In this day and age, if someone wants the answer to
something and no one around knows the answer outright, they’re often told to
“Google it.” Google is a website. It’s a search engine. It is a “tangible”
thing, and a brand. However, its dominance has secured it such an ingrained
spot in our society that it’s also become something else entirely – a verb.
Despite that, however, Google doesn’t hold a monopoly as a search engine.
There’s Bing, Yahoo!, and a slew of others. Unfortunately, there is website out
there that provides a very useful service, but is so dominant as to nearly
possess that kind of monopoly – YouTube.
Obviously YouTube does have competitors. However, at this
point bothering to call them competitors might as well be a punch-line. Perhaps
the most well known of these competitors, Dailymotion, just can’t compete,
given its technical limitations, mere 100 million monthly audience, and lacking
many of YouTube’s more convenient features (freemake, 2013). Other services,
such as Vimeo or Veoh, are at their most convenient if you have money or are
designed more for studio content and content that has considerable production
value (Taty, 2010).
The point is that YouTube’s competitors are so minor or so
terribly specific in what they’re offering, that they’re not truly worth
mention for anyone seeking to get into creating internet content professionally
and is just starting out. For all intents and purposes, YouTube
does have a monopoly. Perhaps the title
of the site prevents it from taking on the same verb-status as Google, but it’s
become so ingrained in the culture as to be viewed in a similar fashion. And
that creates problems. Over the past few years, and in fact in recent months,
YouTube has been running into problems revolving around copyright and fair use
laws, censorship, and poor community practices like the infamous
YouTube Heroes campaign. These are
becoming major issues with movements starting like
WTFU (Where’s The Fair Use), and YouTube
personalities like Philip DeFranco
talking about the YouTube Heroes campaign. DeFranco
even
had to deal with
this potential censorship issue, himself, but did, of course, deal with the
situation in a classy, levelheaded way. Unfortunately, as YouTube has a
monopoly, there’s very little that many of these people can do to defend
themselves against problems like this. Luckily, there may be something new on
the horizon.
What began primarily as a video game streaming website,
Twitch has become something of a major force in entertainment. In fact, in
2014, Amazon bought it in a billion dollar deal. Its audience continues to grow
exponentially, as well. As of that deal, it had an audience of roughly 55
million unique viewers per month
(Wingfield, 2014). That’s over half of the 100 million total monthly audience
it’d been pulling one year prior, in 2013 (freemake, 2013). That number, meanwhile,
continues to grow. New features have been added to the site, including the
ability to upload pre-recorded videos. The interface is likewise simple, many
of its features are shared by YouTube, and many people do make a living on it,
as many do with YouTube. The only thing
holding it back now is that monetization is restricted to Twitch partners.
However, that’s hardly a true deterrent. If one can build the audience with
Twitch, which is becoming more and more possible, with modern resources and a
significant amount of hustle, they could go far.
Twitch is a considerable rising competitor for content
creators to be aware of, and not just gamers. Many artists stream with it as
well. Musicians hold streams, and some people who are actual “YouTubers”
actually do prefer using Twitch’s streaming service over YouTube’s own. It
could soon prove another majorly viable medium for creators to publish their
work and really build a sense of community, while making a living in very much
the same way many have with YouTube. The YouTube monopoly may just be coming to
its end.
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