> Since video hosting is such a resource intensive undertaking, I wonder why many free porn sites don't have outages and have no limit on uploads for free users - unlike YouTube competitors.

Because they can run far riskier and less-vetted ads. They can also run as many of them as they want - the "target audience" doesn't really care if there's 1000 banner ads on a page. There's a reason much of malware is spread from porn sites.

For consumer facing video sites, they have to compete with YouTube on UX, which means much more stringent ad vetting, and far fewer ads. This likely tips the balance just enough that normal online video startups are not feasible without 3-4 years of runway.

>There's a reason much of malware is spread from porn sites.

I thought this was no longer the case

With the death of Flash, if malware ads are getting past Chrome’s sandbox isn’t there like $100k at Pwnium just waiting to be claimed?

100k is peanuts compared to what you can make bitcoin mining on the computers of all pornhub users.

I meant to say, if such a piece of malware were ever actually deployed in the wild researchers would be scrambling to decompile and reverse engineer it, to determine how it worked in order to report the vulnerability.

What about Vimeo? I know it’s target market has pivoted to More high end indie creations however aren’t they somewhat positioned at least to exploit any holes in YouTube’s strategy? This is one of those things where I feel like a real competitor will only sort of be able to creep up not explode on the scene. I always thought Vimeo had a decent chance here because it’s pretty easy (imo) to use just like YouTube and they have free tiers (or st least when I signed up they did)

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised to see PornHub launch a YouTube competitor strategically as YouTube is flailing.

They already run a high functioning video network. They really just need a SFW frontend with alternate branding (and no adult videos).

With the recently released VPNHub [0], it seems like they're willing to branch out and I see this as a possibility.

[0]: https://vpnhub.com

I think a big chunk of the problem now is that when people want to watch regularly released video content from internet creators they reach to YouTube, there's no integration of subscriptions across sites. You'd basically have to scrape video feeds from youtube to compete in this way.

>You'd basically have to scrape video feeds from youtube to compete in this way.

Youtube still offers RSS and it's reliable and chronological unlike youtube's subscription feed algorithm.

If only there were some way to Syndicate website updates to a centralized reader in a Really Simple way...

Seriously though, I dream of a world in which all apps had a "subscribe on your news reader" button which could open an RSS client, maybe something implemented by mobile OS providers so it's easy for new users but overridable by users like the browser or calling apps would be ideal.

I think RSS is a vastly underused technology/tool. I wonder at what point people lost hope in it and abandoned. Not to say, it's completely abandoned, but it's not used as much as it should be used.

I personally feel like and I remember very distinctly that RSS (and Atom Feeds to boot) seemingly hit their peak with google reader and when google reader was discontinued RSS seemed to wane quickly thereafter. I’d be very interested in knowing if hard statistics back this up or not but my anecdotal experience suggests that this is indeed the case

I think Twitter's coming of age was the big blow. When Reader shut down it was already waning.

This isn't a competition problem: Any competitor that gets big enough to challenge YT will attract the same scrutiny from content rights owners. and will face the same copyright issues that YT does.

The problem isn't in the content hosting industry, it is on the policy & legal side.

Yet this issue is on youtube preemptively blocking first party content by established organizations. This isn't Babby's First Copyright Violiating CS:GO Montage, this is content released by the same university that trained a chunk of youtube's employees.

The issues we are seeing can be easily fixed by some simple common sense controls on what levels of certainty are required to take down a video and/or channel that scale with how established the channel is, including requiring escalating levels of human review.

With the "advertiser friendly" issue, the same approach can be taken, topped off with a monetize time prompt or form that allows them to assert how advertiser friendly the uploader understands the video to be (weighted by the history of how accurate their answers have been in the past).

These are such solved problems, that youtube really shouldn't be having them.

> some simple common sense controls on what levels of certainty are required to take down a video

This is solved already, but there will always be false positives.

What isn't solved, and likely never will be, is copyright.

But it seems that the issue isn't due to content ID, but contractual issues.

Ya, youtube is obucating this, but it seems they are changing the terms to force monetization on certain kinds of content where they never did before. As in, force the creator to take a cut (as well as enable more ads to be shown.)

It seems like an odd play, increase supply of ad slots while dealing with a demand decrease from random companies dropping ads during drama. They must have signed some kind of deal recently.

If they are trying to increase the ad slot supply expect actions against ad blockers to come next.

There's also bitchute.com and d.tube as credible youtube alternatives.

Very annoyingly youtube-dl refuses to support bitchute for reasons that aren't exactly clear: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/14052

If I can't get data off bitchute easily using de facto standard tools (I get that I could use a bittorrent client, but that's beyond the point), I have little interest in putting data on it.

Doesn't seem so? Seems to me that some user @tv21 was arguing against it for some reason, and @dstftw locked the conversation to avoid the argument. The issue is still open, implying it's free to be worked on. Has anyone submitted a PR?

It's open-source so... just fork it.

(I know you're not a developer, but this is a perfect use-case for forking and continuing.)

Easier to just not put anything worthwhile on bitchute to be frank. youtube-dl needs constant vigalent updates to keep it working, maintaining a fork of it is a serious long-term commitment.

Just pull in updates from them... No need to maintain it all by yourself.

For very loose values of credible.

You can upload videos to facebook though. In fact, that's the only way to get videos to play inline in peoples' timelines.

Yes but you can't browse Facebook videos without a Facebook account. You can view them if people directly link them, but viewing someone's video page is blocked, let alone actually searching for videos.

You might be interested in this news: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/11/instagram-long-form-video/