YouTube Competitors in 2020

Video is, clearly, the content type that won the 21st century. Today, users from around the world upload video content every day that would take 24,000 days – almost 65 years – to watch. When you think of a video sharing platform, YouTube is probably the first to come to mind. Launched in 2005, it is used by 1.3 billion people each day that upload about 300 hours of content to it every single minute. It is huge, and it certainly is the biggest of its kind – but it’s not the only one.

Online video has become a very attractive platform not only for viewers but content creators and marketing companies as well. As usual, competitors emerged – after all, everyone wants a slice of the online video pie. Here are some of the biggest and most used YouTube competitors in 2020.

youtube competitors

Facebook

Facebook – the company, not the service – understood that there is a lot of potential in online video, so it wants its share of the market. After all, Facebook – the service, not the company – is perhaps the biggest social network today.

Facebook Watch was launched in 2017 as a video-on-demand service available on the platform. It has both contents created by the public and dedicated creators sharing their work through there. While its numbers are nowhere near those of YouTube, Watch is loved by the public – as of June 2019, over 140 million people spent at least one minute each day watching videos on the platform.

IGTV is another video content sharing platform, this time attached to another Facebook service, Instagram. Launched in 2018, the platform was mobile-first, focused on vertical videos, until a later IGTV update added new features to the platform, including the option of uploading horizontal videos.

TikTok

While it may seem otherwise, TikTok is indeed a competitor for YouTube. Where the Google-backed service serves as an ideal platform for dedicated content creators, TikTok is the solution for everyone – and it’s insanely popular, especially among the younger generations.

The popularity of the service has brought big names to the platform: celebrities from Alicia Keys to Will Smith have their own accounts and share short videos through it.

Vimeo

Finally, let’s not forget one of YouTube’s longest-running competitors that focuses on quality rather than volume. With more than 200 million users – including almost 100 million dedicated creators – and more than 700 million monthly views. It is also ad-free, offering paid subscriptions to its users. Vimeo was founded in 2004, before YouTube, and launched in 2007. It was the first service to support HD content (720p) months after its launch.

Vimeo is often used by professionals and corporations to share live video feeds and recorded materials, independent filmmakers to share their work, and even governments – the White House routinely uploads its high-definition broadcasts to the service.

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