YouTube is one of the tentpoles of the Web at this point in time, being a household name and one of the most-visited sites on the Internet. And yet Yahoo is reportedly planning to compete with YouTube by launching its own online video service. The fools.
YouTube Competition
YouTube is a giant amongst giants. It’s owned by Google, racks up 1 billion visitors every month who collectively watch 6 billion hours of video every month, and pushes out 100 hours of new content every minute.
That’s one hell of an achievement, and it makes YouTube a seemingly impossible scalp to take. It is for this reason that YouTube has hardly any competition.
There are lots of other video sites on the Web — Vimeo, Dailymotion, and Metacafe to name just three — but none that can compete in terms of content or eyeballs. Only a foolish company would even contemplate the idea of trying to beat YouTube at its own game…
It All Comes Down To Money
According to Re/code, Yahoo is planning to do just that, with CEO Marissa Mayer believing there is room for a serious competitor to YouTube.
Yahoo has reportedly already approached some of the biggest YouTube producers and the networks they’re affiliated with. And the bait being used to lure them to jump ship is cold, hard cash.
Yahoo believes it can afford to improve on the ad revenues YouTube offers, and it could even allow content creators to sell their own advertising alongside the dedicated Yahoo sales team.
The biggest differentiation between YouTube and the proposed Yahoo service would be the latter concentrating on professional content produced by popular channels, with YouTube’s “everybody is welcome” mentality being rejected.
Conclusions
Yahoo isn’t ready to announce anything, and is staying silent on the speculation. But these rumors are coming from somewhere, so it stands to reason Yahoo is at least exploring the possibility of launching such an effort.
Can it possibly compete with YouTube? I suspect not, as this is at least five years too late to catch up. But stranger things have happened. Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
