A while back they significantly increased the number of ads and also now show YouTube premium popups constantly. I would imagine it's had very little if any negative impact. Google knows YouTube is the only game in town.
For now, but if they keep treating users like shit, it creates a bigger and bigger opportunity for competition to pop in. You might be thinking it's super hard for someone like you or I to create a YouTube competitor. That's probably true, but what about Amazon or Netflix? Can you imagine if Netflix had a YouTube-like platform where, if you're a subscriber, you get no ads?
That's a good point. Who really knows, but possibly Google just doesn't see that coming, or at least not any time soon. A true competitor to YouTube would really do consumers and creators a lot of good though.
Seems like it should be a market inevitability. There are just so many things wrong with YouTube. The main obstacle is the bandwidth cost, and that's not an issue for any major tech company.
I think Facebook could actually properly compete with YouTube if they wanted, it's just that their insistence that you have to be logged in to access content makes it much less appealing as a platform, because you can't just link people to videos easily.
Netflix charges a monthly price. They could have an open YouTube-like service (no subscription required) which adds value to their offering, and tries to bring people into a paying Netflix subscription.
It's not just the ads that are the problem with YouTube. It's also the way they can just demonetize anything that doesn't please advertisers, and the way their recommendation algorithm works. They don't even show me a lot of the videos from people I subscribed to on the app's homepage. Wtf?
This is unlikely, because youtube has one thing that no other platform does, creators. How many youtubers would actually be willing to post on another website, let alone exclusively? How many fans would actually follow them? For already risk averse youtubers this is unlikely.
Many, actually. There are quite a few active alternatives now, such as Nebula for science YouTubers and Odyssey. Last I heard Linus Sebastian was working on an alternative as well.
It seems that most content creators are quite worried about the way YouTube handles (de-)monitization and copyright strikes. Many CCs are also streamers and use YT only as a side channel. Sure, YT still has a large footprint, but it's not as solid as it used to be.
There are, but generally for specific interests, and not nearly enough to challenge youtube's market domination. Without something dramatic youtube effectively has monopoly control of supply and demand.
