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[Jubenhimer]

YouTube has been around for more than a decade now, and had evolved from simply a novel way of letting people distribute silly viral videos, to a Juggernaut in Pop Culture that changed the Video consumption landscape forever. However, YouTube has gained infamy over the years. YouTube is also the only Video Sharing service anybody actually uses, with other alternatives like Dailymotion being either a joke or dead.

YouTube's monopolistic nature, more so than Google's influence is IMO, the biggest problem with the service. With no real competitor to counter them, YouTube has no incentive to improve, and thus Google has slowly but surely worked to suck the core identity and freedoms of YouTube out. Now YouTube is a mine-field of copyright strikes, demonetization and de-platforming for wrong think, and Altering search results and trending pages to prioritize big media corporations over the very users who made YouTube what it was.

Monopolies are never good because it conditions people running the business to think they can do anything they want without consequence or looming threats. Competition is good because it can force or incentivize companies to better themselves in order to preserve their customers.
That's why I'm wondering if YouTube will ever have an actual competitor to pose a major threat. A service that promises to be like what YouTube was in its earlier years, where people can make what they want, say what they want, and have a fair chance to be popular by doing so.

There's still a lot of great content on YouTube getting uploaded on a regular basis, but it's clear that the YouTube of today, is a shell of the service it once was.

 

[Kagey K]

It’s become to synonymous with videos on the internet. It would take a massive disruption to unseat them and they wouldn’t go quietly.

It’s very different from the MySpace to Facebook transition, as everyone is using it, where MySpace only held the cutting edge internet peoples.

When you consider that any time a legit competitor might come around, they just buy them out. It seems unlikely that YT will be unseated anytime soon.

 

[Sqorin Hammerfarf]

YouTube has a 97% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, so everybody loves it. Except for the racists.

 

[Husky]

If it happens, I can only imagine it coming from an even worse tech monopoly. Facebook, Comcast, Amazon seem to me the only likely candidates in the west, and I still can't picture them gaining a majority market share, but perhaps a foreign option could see some global success.
I mean, YouTube in the west is basically as synonymous with online video as Google is with searching, really. Western companies would have to overcome our cultural view of web video, whereas a foreign company would get its start within another culture's web, and could grow into our own.
Though I'd worry if such competition came from a place where free expression wasn't valued. Doubt they'd be able to grow without allowance for a bit of the wild west's behavior, anyway.

 

[Mr Nash]

A large outfit like Amazon could. Honestly surprised that they haven't already. They use Twitch as a vehicle to Amazon itself. Meanwhile, they seem to be taking on Netflix with Amazon Prime. I don't see why Amazon couldn't just set up a digital public access television system similar to YouTube. They have the money and infrastructure to do it, but haven't bothered. Then again, how much money could one of these companies make? Having an optional subscription model like Twitch won't make huge money, certainly not on the scale that massive multinational corporations expect to pull in. Ad revenue isn't that great with all the ad blockers out there. The only other way to make money is selling user data, which is probably where YouTube currently makes most of its money rather than ads. Only so many companies can sell this information before it becomes redundant to potential buyers.

 

[Kagey K]

.

 

[Drake]

I don't think so. Google runs youtube at a loss, it's that expensive to maintain it. Maybe if someone like Amazon jumped in like what was posted above, but I don't think that'll happen considering the cost.

 

[Mr Nash]

On Prime Video in Canada at least it seems like they have already bought some youtubers pages.

They have stuff like Worth it and 2 guys play and tons of Funny or Die stuff featured on the Prime Video page. So maybe they are looking at moving some of the bigger stars over.

I'd still look at that more as select YouTube channels being pulled into a Netflix-like platform rather than it being a YouTube-like platform where anyone can make a channel and post whatever. Also, I think people can apply to make content for Amazon Prime, but they need to meet certain conditions to do so. Classic Game Room did that a year or two ago when the guy gave up on YouTube.

 

[Chairman Tickles]

If one of China's streaming services gets an English language release, sure. Youkou is already bigger than pootube. But that would be like jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

 

[haxan7]

Change will probably come in the form of something we can't really foresee right now, like when CNN swooped in with a 24-hour news network and shook up the whole landscape of network news.

 

[Nelsin]

No I don't think ever will be. Unless someone comes with revolutionary ideas to attract all those people which I doubt will happen anytime soon.