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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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They didn’t have anywhere close to the infrastructure to compete with YouTube
Based off earnings from before Twitter was purchased, they were making less money than Snapchat - and Snapchat is having to close down gfycat due to the cost of serving gifs - much less having the main focus be long form videos
That doesn't really matter, unless you expect the video feature to be unprofitable. With ~300m or whatever active users, it would not be hard to raise money if they need it to launch a major product like that.
There’s 0 chance it would be profitable. They probably could have built it with a lot of external funding, but it would probably never have become profitable
Google is still trying to figure out how to make YouTube profitable
I completely disagree. If anything, Google having difficulties with profitability is an opportunity for a competitor to beat them (although I don't think youtube is unprofitable).
Can something like this under Twitter management (current or previous) succeed? Probably not. But could a team of smart people with access to 300 million users build a video streaming platform that's profitable? Hell yes, and the only major concern would be anti-competitive bs from Google, but the FTC has been paying more attention to that kind of stuff recently.
How big of a team are we talking about?
A small team, no.
First there's compliance with copyright laws to consider, All the false accusations that go along with it. You gonna need some lawyers and support people to handle these issues.
Moderation is significantly more challenging too. It's significantly harder to detect things like copy right violations, child porn, etc, when it's in video forma than in text form.
Then you need staff to manage the clients. And by clients I mean the advertisers. So there's going to have weird demands like "no swearing in the first 15 seconds of the video" or whatever. And so you have to manage the rollout of weird features like that. Which ideally would include tools so the content creators can remain in compliance with the weird demands of the advertisers.
Then there's the bandwidth considerations. It takes way more resources to serve up video to 300 million users than it is to serve up text.
Sure many times Youtube sucks at these things right but these are things that need to be done and doing them right is going to require a larger staff than YouTube has.
If they start with a subscription only model, yeah, they could make one that’s profitable.
Will 300 million people agree to paying a monthly subscription…. Questionable