Not entirely true. First the platform is free, but also is the content that people provide and without it Youtube wouldn't make sense - so it's not a free service, it's a partnership. Second, for many people YouTube is the primary source of income, and I'm sure there would be plenty of content authors who'd be glad to pay a service with human moderators rather than bots - GIVEN THAT they get to keep access to the same traffic that YouTube provides. That's the key thing, you can't just go somewhere else when all the users are on a few popular platforms. If it's not for that, many high-profile authors who get their videos demonetized on stupidities would have left YouTube long time ago - but they can't, big players keep them in a checkmate position due to the form of monopoly on viewers that they have.
And that means you can't just say "If you don't like it, leave, it's a free service", because it's not that simple, as leaving in reality means "give up on your business", and most of people just can't afford that. Youtube has them cornered and thus needs to be careful, since it's not a game, it affects people's lives. For many accidental blocking of channel can mean they'll be living in their cars until the Gods of Google show mercy and fix the error.... and if they do it, since sometimes you don't even get a meaningful reply on what happened, just a template message.
The cost to a competitor is in getting a user to switch. Think of it in terms of paying users: how much would you have to pay someone to switch from Youtube to your site? Multiply the average by the number of users, and that's the advantage Youtube has over competitors.
Ooh, this is something I've often wondered (and has become more interesting since Alphabet recently started revealing revenue numbers for YouTube) - can YouTube be profitable as a standalone entity?
The reason I ask is because, despite all its flaws, YouTube is one of the treasures of the internet. And I wonder if we'd lose it by breaking up Alphabet.
I am not pro-Alphabet and 100% believe Alphabet needs more regulation, and quite frankly does need some trust busting, but I'd be really sad to lose YouTube. Yeah, there's vimeo but it's clearly not a direct competitor. I also fondly remember stage6 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage6).
I would bet it could. YouTube definitely benefits from Google infrastructure. Especially since a lot of their cost is video transcoding and batch pipelines which can easily be slotted into unused CPU around the world. YouTube almost certainly also gets very cheap storage not only because Google has optimized storage cost for them but also because of the similar flexibility that they have on where videos are stored. Furthermore they use Google's CDN which is likely the best in the world hand has many relationships with ISPs to get caches close to eyeballs.
However as I understand it the product itself isn't tied to the Google infrastructure. YouTube's main value is the user base, both of viewers and of publishers. It would be a technical marvel to move it off of Google's infrastructure however I don't think that there is any feature that they wouldn't be able to provide anymore. It would certainly be more expensive, but at YouTube's size you could probably work out similar deals with other providers (or with GCP) so I'm not sure that the prices would rise that much. (IDK, maybe 15% increase in cost between provider cut and raw cost increase?)
YouTube doesn't really fit the definition of a natural monopoly, particularly because there's nothing fundamentally stopping other services from popping up. YouTube's status as an effective monopoly doesn't come from some sort of scarcity of the means of production.
> The cost to a competitor is in getting a user to switch.
Only if we're assuming that users and uploaders will only ever use exactly one service at any given time. No reason why that needs to be the case; nothing stopping people from uploading to YouTube and Vimeo and Twitch and DailyMotion and PornHub and LBRY and PeerTube and whatever other platforms, and nothing stopping people from viewing from those platforms, either.
Thing is that the free market approach just doesn't work in markets where there's only a few players and the cost of entering the market is extremely high. Simply there's no enough competition to make things actually competitive. That's why google provides no support and shuts down peoples accounts without warnings... they can, they just don't give a shit. They know they will not loose any clients over that, and in the end that attitude detriments the quality of services for both viewers and content producers (and especially them).
> and the cost of entering the market is extremely high.
The cost to enter the video sharing market is extremely low, especially in this day and age where you can rent computing and storage capacity on the cheap around the world.
Then where is the YouTube competitor? The closest seems to be odysee (https://odysee.com/) where you're lucky to break a few hundred views.
Suppose YouTube disappeared tomorrow. Where would everyone go? Probably odysee. So why don't they go there now? That's why Youtube is a natural monopoly.
Yeah the fact that said service is the very first result on a major search engine, who's conveniently the owner of said service, has nothing to do with it. Organic congregation and all.
And that means you can't just say "If you don't like it, leave, it's a free service", because it's not that simple, as leaving in reality means "give up on your business", and most of people just can't afford that. Youtube has them cornered and thus needs to be careful, since it's not a game, it affects people's lives. For many accidental blocking of channel can mean they'll be living in their cars until the Gods of Google show mercy and fix the error.... and if they do it, since sometimes you don't even get a meaningful reply on what happened, just a template message.