Seems to me there are hundreds of lifestyle businesses just waiting to happen by following this formula. So many good ideas out there could be made so much better by reducing them to their essentials, but making them elegant and "crazy fast".
That, combined with generally treating their content creators like they are completely disposable. I hope someday someone disrupts YouTube. It seems to me, besides the "network effect", the main difficulty here is unfortunately the cost of bandwidth. I could host a reddit clone from my home machine or some cheap VPS if I wanted and scale up to several thousand users, but video content at 5 megabits per second... How do you get bandwidth cheap enough to host that? Are there hosting providers that will just serve files over HTTP for super cheap?
I think you have very quickly found the reason for YouTube boiling the frog. Bandwidth, encoding, and storage all have costs associated with them. They are not simply free and so YouTube has to pay for these costs somehow.
There has been a mindset shift in the Internet at some point where originally people paid for premium services, and then it swung to everything for FREE. But nothing is actually free, what happened is a tradeoff in who pays from the end consumer/producer, you, to advertising companies.
So it's now up to all of us as users of the Internet whether we are happy with that deal. I personally am not, as allowing someone else to shape my thoughts in exchange for free services is not something I believe is beneficial to humanity. I'm doing my part, but it's up to each and everyone else to make their choice and do their's. Or don't if you are satisfied with the current deal.
As for paying for content, I think there's an opportunity to combine ideas from YouTube with Patreon. Tipping or supporting specific content creators you like. You move away from an ad-driven model towards a model where you get some basic content for free, but you can pay extra for more content.
There is likely some new model that doesn't require fully ad-based or fully premium paid. We work with customers every day who are iterating on a variety of business models. I think in the end we will see a disaggregation of YouTube just like we have seen in many other once complex and costly spaces in tech.
Content is a public good in the economic sense: zero marginal cost, high fixed costs, nonrivalous, and poorly excludable.
Advertising is a rent (to advertisers) and an imposition (to its audience). There's an active aversion to it, the content is very often deceptive, manipulating, and against the recipients' true interests. At the same time, as more attractive audiences are driven away (and they will be) those who remain are subject to ever more, ever lower quality ads for ever more manipulative or harmful products and services.
Bandwidth and availability must meet or address peak demands which are infrequent though often predictable. Users' decision criteria, as with highway traffic, externalise most costs, whilst benefit is privatised, incentivising overuse. Provisioning must be based not on some average utilisation, but on probability of availability and service quality, with additional nines costing orders of magnitude more to provide. That risk environment may itself be quite variable.
The consequence is that demand, revenue, and cost components follow vastly dissimmilar dynamics, making the business exceedingly difficult on market terms, and incentivising numerous pathological behaviours.
Except it doesn't come from Google, does it? The amount of monetisation is entirely in the creator's discretion.
Disclaimer: I do work for Google, but that's public information.
No it didn't : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
Specifically 4.3.11 defines the start of a decade as any year where [year]%10==0.
Wow. Traded all useablity for endless features.
Our setup barely works. And creating a story is such a massive pain. Sometimes things just won’t work.
So I refuse to use it for stories beyond one mega story.
What makes this worse is when 1/3 of the teams in your org decide that they want a similar feature, but each comes up with their own custom-named tag ("owner", "lead", "point person", "point of contact", "jefe").
And then you want to run some jql queries against those tickets, and you have to use disgusting query generators to de-dupe the tag monstrosity.
They've done an excellent job of giving you just enough features to shoot yourself in the foot with.
You're a UX designer. a User Experience designer. User Experience is your profession. And you're telling me: JIRA, the application with massively nested hierarchical layouts and a 2 second response time for every user interaction is easy to use?
Jira has to be the most complicated monolithic issue tracker available. I should think even Jira's sales team would struggle to call it easy to use, particularly when compared to more simple competitors like Trello.
I certainly have not made UX my specialty so I'd like to know what markers I'm missing out on here. What kind of things is Jira putting forward that mitigates its crazy abstractions, its hierarchical layouts, combined with its slow response times? I thought those were the kinds of things that signified really bad UX.
Personally. I'm forced to use Jira as part of my job and have suffered terribly at its hands. If someone is finding it a breeze then it would be a great benefit to me to understand.
Maybe I should sell notepad as a fully extensible work prioritisation tracking platform that integrates with all email providers and now supports slack...
That sums up so perfectly what I did with a B2B SaaS product of mine. I never found words so perfectly as this quote does to describe what I was aiming to do.
I would love to take a look at your B2B project for inspiration if that's possible :)
When I've tried to cold-sell customers in the past, they often want that one feature (a random integration, feature matching from the service I'm replacing, etc.) and aren't willing to make the switch until I add it.
Maybe this wouldn't be a problem if I was marketing instead of selling?
Edit: Snap as in ditto - I would also like to know this, not Snap, the OP somehow founded SnapChat.
That having been said, there are a lot of products out there that made their product intending it to be free, and then when they hit 1m users they started thinking "hmmm, if I could get a dollar out of every user, I could buy a house". They try to stuff a monetization model in sideways and damage their product in the process. Taking a moderately successful product that's crippled by attempting to shoehorn in monetization and redesigning it to have reasonable monetization from the beginning might be a better strategy.
That's exactly the point of this approach. Don't try to solve everybody's use cases like Word. Target one specific group and make the product faster and easier to use by removing all unused features.
But there are a lot of opportunities elsewhere to make products that are faster, simpler, cheaper, and more useful than the current industry standards.
I hate it when I have to use Word for something.
Want to run a little webhosting business focused on small businesses? Tried and true. Want to offer custom software development for some little vertical? Easy enough. Want to just make a really nice and clean note app? That works too.
When your goal of success shifts from "mind boggingly rich" to "sufficient for the lifestyle I want", it's much easier to be successful.