I’m a software engineer at AWS and work on video content delivery for services like Netflix. The idea that one single ad could cover the cost of delivering a video that’s been replicated in multiple servers, multiple regions, multiple countries throughout the world is pretty hilarious. No matter how much money you think YouTube is making I can almost guarantee it’s not enough. There is a reason there is no significant competition in this space, it makes no money.
It’s not really a single ad though, right? It’s a single ad per view. I realize that each view costs money, but at some point you’re just paying for bandwidth, after paying the upfront replication costs right? Assuming replication is an upfront cost, I might be misunderstanding there. If that’s true though, then surely there’s a breakpoint where ads start making money. Though I suppose if that breakpoint is like a million views, your point basically still stands.
You’re forgetting amortization. You can’t copy a video file to a drive and expect it to last forever. It requires energy to run and the drivers break down over time. Google is one of the largest consumers of HDDs and SSDs in the world. Plus you need to pay engineers who maintain the whole thing, pay the finance team to make orders, etc. And then you have to have recycling and logistics. I bet they dispose of the whole truck loads of old drives every day, you can’t put that many in your recycling bin and call it a day.
Genuine question.
How is been running for almost 20 years, most of them with very few ads?
I doubt they had been just sinking money for the kind of their hearts.
I do not know how much it cost to run a service like YouTube. Or how much money they make by ads or other ways. But they have been running for long enough to be a successful business.
And it’s just the latest few years when they are pushing these aggressive techniques.
I know that for many years in the 2000s and early 2010s- what many consider to be the golden age of Youtube- they were losing money. That’s what I think a lot or people don’t get when they claim “enshittification”- the services they are complaining about are unsustainable in their current form. That’s what it takes to establish a digital product- grow your base first while bleeding money, then figure out a way to monetize it later. As capital tightens up, the clock is running out for brands like Netflix, Discord, Youtube etc to start making money. That’s the part that sucks as a consumer but idk what else YouTube can do if it wants to be profitable. They offer a premium version for people that don’t want to watch ads.
I feel like I would need to see their accounting books to fully believe that narrative.
The lack of accounting transparency makes all a tale of “trust me I need this money to make this work”.
What’s less sustainable is centralized web. You must know that since you work for Amazon, right?
When PopcornTime was still a thing you could watch adfree any movie you’d like even in 4K because resources were shared through peer to peer.
Now, YouTube gets up to 12$ RPM, content creators get maybe 40% of that. With 2 prerolls and 2 midrolls + banners they get plenty enough money to make things work. Google has the most aggressive VASTs of the market. They are everywhere, called multiple times per pages.
Spare us your tears.
Besides, no significant competition? Is that a joke?
If you think it’s sustainable you can create a new service yourself, no one is stopping you. I’ve done cost estimations for projects with 1M+ customers and the margins are so tight we’ve killed at least a dozen services despite pouring months or years of effort into their designs and prototypes. It’s easy for you to complain about freebies from your couch but the reality is that if someone could make a better service than YouTube, they already would have. “Spare is your tears” lol.
Question that pertains to general hosting at those scales. In your opinion what costs more, distributing a piece of content that will get 1M views, or 1000 pieces of content that will get 1000 each? I know the math wont add up, but I dont know where the cost bottleneck is. Is hosting something even though it isnt used or that viral spike in views that kills attempts to make a smaller service like this?
no significant competition? Is that a joke?
For the type of service they are (hosting random one-off videos and series that anyone can load and optionally kicking back a portion to the content creators) - who are they competing against? If you go on the street and ask random people to name 3 streaming services that do that, you’ll likely get YouTube, “ummm”, and “I dunno”
If you ask a 40+ year old maybe…
Content creators are flying away to TikTok or Snapchat. Gamers are on Twitch and Discord etc.
My nephew is 11 yo and has never watched content on YT.
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Sounds like the public library system should host the peoples videos as a service, not for profit.
Unfortunately, YouTube exists because content creators make money out of the ads.
But free content video is possible with a peer to peer protocol. The content creator get the responsibility to keep the seed alive. The more popular, the more it gets shared, the more it’s available.
But content creators don’t work for free, and public libraries don’t have the resources to store all the dumb content people deem necessary to make.
Reminder: give money to Wikipedia. This thing is a miracle.
Yep. Hence why we need to remake the internet.
Good luck with that :thumbsup:
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I refused to use adblock for years. Not because I thought Youtube needed MORE money, but because I did realize that a business ultimately only continues operating as long as the business model is sustainable. I endured, through occasional ads, ads at the bottom, then through ads every time a video was watched, then ads in the middle of videos, and even two ads before every video.
But three unskippable ads was where I drew the fucking line. Now I use adblock for Youtube and Youtube only.
I like to watch video game speedruns. I especially enjoy the really long, challenging ones. Watching a 2 hour video on YouTube without an ad block is basically impossible at this point.
That’s nice of you, but it appears that the ad-supported business model doesn’t work. It just results in enshittification and surveillance.
“We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that it can happen is if it’s financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them.”
No one will ever pay for services like YouTube. Thus ads is the only way.
I appreciate this point of view but I refuse to have my limited time and energy wasted as a form of “payment”. Ads degrade the user experience of everything they touch and corporations don’t limit their ad use to “continue operations”, they push it as far as possible to suck as much money out of the product as they can.
The only “TV” I watch is hockey and it’s depressing watching the product get degraded year after year as they continue to shove as much advertising down our throats as possible in order to make more money. Fuck ads.
Similar story here, except I just stopped using YouTube.
Lemmy’s piping bots help with that.
Capitalists don’t care about making quality products/services.
They care about squeezing more profit out of you as time goes on.
Bad capitalists, yes. The trend of “maximize profit this quarter at the expense of everything else” is a recent (meaning a few decades old) idea.
Once upon a time the boards of publicly traded companies could think long term and sacrifice short term gains without getting fired by shareholders. When a large firm prioritizes long term success efficiency still matters but so do things like building reputation through quality and retaining talent - the things sorely missing from publicly traded firms today.
The commodification of securities has been one of the most ruinous trends in human history.
There are only bad capitalists now, the good ones have been eaten.
I’m not here to defend the soulless multi-million dollar corporation, but we don’t actually know how much money it costs for youtube to stay up. The scale they are operating on is immense, I wouldn’t be surprised, if they were still making a loss with 10 midroll ads.
They almost certainly are running at a loss. Same as Twitch, their parent companies are generally okay with it, because they also serve as pretty solid tech demos for other services they offer (YouTube runs on Google Cloud Platform, Twitch runs on Amazon Web Services), and that pays off indirectly.
Moreover, their parent companies can use them as free advertising. Google about to launch a new phone? Guess what you’re gonna see ads for!
I think the term for this is “loss leader”
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So they could either be making money in ways they are not proud of, or there is nothing to be (not) proud of in the first place.
Number of ads does not necessarily scale linearly to amount of income. If the ads alienate viewers, then they become worth less. I know I personally watch less when they started sometimes subjecting me to 30 seconds of unskippable ads to watch a 90 second video. Recently, I hit “skip ad” and it took me to another ad, which made me less likely. The other day whole watching a video someone told me to watch, I paused to look at some text. After a few moments it started rolling an ad while I was trying to read the text. The more this happens, the less likely I am to watch. Wild be interesting to know statistics on viewership versus more obnoxious ad behavior, but there’s likely at least some decline in per ad avenue versus number of ads crammed in the face of viewers.
It’s a fair point. The honest answer might be that with current technology there is simply no way to make Youtube profitable. If Google can’t pull this off I don’t think anyone can. In which case we will see a slow, but profitable death for Youtube as they make increasingly user-hostile moves, like raising prices, increasing ads, and eventually becoming increasing aggressive about deleting rarely watched videos. This will kill their user base over time of course, but they are still sitting on a massive treasure trove of content. The one thing in their favor is that storing and transmitting data gets cheaper every year. Maybe that’s what they’re holding out for.
Youtubes video platform’s annual ad revenues amounted to 31.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2023.
Costs are $2.0 billion a year for hosting fees, if you were to run YouTube on AWS.
Take off creators fees and you are still in the black.
Was YouTube ever profitable?
I actually had trouble finding that out (although I only looked for like, 15 minutes). It’s apparently difficult to determine according to some tech websites. I do have this chart that says since 2017 YouTube ad revenue has been 7-11% of Google’s global revenue but I don’t know if that = profit. Decided to meme anyways because I have ads blocked on PC but still see them on my phone.
Youtube has always claimed that it doesn’t turn a profit but I don’t believe them. My reasoning is that if the server costs are more than the revenue today, then they’re going to be worse tomorrow. A gorillian gigabytes of data are uploaded to that thing every nanosecond. A company can’t get exponentially less profitable every second and still survive. And what else is there to prop it up? Google ad results? No way is Youtube not profitable. They’re saying that to avoid tax.
get firefox with ublock origin. block that garbage on mobile too.
Given the tech turnover rate at google (the rate at which they kill products) the answer is most probably yes.
Fuck YT, but bad meme. YouTube has never been profitable
I doubt that. Paper losses are not an indicator of profitability.
It’s not hard to look up the earnings
Ads never bothered me on YouTube.
They’re bothering me enough now that I’m going with an android phone after more than a decade on iPhones just so I can get back to YouTube the way it used to be with a decent ad blocker (better than it used to be actually).
I can’t fucking stand it, and again, it didn’t bother me before.
Want to show someone a short clip? Nah. Gotta skip two fucking ads first while you stand there looking stupid and waiting.
I’m fucking done.
The irony of a Google product pissing you off so you switch from iOS to Android
All to get those sweet sweet modified APKs
So pissed at YouTube (Google) you’re switching to Android (…)? Was this their master plan all along?
I’m going to go with a degoogled version of the OS (LineageOS is my current plan).
The only way I’ll back out is if Apple allows an ad blocker that will cover any app I’m using. I’m currently paying for one that only works on Safari and YouTube videos take a thousand years to load up.
Now if a legit version of Firefox makes its way to iPhone in the US with ublock, I’ll be happy with that.
The reason YouTube makes the ads so unbearably obnoxious is they want people to pay for premium. That’s all they’re doing is annoying people until they pay. I’ve been paying for premium since the beginning, I know it’s awful, but at least I have never seen any ads.
Until they pull a Microsoft and start throwing ads into the paid model as well.
Or like all the other streaming platforms that you paid a subscription for to not see ads, but believe it or not you now have ads.
yeah I havent experienced it myself with YouTube, but I have heard some people say they pay for premium and they’ve started getting ads 😡 YouTube is a huge part of my life and I would be livid if this happened and I don’t know what I would do because I don’t know how I could live without YT I would love to say that I would abandon YouTube if they pulled this shit on me, but I just can’t even imagine my life without YouTube. I don’t pay for any other service, no Hulu, no Disney Plus, no HBO blah blah whatever the heck other people are paying for. when I’m craving watching something, I always go to YouTube. And I have several YouTube channels too, so YT is an integral part of my life 😭
Yeah premium makes 15 dollars per month. Ads for an average viewer makes dozens of cents per month.
I use Firefox with ublock origin and I don’t any ads either.
yeah I admire all of you who refuse to use the YouTube app and you watch YouTube through a browser, but in my opinion watching YouTube through a browser is clunky and tedious.
ReVanced, NewPipe, SmartTube. You’re correct that their mobile browser experience sucks.
I have ad free YouTube on the YouTube app on Android. Just takes modding the app through a simple guide. Only works on Android though, not iOS IIRC. The tool is Revanced.
Also for Android Smart TVs, check out the TV app called SmartTube Next.
You realize people watch youtube on computers not just phones right?
youtube prem + youtube music family plan with 6 total users at $22.99 is pretty reasonable.
I remember when YouTube was free, and ad-free. I’ve been posting videos to YouTube since 2005. Then a few years later they put a price on it, “Premium” became $9 a month. Something something Pepperidge Farm remembers
And I was grandfathered in at that price even after they raised their prices for everyone else, but then for some reason I got upset and I canceled YouTube but then I couldn’t live without it so I subscribed again and they put me back in at the regular price with all the new people 😡
I had the same deal, my comment is in regard to the family plan, which allocates 6 total accounts. I thought $3.83 per person a month was reasonable for the hd music alone, youtube prem was just a plus, but based on other comments I’m apparently a dipshit. 🤷
Per year?
Per month.
That’s not good at all.
My father in law uses the built in YouTube app on the TV. There were 3 ads that played. The first one was 15 minutes. The second one was also around 15 minutes. The third one was an hour. One fucking hour for a 5 minutes video.
It always makes me mad when somebody put a playlist on YouTube and out of nowhere a bad song starts playing because it’s an ad.
That’s exactly what he was listening to. I think it was a beetles playlist and out of nowhere an ad. I skipped and the next was another 15. Skip again and it’s an hour.
Yes fucking YouTube. When I skip a video, my intent is to see a longer ad.
Is there a blocker I can use on the android YouTube app? I put videos when I’m doing dishes, and in the last year the ads have gotten so long that if you don’t skip em or can’t (cause you’re hands are wet) they go on for 10 minutes or more. The worst are the ads that end, but don’t leave your screen until you physically press skip.
YouTube revanced gives me ad blocking with sponsor block included
NewPipe
If you have a rooted phone and Magisk there is a module that essentially turns the stock YouTube app into the Premium version without adds and background play enabled.
Wow really? What’s it called?
Small correction it’s technically an LSposed/Exposed module, but everything I said previously still applies.
Brave or Vanced or Firefox with uBlock origin
The only reason Brave needs crypto at all is so the CEO can keep donating money against gay marriage without getting caught.
I don’t think the Brave CEO cares about getting caught
He cared when he was ousted from Mozilla for it.
Vanced is dead. Use revanced or revancify(requires terminal).
Check out “ReVanced” YouTube.
It takes set up and maintenance but it is well worth the effort as you get all YouTube premium features, latest YouTube app updates, and other enhancements.
Direct link to GitHub- https://github.com/ReVanced
EDIT:
Removed the incorrect “.net” Link as mentioned below.
This is not their official website. Never download revanced from anywhere other than their GitHub repository or https://revanced.app
Yea dude so many people go to that .net site i don’t know whether it’s legit. But i search GitHub and open the link provided in the side bar
Thank you! I quickly (and carelessly) searched and pasted the link. Thank you for the correction.
Objectively wrong.
YouTube could not be profitable showing one quick ad per video, especially if it’s longer content.
Im of the firm belief that youtube should make creators pay for storage of their videos.
Free teir for short videos, no monetization, YT places ads. Paid teir for longer form videos and monetization. This would ensure that long form videos should ideally be profitable for creators, or companies uploading their training videos etc pay a nominal fee for their storage.
This is the fairest way to keep youtube in the green.
Yeah it’s very clear to me the top creators make far too much money and I agree that business model bears fruit.
However, the cost of YouTube isn’t the storage, it’s serving views of the videos. That payment scheme you’ve suggested doesn’t scale well with number of views of single videos, that’s why they chose to increase income per view and not per video.
this process will cause most smaller creators to just leave the platform, it’s already super difficult to to get established, this would essentially force them to operate at a loss until they can get a foothold which concidering a lot of the time it can take months to years to get established? I can’t see that system being sustainable either.
I know this is a controversial opinion, but I dont think youtube should be a place where small creators should expect to make money from direct monetization. That model is what brought youtube to the state its in. Selling patron, merch, or driving traffic to their own website for services, yes. Direct monetization of ads on youtube, no.
Passively?? Video streaming is anything but passive income.
As someone that has used ad blockers for just about as long as I have been able to, I would like to think that this is true. However, I’m not entirely sure that it is. I’ve heard that a surprising percentage of people just don’t even know that ad blockers exist. If that’s the case then they may be very well aware of what is happening. (Using made up numbers for the sake of argument since I don’t have real numbers) Like if only 5% of users use ad blockers and doubling the number of ads they show only brings that to 10% then it is certainly worth it financially. I doubt that if you were to graph that curve it would be linear - there is certainly a point where you inundate users with so many ads that even non-technical people will start learning about ad blockers. Regardless of what the real numbers are, I would be very surprised if they are making decisions this big without at least being aware of what those numbers might be. And if they can make a small amount of money indefinitely but they have evidence to suggest that they can make even more money also indefinitely then the financial motivation is obvious. Not all infinities are the same size.
Who cares about a privately owned platform? It was never ours.
Spending time there was always going to be a waste of time. Every business wants to grow like a cancer to consume us all. The next service that you use will want the same if you use another private platform.
You should consider using something that is open source and self hosted. Peertube right? Anyone got other recommendations?
Ads in, before, and after videos suck.
But wouldn’t be an ad, which is displayed during a paused video one of the least annoying? Because, when I pause a video, I’m usually doing something else (bathroom break for instance, or, when staying at the computer, doing something in another browser tab or in a different program) and I’m absent from the video. Also, I can mute sound easily (one push of a key on the keyboard - which is a workflow that has to be executed then in addition to simply pausing the video and therefore would be annoying).
Or did I miss anything else crucial? Do you pause videos and stare at the paused video without doing anything else?
Anyway, this probably won’t be a problem if you use an ad blocker. Or if you download the video.
