It wasn't obvious at the time YouTube would have a network effect though. It was very dependent on coming up with a great recommendation algorithm, along with monetization and revenue sharing. At the time, YouTube didn't have anything like that, iirc.
Even the basic front page of youtube was of immediate and obvious value to a creator, and would increase disproportionately in value the more people were on YouTube. The same goes for Amazon, and the same goes for Facebook.
All the LLM providers are - extremely useful - tools. Currently I can only see the 'non-monopoly' proportional improvement when their userbase grows from 100 to 1000.
But I might be wrong, and I wouldn't be surprised if in hindsight it will be obvious what the real disproportionate advantages there were to be found.
