Much like many of you I have embraced dtube with open arms. It's been too long that YouTube has had a hold on the video creator community with its monolithic approach to running the platform and managing it's users. Sadly due to the nature of video becoming more and more high resolution all the time its extremely hard for a competitor to try and jump into the saddle and take on YouTube. The storage requirements alone for YouTube alone would make your eyes bleed. Here a are just a few statistics to give you an idea of the power and reach of Youtube.

A few stats

• 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute!
• Almost 5 billion videos are watched on Youtube every single day.
• The Annual cost of running and maintaining YouTube is $6,350,000,000.
• 10,113 Youtube videos generated over 1 billion views.
• Google’s annual revenue generated from YouTube is $4,000,000,000.

Innovation not Replication

So as you can see YouTube is a very large fish in a very large pool. Even trying to acquire the amount of storage needed to handle 300 hours of uploads every minute would be a feat on its own. There have been a number of attempts to take on Youtube but they have so far all failed with the exception of Vimeo. However Vimeo is nowhere near the scale of Youtube and to use at scale you have to pay a premium.

The perfect storm

dtube seems to be in a really good place, at a really good time. People's loyalty to YouTube is at an all time low due to a number of bad decisions by the company and the ever increasing issues with monetisation through the YouTube ads platform. Already I feel like dtube has set itself apart from YouTube just by the nature of how it's run but it needs to continue to differentiate itself from Youtube. One of the issues I have with dtube currently is that it looks far too much like YouTube. Whilst I agree it needs to be simple to use and follow a somewhat recognisable UI/UX I just feel it looks far to much like YouTube at the moment and as a result maybe taken less seriously.

Innovate or Replicate

Whenever I stumble across a new competition to an existing service and they have practically just cloned the competitors product in terms of design it always creates a red flag for me and shows lack of creativity and professionalism. I honestly think dtube will be fine and will be very successful but a colour change here and a tweak there to set it aside from YouTube would do wonders for the platform.

Just my two cents.