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(parodical) YouTube popup:
Going to pee during the ad break violates YouTube's Terms of Service
- It looks like you selfishly left the room while our ads were playing. Don't you know that by watching youtube you entered a CONTRACT?!
- We killed the competition by operating at a loss for a decade. We paid good money to be the only game in town.
- Now that there are no other options, we can start to make that money back however we like. So turn your webcam on so that our advertisers know you're paying attention.
(Two buttons, first one suggested)
Let us program your brain
Foot the bill directly
You're completely correct, but I want to explore it a bit more.
It's not like YouTube didn't also need to do these things, but they had the advantage of being more or less the first to even try, therefore had the fairly substantial benefit of being able to grow gradually as their traffic volume increased from the late 00s into the early 10s.
Any YouTube competitor entering the scene needed to hit the ground running and didn't have the luxury of being able to gradually scale up. They need to match YouTube immediately, or be considered an inferior platform.
YouTube was first, and everyone else needed to play catch-up with a headwind.