I argue TikTok did / is doing the same path.

Isn't TikTok more like the Instagram of video? I seem to remember early Youtube had a lot of digitised content, like private videos and TV show ripped fragments. With TikTok I see more of a Twitter/Instagram vlog and opinion platform. Youtube's success these days is, somewhat surprisingly, long-form content, often even exceeding an hour.

I'm too old to see just how popular TikTok is and where they could take that with the (supposedly petty young) demographic they have.

I wonder why the likes of Vimeo and DailyMotion from a similar era never seemed to really make it.

I remember going to daily motion spcifically to watch stuff that got DMCA'd out of youtube, the problem being I had no reason to stay there, the content was too sparse, even considering the amount of illegitimate content published

Vimeo decided awhile ago that they weren’t going to be a “shareable video” platform. That, combined with their pretty user-hostile UI, has limited their growth.

My guess is that they looked at the costs of hosting trillions of hours of video and decided that only a corporate giant like Google would ultimately be able to afford it.

Their software experience was terrible as well. Real player type stuff. You only went there when you had no other option.

Everybody pirated, only YouTube succeeded. This can't be the reason.

piracy probably wasn't the reason they won back then, but I think the point was that the change in IP enforcement since then might be the reason they can maintain their lead now

They had a rough start until googie acquired them. Lot of traffic, little revenue. It was the infusion of billions of dollars at the time and in the landscape it existed in that made youtube successful.

You would need a few times that to make it work all over again. Either that or some sort of decentralized framework with decades of volunteer man hours and hundreds of millions of dollars of volunteer hardware and network power to displace/replace it.