It's hard to make a Youtube alternative that will sustain itself and capture some
percentage points of video hosting market share, when not even Youtube is a profitable
platform.
Should any Youtube alternative succeed, it ought to give people a strong motivation to
stop using the second most visited website, second largest search engine, most profitable
digital marketing platform, and most open video sharing service in the world.
An alternative to Youtube is going need to offer something that has a such value to people
that Youtube will not be able to deliver it without fundamentally restructuring or dismantling
their current business model.
It can't be somewhat better than Youtube.
It must be an absolute punch in the face of the Youtube's company for neglecting to
satisfy some essential market demands.
Is any of the proposed Youtube alternatives delivering on this promise?
My view is they all fall behind for a similar reason – they fail to give people enough
motivation to use their service.
Some of them just don't understand market demands, or just focus on a different service
than what Youtube does.
Others act as if they wanted to maintain their hipster position and remain alternatives forever
instead of taking a chunk of mainstream networks' share.
Let's get vimeo out of the way real quick.
Vimeo has been around as long as Youtube and is a name that is perhaps equally as known
as Youtube.
It has only one problem.
Vimeo is nowhere near a Youtube alternative.
Look at these offerings.
What is up with those upload limits?
I wouldn't even be able to upload my last video with a basic account.
Why should anyone bother to pay for uploading to Vimeo when they have tons of other platforms
to upload for free without any limit?
This is not a website where you can quickly share videos that everybody will be able to
watch.
This site operates on highly entrepreneurial level.
Nobody is going to pay 14 euros per month to upload gaming videos or social commentary.
Especially channels who are starting out.
Vimeo doesn't act as a search engine either.
It doesn't display its content in the same transparent way.
It's not a social media platform, which is what a proper Youtube alternative needs
to be.
It's a video sharing and hosting provider for professionals to earn money, businesses
to to do their business, and viewers to pay for quality content.
It's not made to interact with people from all walks of life.
Vimeo strictly doesn't display any ads over its videos.
The only revenue stream for content creators is if their viewers pay to watch.
Which means you'd have to have some strong motivation to pay for content and that's
not an option for unestablished creators.
If you are small or medium size content creator on Youtube, forget about Vimeo.
The two websites serve completely different purposes.
Vimeo has poor search engine optimization, terrible content suggestions, and only a fraction
of Youtube's traffic, which is a problem if you are not established and want to get
discovered.
Try searching for anything on vimeo.
What the hell is this?
I guess I want to watch this video…
Oh no I can't!
It's a paid one!
I wonder if it's worth it.
Let me see… waiting… still waiting… ok I am starting
to loose my patience here.
Argh screw it!
I give up!
Vimeo is not a community based service.
Vimeo was created by filmmakers to have a sleek platform for sharing videos.
Youtube was created by a bunch of 20-year olds to share videos of Janet Jackson's
side boob slip and earth disaster porn. And that says it all.
A proper Youtube alternative that's gonna be successful needs to be doing things Youtube
does right, and correct things Youtube does wrong.
It can't be opposite to Youtube.
It has to be a social network where people are able to connect easily without a steep
learning curve.
The hurdle of transferring from Youtube to another platform must be very low.
Because it's based on user-created web content, the platform essentially needs to be a search
engine with smart algorithms able to show results people are looking for.
It has to be possible to optimize the content for search engines and have them indexed in
search aggregates.
It can't be an isolated website people have to actively look for to find.
It needs to be easily found without even directly looking for it.
It can't expect action from the general public.
It has to give them a motivation in form of content they are looking for and innovation
at an offer they have been given yet.
Successful Youtube alternative is going to have to balance the relationship between creators,
advertisers, and its own platform.
It should allow creators to be driven by profit as well as values of their choice.
While at the same time, it has to customize the space according to individual viewers
needs so that they are able to have a circle of content they are interested in without
being flooded with content they'll never want to watch.
All of this has to be done while beating a multi-billion dollar centralized business
that has a well over a decade of experience, development, and established position.
So how is vid.me doing on this one?
Horribly, in my opinion.
The experience I get from using vid.me is so similar to what I was getting when I visited
vessel.com.
Do you remember vessel?
It was supposed to be the big new Youtube alternative that everybody was going to switch
to.
Well, it doesn't exist anymore.
It was sold to Satan.
I mean Verizon.
I foresee similar faith with vid.me.
I might be wrong so correct me in the comments if you think otherwise or have anything to
add.
But the site is basically just a clone of Youtube.
There's nothing that's better.
Many promises and desires about Youtube alternatives are that they fix the copyright abuse problem,
broken flagging system, totally unusable Youtube comment section, and won't actively take
down or demonetize channels or videos that conflict with the politics of Youtube and
its advertisers.
Vid.me doesn't guarantee any of that.
It doesn't even market it anything like it.
And what's a grave no-go for me is if I visit a video sharing website and I don't
see any videos on their home page.
What are you trying to be?
Do you just want to attract creators to upload their videos to your website and then you
want general users to not watch those videos on Youtube but actively look for them on vid.me?
It's understandable you need creators but vast majority of visits to your website will
be from people looking for content not creating one.
This so basic behavioral economics.
What are you doing?
Then there's minds.com.
A project I really love but a website I totally don't understand.
Especially its user interface.
It's not complicated.
It just doesn't make any sense.
It fails to explain itself easily.
You'd have to commit yourself to use it because you devote yourself to an ideal.
And even then it doesn't quite fit in my brain.
I like minds core ideas, but from UE and UI perspective – are they trying to be an alternative
to Facebook?
But they do call in a lot of Youtubers promising payoffs from various monetizing features – like
peer-to-peer support, paid subscriptions, donations, and they apparently want to make
an alternative to patreon.
Minds doesn't have any objective reasonable algorithm content creators could follow to
make their videos searchable.
Search engine optimization is completely absent, videos are viewed as posts, which makes it
impossible to search for them by merit, you can't add tags to your videos, if you share
your videos they'll get zero views unless you boost.
Boosting is basically just paying for views, but these are not views just mere displays
of your posts on other people's news feeds.
It's like paying for like farms in Bangladesh.
You'll get likes but no real engagement.
As a creator you don't want to be noticed.
You want to be discovered when other people search for stuff you made content for.
You are not a product to be advertised.
There are other cosmetic flaws that need fixing if minds wants more youtubers – the biggest
as mentioned is that there is no video list.
The channel's content is viewed as posts in feed and not list of videos on a channel
page.
Since uploads are treated as posts, there is no real description tab that would appear
underneath the video.
It creates a messy combination of Facebook and Youtube content layouts and they don't
really blend together very well.
Also if you upload directly to minds, it's not possible to add your custom thumbnails
to distinguish your videos, which significantly diminishes your channel branding.
To me minds is more of an alternative to Facebook and tries to make money by implementing monetization
models of Youtube and Patreon.
It's not horrible, but it's not all that intuitive and expected.
There should be a clear distinction between an ordinary user page layout, and channel
page layout.
Content creators should be allowed to adopt Youtube-like display page, while general users
could keep Facebook newsfeed.
The core message of minds is to be a social network that doesn't censor you and doesn't
track you.
Which is great, but who gives a damn?
Apparently not those 500 million people who upgraded to Windows 10.
And certainly not 90% of worldwide Internet citizens relying on Google to search for news
and pretty much everything else Google censors.
And absolutely definitely not those 2 billion Facebook monthly active users.
An alternative to Youtube that doesn't just want to remain an alternative in the corner
full of people lamenting how right they are about the masses of sheeple has to have a
kick ass user experience.
It has to blow everyone's mind away.
Minds.com certainly didn't blow my mind away.
LOL.
I must stop…
Another new video sharing platform is bitchute.
This one looks very promising.
It has just a tiny problem.
So tiny it's hard to see.
Oh there it is.
No views!
You can create a great project, with fantastic values hard coded in its core.
But it needs something additional that will pay the bills.
Something that draws everybody's attention.
Even if Pewdiepie announced his bitchute channel, he'd still get 7 views per video, because
people would be asked to sacrifice a little bit of convenience that they so sacredly don't
want to give up to migrate to a new website and subscribe there.
Bitchute would need to make some partnerships with established organizations and creators.
Maybe if some news outlet started posting their videos on bitchute and shared them with
their audience on their platform.
That would start to build some traction.
How much it is in their control to attract the kind of content that draws everyone in,
that I don't know.
But bitchute is doing something that certainly has a potential.
It's a completely decentralized network that doesn't look horrible and is actually
easy to use.
Bitchute is clearly an outcome of a brilliant human genius and maximum effort.
Bitchute trades as a peer-to-peer network based on a web browser version of bit torrent.
This means that the site's developers do not provide their own servers for hosting
the videos, but rather spread this costly burden to the network of torrent users seeding
file storage from their devices.
It works similarly to bitcoin blockhain network – in order for it to work, there is a group
of core developers maintaining the software side, and then seeders, like miners in bitcoin
making transactions possible, provide the lifeblood to the Bitchute network by making
it possible for users to upload and share videos, and just generally use the website.
Bitcoin blew cryptocurrency into a &150 billion dollar market asset class, even though it's
still far from becoming mainstream and the establishment hates it.
Decentralized service is just a better idea because it doesn't have a single point of
failure – like a centralized company or a regulatory body that make and break the
whole thing.
Bitchute currently doesn't serve its own search.
Any search will transfer you away from their website to DuckDuckGo's search engine, which
proxies results from Yahoo.
It is crucially important to see a thumbnail of a video.
Youtube heavily relies on it.
Videos wouldn't get nearly as discovered if they were offshoot of Google index pages.
You don't search for videos to read but to watch.
Bitchute certainly is an interesting project and it deserves to be given a chance.
Something to keep in mind though is that 30% of Youtubers make 90% of the website traffic.
If Bitchute wants to grow big, its bitchuters need to be big as well.
Popular creators will be able to generate more traffic and attract more profits, in
which way they will pull smaller ones and newcomers with them.
I think only that way the whole network will be able to grow and attract more new and small
content creators.
My whole take on this is that we'll probably never see a complete replacement of Google,
Youtube, and Facebook by ethical alternatives.
If they ever fall, it will be because the innovation will outpace them.
In which case these corporations will invest in such new innovations and will transfer
their business model to them.
Google is already preparing for this which is why Alphabet has acquired 160+ companies,
most of which have nothing to do with being a search engine.
Diversity is a necessity to sustain a free and strong middle class.
The economy is more stable if the free market is more open and spread across as many players
as possible.
We are living in a dangerous world where more and more wealth is accumulated and merged
within fewer and fewer boards of directors.
It's problematic because instead of serving millions of interests to millions of people,
only a handful of interests are met with satisfaction because their monopoly power is at such a
level that whatever their actions define the whole market.
So I would conclude that the free Internet needs more alternatives like bitchute and
less clones like vidme.
But they can't just be alternatives.
They must strive towards innovation.
Luckily for them, centralized monopolies are poised to kill more innovation than make,
so decentralized projects have an upper hand on this one.
But let me know – do you have any content creators you watch posting on one of these
alternatives?
And also which one do you think has the biggest potential to gain some percentage points?
If you engage in liking or commenting, my videos will be discovered by more people to
join the discussion.
So please do so and also feel free to share my work and subscribe for more coverage of
cyber Silmarillion in the next chapter.
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