this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
976 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
60048 readers
2835 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I never had an issue with YT's 1-2 skipable ads at the beginning, or even the banner ad. But they got greedy.
The midrolls and the unskipable ads was the trigger point for me.
I was fine with even having a couple very short unskippable ads every other video. Now it is all of them with one in the middle of videos longer than 5 minutes. And then of course the content creator has to put in an ad because YouTube does not pay shit for views.
Yeah and I wouldn’t even mind like 5 minutes of ads at the beginning compared to randomly dispersed in the middle
Oh sure, let me watch 5 MINUTES before watching a 7min clip.
Dedicated 5min are only marginally justified if the content is >60 minutes in length.
Screw that much. I'll give them 1 second per 5 minutes of video.
I mean, they didn’t get greedy, as far as everyone knows they are losing a ton of money (at least if you can extrapolate anytbing from the fact that twitch is massively unprofitable)
Pretty sure YouTube has already been declared to be profitable. But frankly I'm pretty suspicious of claims of unprofitability for services being run for over a decade. Why would any for-profit company bankroll them if it wasn't worth it? There has to be some creative accounting going on.
Doubt it, if it was profitable, they would be announcing that to everyone as loud as they could. Besides, if twitch is unprofitable, I doubt that google is in a much better situation
I wouldn't apply Twitch's situation to YouTube, IF it's even true, because YouTube got a much wider reach and more advertising possibilities than gaming and somewhat related audiences.
It doesn't seem to me a given that they'd boast about their success either. Because if they hide the situation the way they do, they can do this, turn to the customers saying "Welp, I guess this much is not enough. Gotta put more ads on it and raise prices 🤷". It's easier to placate the users if they are convinced it is inevitable. I imagine you are considering of what investors might think if products are said to be unprofitable, but overall Google/Alphabet still gets tens of billions in clean profits every year.
Most of all, again, if this is such a money sink that in over a decade they couldn't figure out how to make money of it, why would they still keep at it? Why wouldn't they sell it off or close it? If I assume they are honest about unprofitability, as much as I doubt it, then they must be getting something else from it that is equally valuable as raw money. Maybe it's user data. Maybe it's the social clout of controlling a major media platform. But it has to be worth it to them or they wouldn't be hosting it. It wouldn't make sense.
But personally I just think they are lying about unprofitability, including Twitch. It's just a convenient excuse for layoffs and price hikes. It's not like they are going to show everyone their full balance sheets.
Interest rates have been low enough for long enough that many companies have been running on the "fake it 'til you make it" philosophy forever. Air BnB, Door Dash, Lyft, and countless others have never been profitable. But they survive by constantly taking out loans and collecting new investor money to increase their market share (the infinite growth scheme), hoping that they'll either eventually have enough impetus to monopolize a market and bully it into being profitable, or get bought up by Google and co for a rich payout.
This is how YouTube and Netflix got profitable. They ran at a loss until they were popular enough to turn a profit, and then switched to maximizing that profit. I imagine the same is true for the big social media sites as well. Run at a loss until you have a big enough userbase to attract advertisers. And this is exactly why Tumblr was never profitable and Verizon basically killed it trying to make it profitable. Tumblr's population has always been the groups advertisers like the least - minorities, LGBTQ groups, sex workers, and artists/creatives. So Verizon tried to sanitize it by purging them to make it attractive to advertisers, and consequently killed the userbase that gave it it's potential for ad profits in the process.
I see what you are saying, but Google is still not bleeding money and YouTube has become very well established already. In fact, for years YouTube contributes to Google's primary revenue source: Advertising. Of course, this is why they are opposed to ad blockers, that much makes perfect sense.
But I don't see any indication that it's not making ends meet. And I'm not taking an executive's word as proof, much less one from a whole different company. It's expected that they will say whatever make their actions look good, whether or not it's true.
Yeah, I don't mean that YouTube is unprofitable. It's probably hugely profitable, and now they're focusing on maximizing that profit.
But with something like Twitch, which claims to have been unprofitable for a decade or more, I can believe that simply because of the low interest rates that allow them to perpetually keep burning money and that the value of these platforms is measured by the potential profit from the userbase - whether through ad revenue, data, or something else - rather than the money they're making right now. This is why Verizon bought Tumblr for like a billion dollars or whatever. That was the estimated value of the company, despite it never turning a profit, simply based on the potential revenue from its userbase. It's also why Verizon ended up selling Tumblr for like 1% of what they paid for it 3 years later. Because they ran off that userbase and the rest weren't deemed valuable for advertisers.
If they want to, they can go 100% paywalled. But I guess people like to conveniently forget that YouTube wants to double-dip.
That was the initially when YouTube was created. Everyone knows that Google has no problem cancelling anything that's not profitable.
If it was profitable, then why did google stop posting the financial statistics for YouTube
to get the benefit of the doubt on unpopular decisions. Same thing with hiding thumbs down counter from videos.