Facebook won. Hands down. Beat the crap out of Myspace and whatserface. But why doesn't YouTube have any serious competition?

They’re completely different websites. Facebook and Myspace were similar because they were ways to meet and talk with people and present yourself on a page.

As for Youtube, lets say you make videos and want to reach as big an audience as possible, you go for the site with the biggest views. Maybe you’re just looking for videos instead of making them, you look on the site with the biggest amount and variety of videos. Youtube won. Also Youtube pays its users if they get a decent amount of views regularly so the main stars are not going to jump ship any time soon.

You could go to Vimeo (sort of the Fluther vs Yahoo Answers) where you get a more specialised quality and a very different audience. There were other video websites around the time of Youtube’s rise, Dailymotion springs to mind, but Youtube was just much more direct it seems. It knew what it wanted to do.

Vimeo and Video Jug are pretty darn amazing, but everyone can’t just post on those.

Honesty, I miss Myspace . I liked it better to the way it was before. It’s sucks that none of my friends check their myspaces. I don’t either because of that. I haven’t been on it since ‘god’ knows when.

The back-end stuff for youtube is crazy. We are talking thousands of servers and load balancers and database servers. It is easily a million a month just for the hardware and bandwidth.

And Vimeo is fantastic.

@johnpowell I understand – it’s an expensive site to maintain. But so are a kazillion ideas/companies in business – yet people venture them. I’m sure it was very expensive to start producing Pepsi one day – but someone gave Coke a run for their money.

Why is this different? Why does Youtube have no competition?

Great question. For sure, there are great ideas out there that may give YouTube stiff competition and venture capitalists who might fund them. But so far nothing bubbles up in the surface. Guess this is that time when every entrepreneur out there all think the same and all share the defeatist notion that YouTube is unbeatable in its own game.

1) They’re backed by Google, nuff said.
2) They appeal to the lowest common denominator.

There are definietly good alternatives, everyone’s mentioned Vimeo which has a higher quality community and better content because of that, plus they had the ability for HD quality video before Youtube did.

I think the ads and commercials make the difference between YouTube and the other similar websites.

With Youtube, I just feel at home, especially scouting for a song or video I am looking for. If you cannot think of a name of a song, Youtube gives you helpful suggestions, right on the same page or next pages.

Youtube does push you into commericals, like the other sites.

I’ve never bothered to read a single comment on youtube. I just use it to look for a clip.

YouTube did have some serious competition, Google, who bought them.