Why aren't there any "YouTube competitors?"
TikTok, Reels, and YouTube are all competing over "shorts." Who is competing on "longs?"
@HumanInvariant asks: “Why is there only one long-form video platform like YouTube?”
It’s a good question: YouTube Shorts competes with TikTok and Instagram Reels. But when it comes to horizontal long-form video, it feels like nobody is competing with YouTube.
Facebook used to have a section for long-form videos in a way that seemed like it was intended to compete with YouTube. (As recently as 2023, Matpat was posting Game Theory episodes there.) But in September of 2025 they merged videos into Reels, which has effectively killed horizontal long-form video on the platform.
Right now it seems like the only other platform that’s trying to do horizontal video is X, where MrBeast briefly experimented with uploading his videos. But X is bad for long-form video discovery; X has their version of reels-style scrollable short-form, but there’s no long-form “videos section” where people can go to find more videos. As such, the only long-form horizontal videos on X tend to be podcasts, as these fit with the “timely” and news-driven nature of Twitter as a platform.
TikTok keeps acting like they want to get into long form video, they’re experimenting with allowing people to upload longer video, but they haven’t really gone all in on creating a “horizontal viewing experience” or trying to make a “click and watch” platform like YouTube where you’re offered a buffet of thumbnails to choose from (instead of just swiping to see what the ol’ algo serves up next).
The midlist
In the absence of a direct competitor, you have video platforms made by YouTubers that don’t really directly compete with YouTube, like Nebula (which is mostly for educational creators), Dropout (for all of the shenanigans the College Humor alumni are up to), and Dude Perfect (for wholesome kid-friendly content for parents who don’t trust the “YouTube Kids” app). But those are all invite-only; not anyone can post there.
It should be noted that all of these are tiny, tiny compared to YouTube. That’s to be expected, as they are usually built around business models that involve charging a ~$5 monthly subscription fee in exchange for ad-free content, and they’re mostly serving an English-speaking audience, while YouTube is a global platform. Reportedly, in 2023 Nebula had 680,000 paying users, and in 2025 Dropout crossed 1 million paying subscribers, whereas YouTube has around 2.5 billion monthly active users.
Also, none of these YouTuber-made “YouTube alternatives” have an audience that can rival the size of YouTube. When a Nebula creator launches a new “Nebula Original” series that you can “only watch on Nebula,” the most common (and effective) way for promoting it is to upload the first episode for free on YouTube, with a link to the paywalled content.
So why does nobody want to compete with YouTube? It’s freaking expensive!
YouTube is free video storage
It’s actually kind of crazy that YouTube will just let you upload gigabytes of video for free. There is technically a hidden daily upload limit; there are people who report that after uploading literally a hundred videos or so that YouTube will pause their uploads for 24 hours, at which point they can resume uploading.
You can just log in every day and upload 50 GB of Fortnite gameplay footage that nobody is ever going to watch, because statistically, ~89% of YouTube videos have zero ‘likes’, only a ~third of videos crack 100 views. And YouTube will just host gigabytes of your video, for free, forever, for no audience and no ad impressions and no revenue.
X (formerly Twitter) does not offer this: free X accounts can only upload 140 seconds of video (what a long way we’ve come from 140 characters); the ability to upload longer videos to X is gated behind a $8/month paywall.
Even Twitch, which is owned by Amazon (one of the few multi-trillion dollar companies that might conceivably want to compete with Google), wants no part in the business of hosting gigabytes of people’s video in perpetuity for free. Twitch affiliates’ VODs are auto-deleted after 14 days; basic Twitch accounts’ VODs are auto-deleted after 7 days. If you want to watch Pokimane’s Twitch stream from last month, you need to go to YouTube.
It’s really, really expensive to do what YouTube is doing. They are the dumping ground for everyone’s digital archives, many of which will be seen by no one, generating no revenue.
I think we’ll continue to see growth in the world of smaller alternatives to YouTube like Nebula and Dude Perfect.
But these platforms will not be the dumping group for everyone’s personal vacation videos. It’s expensive not only to host all of that stuff, but also to do content moderation. Nebula doesn’t have to worry about their members uploading Simpson’s episodes, or illegal content, or all of the other things that come when you say “literally anyone can upload here for free.”
Footnote: Google is probably going to benefit massively
Nobody wants to give you free hosting for your 10 GB of vacation videos that will be seen by you and 5 family members, because nobody but you has the attention…or at least, that was true.
But in 2017, Google learned that Attention is All You Need, and now the AI companies have an insatiable appetite for new training data, and training data timestamped before the advent of AI-generated content is especially valuable, because you know that video from the 2010’s is au naturale (or, at the very least, you know that the editing was done with Adobe After Effects; it wasn’t just generated by Sora).
OpenAI has admitted that they scraped and transcribed over a million hours of YouTube videos to train GPT-4. It also seems pretty obvious that they used YouTube data train the Whisper voice model that ChatGPT uses for voice transcription, which is why a common genre of bug report from ChatGPT voice users is that it will parse random sounds at the end of a recording as “Thanks for watching!” or similar common YouTube sign-off phrases.
Viewed in that light, the multiple petabytes of video that people upload to YouTube every day start to look less like a costly liability for Google, and more like an asset. (This is why it strikes me as an odd move from Facebook to pick now of all times to tell their users “we don’t want your long-form video; take it elsewhere.”)
(I wonder how Amazon feels about deleting those millions of hours of Twitch VODs, if they actually did delete all those VODs instead of just hiding them from public viewership.
As I mentioned at the top, this post began with a question asked by @HumanInvariant. I got to answer a lot more of his questions in this interview:
This wasn't always the case. YouTube used to have competitors. I'm old enough to remember when it was a three-way race between DailyMotion, Vimeo, and YouTube. At that time there was absolutely no differentiation in the type of video content / audience each of these attracted, although they diverged over time. It would have been interesting to include some historical analysis as to how YouTube came to dominate.
> Dropout (for all of the shenanigans the College Humor alumni are up to)
Interestingly Vimeo also spun out of College Humor:
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimeo