After years of web dominance, have alternate social media video services taken over? Graphic courtesy of reporter Zach Wallace.

  Does YouTube still matter? Many students at San Luis Obispo High School have been asking this question and many believe the answer is yes. It just is used for a smaller purpose than it previously was.

  TikTok has successfully captured the short-form video market but Youtube is still one of the best websites for longer videos that have more content and information. Over a billion hours of YouTube are watched every day. DOn’t get me wrong? YouTube currently has 2 billion users. Up from 800 million users in 2012. But many people don’t watch as many long-form videos now that short videos are more common, however. This could affect YouTube in the future if this continues to get more exaggerated, but for now, YouTube is still the second most popular website in the world; showing its dominance. 

  “I do still think that YouTube is still relevant, even though apps like TikTok have been doing better currently,” said freshman Ethan Chen.

  YouTube is also still more popular in other countries where apps like TikTok haven’t caught on as well. YouTube continues to get tons of newly uploaded content and is a place where people can make a living. TikTok struggles to find ways to pay their creators and creators often have to find different ways to make money such as selling a product on the side. 

  So will YouTube stay around in the future?

  “I do believe that [YouTube will eventually die] because myself and most people have a short attention span, making it more convenient to just watch Tiktok since there are no ads, shorter videos, and you can just scroll to the next video instead of thinking about what to watch,” said Chen.

  YouTube is fine for now but it better watch out for the future because it seems that these alternate platforms are only getting larger.

Source: Backlinko.com