Google Can’t Figure Out What YouTube Is
And its users are suffering for it
Is YouTube a music service or a movie rental store? A space for news outlets or beauty vloggers? Is it for video essays or game streamers? For years, Google has wanted the answer to be a simple, “Yes, all of the above.” Today’s shutdown of the YouTube Gaming hub shows the actual answer is a lot fuzzier than that.
YouTube occupies a unique position somewhere between a TV-like service — where it gets its name — and a social network. Its core function of hosting and sharing videos is useful to a wide variety of communities with wildly different needs. Some of these needs are even contradictory, such as shopping channels that need to monetize products, versus news channels that attempt to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest. Google has attempted to reconcile this clashing platform identity in recent years by spinning off pieces into independent hubs, but it’s unclear if that strategy is working or if it helps those who get left behind.
YouTube Gaming was meant to be one of those hubs. When it first launched in 2015, YouTube Gaming was a separate mobile and web app designed to leverage the massive gaming community already on YouTube and turn it into a competitor to Twitch, which is owned by Amazon. At the time, YouTube proper lacked features that would make the…
