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Network effects leading to strong winner-take-all dynamics, same as every other social media site. If you want people to see your video you upload it to Youtube because that's where people are looking, and if you want to watch a video chances are it's on Youtube because that's where people upload videos.
Compare to Amazon Web Services - sure AWS is expensive to run and benefits from economies of scale and so on, but there's still plenty of alternatives, especially if you're just planning to host a website. That's because of the far lesser network effects, users don't need to use a new browser or even a new URL if you switch hosting providers. At no point are they having to choose between the Amazon internet and the DigitalOcean internet, HTTP works the same regardless. In a world where discovering and watching videos was site-agnostic it wouldn't matter (perhaps where the dominant way to watch internet videos was a third-party application or a search engine which searched and suggested videos in the same way that Youtube does via some standardized protocol), but in the real world the network effects for a video site are strong. That's why all the big social media sites offer different things, overcoming network effects requires strong differentiation otherwise you're just like the biggest site in your niche but worse because of less content and less audience. Even on the rare occasion where an incumbent is overcome by a newcomer in the same niche (which was probably easier when the sheer number of users was less) they don't evenly divide the market between them, rather the newcomer reaches a tipping point where it benefits from the network effect instead and takes over, like Reddit and Digg or Facebook and MySpace.
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