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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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The insinuation that website users somehow have a responsibility to watch ads so that the website's 3rd party content creators can make money reads like a case of Stockholm Syndrome. YouTube are the ones paying the creators, not me, and can change the terms by which they calculate creator payments at any time. If YT decides that now, ads viewed during the hours of 7pm to 10pm result in higher creator payments, where is my role in that? Am I now obligated to prefer viewing ads during that time?
Plenty of content is uploaded to YT by people who don't and never will get creator payments. Do I have to watch those ads?
My contract with YT is that I control what data is downloaded by and presented on my PC, not them. That Silicon Valley has decided that everything is free, but with ads, is unfortunate. If they're unable to fund their business or their content if I use an ad blocker, then it seems to me like they're pretty fucking bad at business.
Are you new to the internet? Every website, every single one of them, costs money to maintain and keep running. If you don't pay to keep it online, someone else has to. Ads are a way for everyone to contribute a super small amount to keep the thing you're on, online. When one or two people block them, it's not a big issue. When most people do, it becomes one.
How do you pay to keep the servers up when most users are free booting? What do you do about high traffic when most of it isn't paying for the servers you need to keep it running smoothly?
It's the fucking apex of entitlement to think you should be able to slink through every website without paying a cent either through your data, your attention, or your wallet. You're on lemmy, you should have a basic understanding of how this shit works and it baffles me you don't. The instance you're using is up because of volunteers, paying the electric bill and for the hardware so you can type shit this stupid. Maybe we're just finally getting normies with how big the site is growing. Maybe this is a good thing. I take it back, welcome to the internet.
In 2022 Google grossed around $280 billion, and only around 10% of that from Youtube. Before tax they profited around $73 billion, and after tax around $60 billion. They’re doing fine selling ads.
And we paid all of that $280 billion, even those of us with adblockers, because companies charge us more to cover their marketing costs. I pay for google every time I pull out my credit card.
I don’t feel like watching ads to convince even more companies to pay google to advertise to me and buy my data. They’re all making enough money already, and every year they spend less of it on wages or tax for society to function. Their money goes to stock buybacks, payouts to their major shareholders, executive bonuses, and think tanks to push policies and social trends that hurt all of us.
Revenue is not profit. Profit is what you have after expenses. So let's do a quick logic exercise. $13 billion after taxes, minus bandwidth costs worldwide, minus hundreds of server centers worldwide, minus tens of thousands of TB storage per server, minus redundant storage just in case a server blows, minus what they pay creators, minus what they pay employees.
Boy howdy, not so sure about this one. Especially when we know in 2015 they lost 470 million from operating the platform. They took losses from keeping Youtube alive. Hmmm. Seems like a narrow fuckin margin if that's possible. Haven't heard of Netflix losing money from a year of keeping their platform up.
"I don't feel like watching ads" so buy premium. "I pay for google every time I pull out my credit card" that.. what? "They're making enough money" 470 million in losses. "They own the entire fucking planet" They aren't even one of the five companies that own everything. You're thinking Blackrock. "Every year they pay lower wages" That's every corporation. Yes, eat the rich. This is not eating the rich. We do not get higher wages from you using adblocker.
Also, when I said “they own the entire fucking planet” in my original unedited comment — which I edited for tone before I saw your near-immediate response — I was referring both google and the companies that advertise through google, which is why I said “they all make enough money already.” All is plural. Google sells enough ads, and their client companies buy enough ads.
Also, Blackrock is an asset management company that handles other people’s money. Google earns 16 times more revenue than them.
Of Google, not YouTube. I said YouTube took losses and actually costs Google money, which it does. Yes, YouTube is part of Google just as Google is part of Alphabet but what I'm explaining is that YouTube, isolated on its own, does not make money. Hence the ads, premium subscription, etc.
Y.. Yes. So does shipping the product to retail stores and depending on the product, the continued research into said product or the manufacturing of it. All expenses are calculated and a price is set above that to create a margin but what I don't understand is your point. The only difference is that as a creator on YouTube, you get a cut of that advertisement budget from companies you might not personally buy from and put it towards products you do. What baffles me is that I'm having to break down economic concepts that I assumed were pretty transparent.
Not gonna lie, I've missed the advertisements of Google since I was pretty sure everyone was aware of them. They're synonymous with searching something on the internet. They kinda won on the advertisement front, like band-aid and kleenex. They make their money on pushing ads but if everyone blocks ads, they don't get paid. Hence why they made it harder to do on Chrome and why they're cracking down on it on YouTube. Their entire business model (or large majority of it) is ads. Adblocker is a direct obstacle to their existence. What is your proposed alternative for them to make money if not ads?
They're an investment company that have purchased trillions of dollars in shares of some of the most massive companies you or I are aware of. Google, Amazon, Telsa, all of them. The more shares they own, the more direct legal power they have over the company. So just like Alphabet owns Google, a company like Blackrock can own Alphabet by direct investments. They have over 52 million shares of Telsa valued at $220 each or about 5% of the company. These are the kind people conspiracy theories are made about and are the ones we should be taxing into oblivion for those bigger wages. Not YouTube.
That's my whole point! Google can afford it. Even if YouTube showed zero ads and earned zero revenue Google could afford it.
If I want to support a small creator, I donate. I don't feel bad about hurting the bottom line of one of the highest-earning companies in the world.
Even if YouTube runs at a deficit, it's probably worthwhile for Google to control the main video hosting hub on the internet and keep competition out of the game.
Spending on shipping or manufacturing is a lot less discretionary than spending on advertising. You have broad leeway to advertise less or more, and past a certain point the main requirement is that you advertise as well as your competition. If Google shows fewer ads across the board, even half as many ads, you're still in business.
If you want to talk real life, they're already raking in $60 billion a year in profit so I see no need for an alternative. If you want to talk hypotheticals, I think central back-end infrastructure like Google's servers — and the data we put on them — should be publicly owned, with an open-source marketplace of front-end services we can use to access it. We should be able to browse YouTube with whatever site interfaces and suggestion algorithms we find most useful, not the ones most profitable to Google.
Blackrock's clients own 5% of Tesla.
Blackrock dies tomorrow if they do anything other than what their clients expect of them. The sole purpose of Blackrock is to invest rich people's money and maximize returns for them while managing risk. They have some leeway in how they do this, but only up to a point. They're very good at what they do but they are ultimately replaceable.
Yes but if you had a store in a chain that wasn't turning a profit and constantly kept costing you money with no solutions in sight, you'd eventually shut it down and call it a day without some other reason. I think right now the only thing keeping YouTube alive is the level of unmitigated backlash they'd get for dumping it. Sure, they control the main video hosting platform on the internet but what are they able to do with that? Hold onto it and talk about it at parties? Not every small creator has extra ways to donate to them, not every creator rises to the level of whipping your wallet out, but should still support them no matter how miniscule it is.
My brother, that is not an answer. Services have costs, costs need to be mitigated with revenue, things worth doing usually turn a profit. I'm asking you for an alternative knowing one doesn't exist or the multi-billion dollar company would have already tried it. They're limited to advertisements, selling your data to brokers, or asking for a subscription. We've got adblockers, tracker blockers, and the content is still free to access without a subscription (for now). Freely using a service that isn't free is not now nor will ever be sustainable,
Hahaha.. to own them we'd have to pay for them. Things like Lemmy exist because people volunteer to accept the cost of hosting the instances. A company built to earn money is not going to do that. The broader problem is capitalism, sure, but that's a different topic. Youtube does, and in my opinion (without societal changes), should try to make a profit on what they bought, developed, and now host. Their splits with creators are fair and I worry they'll become less so as their options become fewer.
Yes but those investments are in Blackrock's name, giving them legal control. Yes, they can lose their clients if they fuck up and depending on how, be liable for returning some or all of that money, but no matter how you look at it they still have that control. There are very few of us who are truly beyond being replaced.
If someone else has the main video site on the internet, that is a beachhead for building a larger platform and challenging Google as a whole.
We're already fucking paying for them! I've made this point twice now.
I'm out of patience
I gave you both revenue and profit. Their revenue was $280 billion, not $73 billion. $73 billion was their profit before tax, and $60 billion was profit after tax. $13 billion, the difference, was their income tax.
According to the Credit Suisse report, which also massively contradicted Google’s own earnings reports, lowballing YouTube’s revenue by a factor of ten iirc.
Advertising costs money. To cover that cost, companies charge us more for their goods and services. I don’t know what is baffling to you about this.
Come on man, I've been on the internet since the beginning. Back in the day I paid $10 to join the Something Awful forums. We used to host our own game servers, back when games would let you. We rented our own Ventrilo server for over a decade.
There are ways to pay for things besides making the user experience godawful.
Then you've been there. You've seen what I've seen. The banner ads, the pop-ups, the sound-on ads that you can't find because your browser won't tell you what tab it's on. The user experience of just ten years ago was so abhorrent that today, even having the ability to go fully dark on ads is a heaven we take for granted. It comes at a cost to companies that need that revenue.
I'm not throating Youtube for the sake of it, but what are their options? What advertisement company is going to pay decent for a streamlined ad you can ignore? When you 'skip ad' I believe it doesn't even count as a 'served ad' so they pay nothing on those. I'm genuinely asking - what ways are there to pay for the behemoth Youtube has become beyond the methods available?