>This is like saying "nobody goes to Google to look at links, they want the actual pages". These are search engines. People are more than happy to use them to find what they are looking for.

That's not my point. Yes of course the websurfers click away from a search engine to the original source url to read a blog etc. My perspective was not the websurfer but the statistics aggregation of websurfers playback behavior for Youtube as a factor to recommend videos for other websurfers.

For non-video search engines like Google/Bing/CommonCrawl, the web spiders download the actual HTML text and also execute some of the pages' javascript to add into their own index which is similar to users uploading actual bytes of video data. Google can then apply extra analysis on their copies of others documents. Pex fingerprints of videos are not the same. Unlike html of text pages with url links for Pagerank to cheaply extract and exploit, videos do not have a built-in "link" structure to other videos and don't form a graph for analysis. Therefore, signals like measuring actual user behavior drives a lot of the algorithm for recommendations. They have lot of this data ... because they host the majority of videos... which happens because hosting videos is expensive.

A pure search engine without hosting the actual video bytes and only links to others doesn't have the same virtuous loop of data feedback. It's fundamentally missing information that Youtube has. If I search Pex for "how to fix a faucet" and I click on a search result url that takes me to "http://ugc.com/fixfaucet.mp4" and it turns out it's a bad video and I abort the playback after 10 seconds, how would Pex know of my dissatisfaction based on realtime behavior happening on another website you don't control? In contrast, Youtube knows about my dissatisfaction without me having to click "thumbs down" icon.

> For instance we know what video is deployed where on the web, which pieces (down to 1s) are being taken out and how they are utilized and also general performance of the content on each platform. This way we are able to show things like "here is the best part of this video"

If you don't have visibility into the actual play/pause/stop buttons of the Youtube's video player and the browser's close-tab button, how do you get the same user behavior data Youtube has?

>They are the default search engine on EVERY browser. Firefox, Safari, Chrome. The tyranny of defaults is quite substantial.

And yet Facebook's walled garden of video hosting has many content creators with higher audiences than Youtube regardless of Safari/etc browser defaults for Google. Tik Tok found success as well. I disagree that it was billions in marketing.

Back in 2005, Google was also the default search engine for AOL and Yahoo and yet a little upstart like Youtube (without billions) was beating Google's own Video service! The irony! Susan Wojcicki was the early employee of Google who convinced Larry Page that they were losing and to acquire Youtube instead.

>TikTok spent billions on ads to promote their app. [...] It's not the technology that is the issue, it's the marketing. We would just never stood the chance.

I disagree with a CEO who boils down his business disadvantages to "marketing" expenditures. Let's consider Google of circa ~2002. How did the underfunded Larry & Sergei _pay_ for the search default deals with AOL and Yahoo when they themselves didn't have billions to spend on marketing? Remember, they only had $25 million in VC capital. The way they partnered with the then much bigger AOL/Yahoo was to offer them a revenue sharing deal for the Adwords revenue. They had the better technology which AOL/Yahoo wanted and Google used a clever "arbitrage" to fund the deals.

As the CEO, you can use a similar playbook. You need to come up with a compelling technical product (maybe more than content fingerprints, etc) and then work out a clever financial arrangement (subscriptions, or licensing, or partnering with Bing/Apple/Amazon to beat Google, etc) -- that makes your lack of billions irrelevant.

>YouTube is big, but small part of the UGC world, which is quite diverse. That's why a search engine would make sense.

Ok, that's a fine business thesis. (Seriously.) A universal search engine that's superior to Youtube because your algorithm would transcend the entire UGC landscape should easily prove to websurfers that they get much better recommendations.

If millions of others agree with you, that proves you have a compelling product. You don't need billions. Neither the early startup Google nor early Youtube had that type of money. Every company that seems formidable and unbeatable today because they have billions in the bank was previously a small company that didn't have billions. Likewise, you can be one of those companies that finds a way to billions instead of falling back on lack of marketing as the roadblock.