Every month, a third of the world’s population views an average of 4 videos on YouTube channels. The owner of the service, the company Google LLC, annually becomes richer by the amount equal to 10 billion dollars. Many people ask questions about such popularity, what causes it, what are the secrets. And we’ll try to figure out how you can create such a video hosting yourself, and how much money it takes.
YouTube business model
April 2005, YouTube just opened, and there’s practically no video on the site and no information about it. It’s not about its popularity or the number of visitors, because almost nobody knows about its existence. But the people at Google were able to spot the goose that lays the golden eggs. A year and a half after the start of the project, the company bought it for a billion and a half dollars.
Experts saw a promising business model and praised the team working on the project. They made a bet on:
- Hosting video clips, high quality, with virtually no restrictions
- Live and on-demand videos within one service
- Use of the latest technology
- Individual recommendations as a result of neural networks
- Possibility to transmit and playback video on any devices without buffering by means of dynamic transcoding.
- Availability of modern data centers and powerful servers across the planet.
Users received all these services for free. It was a bold, unprecedented move at the time, and it paid off. Ten years later, there’s not even an approximation of the site. About 80 percent of all video goes through YouTube’s servers. Today it is a monopolist, although at one time it was not even seen as a prospect, except by Google.
The secret to its success is its business model. No one demanded money to use the service. The user simply could not get past such a thing. The monetization process was organized competently enough so that visitors would not pay attention to it unnecessarily.
Going to, create a similar site, make it free of charge, so that in the long run it will be competitive.
Taking advantage of YouTube’s disadvantages
At the time of its creation, YouTube was positioned as a free video hosting site. Everyone could post content, everyone could view it. In fact, it wasn’t possible to target an audience, but the trend has persisted. There were restrictions on content that called for violence, racism, breaking the law, etc. The breadth of user coverage is an undeniable advantage of the service, but the lack of a targeting group is a disadvantage. If you can skillfully exploit this drawback, you have a good chance of creating a more popular service.
An excellent example of an appropriate policy showed Netflix, focusing on movies and TV series. For streaming gamers there is nothing better than Twitch. Tv.com’s target audience is fans of popular TV shows. The success of Pornhub cannot be overlooked. Among 18+ subscribers, it is one of the most visited video hosts.
No matter how much money and human resources YouTube spends on combating unethical content, still radical users often post videos with scenes of violence and promote racism. Terrorist organizations are not even shy about filming execution scenes. It happens that a considerable period of time elapses before these clips are removed by the moderators, due to the sheer volume of information.
Fakes and copyright violations are another pain point for YouTube. The company’s management admits that with such a large volume of free video hosting service, effectively combating these problems is not easy. Tracking and controlling the fake videos that appear is simply not possible.
If there is a need to create a similar site of your own, you can and should play on the disadvantages of your competitor:
- Having determined the target audience, you can build solely for its interests. It will be easier and simpler to promote and promote. The sphere can be anything. A place to watch sports events or popular science videos, you can select a specific language group or country.
- Develop and implement effective tools to control and combat plagiarism and fake throw-ins. It is possible to implement this idea through moderators or a feedback rating system.
- Blockchain technology can help in controlling controls that require licensing.
