I'm sure those of us from YouTube have noticed that the Steem blockchain offers an alternate to our well known site. This immediately raises one question in my head: upload to DTube or share from YouTube?
In case you do not know, YouTube and DTube are both video sharing platforms. Any user with an account may upload a video, and give it a title image. However, YouTube is run by Google, while DTube is run by it's own developers on the Steem blockchain.
The first issue is which platform has more reach and creators. YouTube has one billion active users, with about fifty million channels. Steemit itself has eight hundred thousand register users, and only a portion of them use DTube, so clearly there are more viewers and creators on YouTube. However, YouTube also has more competition within the creators group. Right now, it seems like YouTube isn't too good right now, but it has a very big advantage over DTube: it is the second largest search engine in the world, and is owned by the largest search engine in the world. If you make a product that you need to manipulate in some way, like pushing buttons or putting together, you can make a video on YouTube and many people will find it. DTube, not so much. Just think of assembling a drill or a cooking appliance.
In terms of making money, this gets interesting. If you want to make money just on your content, DTube has an insane advantage. However, if you want to leverage a specific audience and sell them a product, use YouTube. While there are demographics on both sites, YouTube has the tools to let you see if you are targeting the right people. DTube has the comment section, as well as view and like counters, which are not very good for audience analysis.
In terms of breaking out and getting big, this one is in the air for me. There are too many factors to take into account to figure out which one is better for growing big, so I'll say this: both sites have ways of doing this, figure them both out and pick the one for you.
The last part I want to mention is both sites' access to Steemit. DTube automatically posts your video to Steemit. With this being said, why not just share your video from YouTube to Steemit? The post may get upvoted just like a DTube post, and those on Steemit will know about your YouTube channel. Not only that, but YouTube promotes you in search more if they see that your video is gaining traffic on other sites. Plus, you can get the ad revenue and 100% of the Steem you earn, instead of the DTube devs getting a cut for server maintenance and things of that nature.
Right now, YouTube is clearly the winner. This is based on the fact that you can share it to Steemit, as well as have more reach. So, what can DTube do to be more competitive with YouTube? There needs to be a better reason than"I hate Google/YouTube" to be on DTube. There is the DTube account that likes videos, but you have to compete very hard to get the likes from it, and there is no definitive way to make it like you. My main suggestion would be that they need to find a way to grow creators faster then they can on YouTube, which means have a better video suggestion A.I. than YouTube does. This will require a lot of money, and I do not think DTube can do this fast. My other suggestion would be to find a way to reward creators for uploading to your site. Maybe give them a guaranteed like every ten videos or something like that. Or even have achievements for them to try to get, and give them SBD accordingly.
This is all I have to say. I could've gone into things like video load times, but those are too obvious and will always be worked on. Let me know what you all think in the comments, I would love to know what you are all thinking! :)