Hank: Hello and welcome to vlog everyday in April. Today we're gonna talk about why YouTube can never be MySpace'd. So last video I talked about what would happen if YouTube went away. Today I'm gonna talk about why that's not possible. 

So why is YouTube permanent? Because. I'm pretty sure that it is. And that's because unlike a lot of social media platforms, it has two things that need each other very much, and cannot exist without each other, and cannot come together in other places, they will just miss each other. It has been a long process to get them there, and to get them there initially it involved some, we might call it rule breaking. Viacom's pretty angry about it. To this day.

So the two things are great content, and eyeballs for that great content. You can't have one without the other. And if you've got the eyeballs and you can push to great content like YouTube does. People will not upload their stuff anywhere else! If they can't get the eyeballs, even if the CBMs are a million times higher. The real value for people...CBM is cost per thou...its the amount of money you make per view basically...

People want the attention. They want the eyeballs. And if there is not that. The eyeballs aren't there, then none of the rest of it is worth a damn.

And for the eyeballs, the people who want to watch content. They're not gonna go somewhere where there's no good content. 

Now there's talk about Hulu and Netflix potentially taking market share away from YouTube, but that. I think. Is a fundamental misunderstanding of what YouTube is best at. Now YouTube is really interested in getting into the long form, leaned back, passive kind of stuff because advertisers will pay more for that. But that's not their core. That's not like their true value of what their really good at, is a completely different kind of video. Which is active video, which you are participating in right now.

Whether it's how to videos or Maru with a cat, or delightfully interesting analysis by a guy in his office. This kind of content, YouTube owns 100% of it. 100% of the market share online of active content is YouTube. That is their true value. That their bringing right now. And they of course their interested in diversifying, but they don't need to work on this part of it. Cause it's so good. It works so well. They don't have to think about it. It just happens. Now as long as they build features that actively discourage it. They're not going to lose it.

Now if they do get super obsessed with passive content and the start to build like actually make YouTube not good for active content, then that's...that would be a problem. I don't see them doing that. I think that their too smart for that. I think that they understand that their real value is in this kind of stuff, and that they can build from that, but they have to preserve that in order to build on top of it. I hope that they understand that. I assume that they understand that. The people that I've talked to at YouTube understand that.

But if. If If If IF. If they did this, and just really started discouraging the kind of content that is the best part of YouTube from my perspective. Then it is possible...this is the only situation I could imagine where YouTube would actually sort of like see a decrease of market share in this kind of stuff. Where a bunch of really great active community people who create online video. Were to just take all of their audiences and off somewhere else then that could become a legitimate competitor to YouTube. In the active online video space. Now that would be a very uphill battle. It would cost a lot of money, and it would require a great deal of like social capital for those communities.

So, YouTube is not anywhere near pissing anyone off enough to do that. Mostly you know, we argue, YouTube and creators. But we both realize the immense value that we bring to each other. So that's no where near happening. But, if it did eventually happen, that's the only situation I can see where YouTube would lose market share of that. So. That's youtubes biggest threat. Pissing us off. That's from my perspective. Which is probably pretty biased.

I think that we pretty much established how I feel about this topic. So I'm gonna end the video. Goodbye.