet there is YouTube, chugging along, hugely popular for young and old.
Video is expensive so competition is harder to kick up unless it does something very different.
I think it makes sense. Visual media just work well and universally so for all humans I’d say. All the other limited platforms are stuck with some indelible fashion like a haircut from a certain era and so always show their age eventually.
On top of this I think there’s an argument that YouTube have been uniquely successful in their attempt to take a middle path between profitability and facilitating creators, the result of which is that you get a performant and easy to use service (with a pile of ads) that connects with what feels like a huge range of real people talking about real interests.
YouTube has pushed itself more as a product than a community. People won't stop using Amazon because it's 'uncool'. I imagine this is similar.
I don’t know how successful it is as I’m not a big consumer on there, but from what I’ve seen a number of YouTubers create community around themselves using whatever they like including other platforms, which again, is the way to do it.
Yeah, most of a creator's interaction with their community probably happens on other sites, with YouTube just being the video delivery platform.
Instagram is for 20-40s, Facebook is 30s+, TikTok is 20s and under.
You people make up the wildest shit lol.
Lemmy is for 16-25, but not 26-28 year olds, but then 29+. It’s the darnedest thing
I mean of course YouTube is popular. User-generated videos have always been popular (even pre-internet, like home videos on TV etc), but it's never been the case that storage and bandwidth was cheap enough to not operate a website with videos at a loss.
The only ones being able to operate such a site are entities that have lots of spare cash. Otherwise, if the site gets too popular, it'll have to shut down or become unusable because of having to limit access behind paywalls or similar, hugely stifling its popularity and likely killing it.
Google created a very good service with YouTube that no one else could compete with because no one had so much money to "burn". They kept this up for years to a point where it didn't really make sense for neither creators nor viewers to want to go anywhere else.
And now there is a lot of good content on YouTube. The content is good because creators can actually live off the YouTube payments, thus being able to spend a lot of time on the videos. It will thus stay popular, because creators will not start risking their livelihoods on any other platform.