this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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to people saying YouTube is a moneysink for google:
yes it is, if you just look at direct expenses of running it. but you're overlooking the fact that it has enabled google to amass so much data(we're taking about 500 hours worth of videos being uploaded per minute) that they can train anything with it.
it's a service that's too big to fail. even whole governments, courts, and other institutions depend on it. so, I refuse to believe that YouTube will be non-existant because a sliver of users refuse to be profiled by invasive advertisements.
I used to believe that.
Then Elon Musk showed us that nothing is too big to fail.
Too big to fail is a lie told by bankers who don't want to pay their losses.
fair point. but twitter isn't as big as YouTube. YouTube is the second largest search engine.
So, YouTube going down would be a much bigger deal than twitter. I suppose governments won't even allow YouTube to get acquired by some musk.
Digg was the front page of the Internet. Anyone remember MySpace? Posted any Vines lately?
Was.
Twitter / X are far from failing simply because your bias is peeking through and "Musk bad"
You musk fanboys are hilariously delusional. To pretend Twitter is doing even ok is a joke.
Pretty sure my bias isn't peeking when I have a dozen comments mocking ol' Elong Muskrat.
This is where I am a bit curious. In a world where we didn't have user tracking and just did ads the old fashioned way like television via over the air signals and used content as proxy for viewer interest, would folks still use ad blockers or accept having ads as part of the viewing experience?
We just muted the TV during the ads and did something else until the show came back on. Ad breaks for regular shows like dramas were a predictable length of time, so you could time your bathroom or fridge run pretty well.
I don't mind ads if they're solely keyword-based, and one per 30 mins or so. but I do mind the tracking by ad companies(most notably google and meta).
but nowadays I'm so deep into privacy hole that I steer clear of anything that's not FOSS, unless it's absolutely necessary(e.g.: degoogled android). So naturally, ublock origin stays on all the time.
for sure. I listen to a number of podcasts that instead of having dynamically inserted ads, still have the hosts do an ad read. I don't mind that at all
Who says that today? This was true about YouTube many years ago, before Google took it over, I doubt that's still true.
No it's not, most content of value will have back ups and can be uploaded to other services.
Google have been saying that for ages, that their YouTube advertising revenue does not cover YouTube's running costs.
Source please.
I tried a search "youtube still running at a deficit"
The ONLY relevant result I got was this 7 year old post on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/593tgc/reminder_google_runs_youtube_at_a_loss/
I made the search on Google, and found this: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/
Lots of talk about revenue, but nothing on profit/loss, except they had had losses up until 2014.
Mate 2015 was only yesterday.
Fair play though lol I hadn't quite realised how long it had been.
Also I wouldn't take the losses up until 2014 to mean anything except that the 2015 financials hadn't been published at that time the WSJ article (which both links source) had been written.
their data is worthless if they can't serve ads
They're serving ads just fine. They're now targeting those that don't want the ads and actively try to avoid them. That's the main difference.
The data has so many more uses than just ads. They sell the data, use it to train AI, etc. The data itself is more valuable than their entire ad network.