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Comment by thefounder | Hacker News Reader

People ahould not put too much trust in youtube-like companies. If you have a youtube career you don't really have a real career/job. You just found a way to make easy bucks. Youtube is not the "internet" of videos. You can have your own website

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That's not exactly right. First you would need to know how to use an ad system, probably DFP and maybe DFP Premium if you're expecting a high audience, and probably an organisation to book and handle all those ads to maximise your income. Your website also needs the infrastructure to be able to deliver your content to your audience. That can be hard for a non-technical person, hard and expensive.

So, you have a website with your videos, you have proper advertising on your videos, maybe a subscription system setup. What next? Where do you get your audience?

Today the universal truth is that you get your audience on Youtube, and to some extent Vimeo. You just lost practically 100% of potential customers.

It’s absurdly expensive to live in many parts of the US, and incomes in those same places can be insultingly low.

You can depend desperately on extra income even if you have a job (or two). “Real career/job” is just not something many people can count on in the US, and hasn’t been for a long time. I strongly recommend that you learn more about this. People are really, really hurting right now, no matter how many millionnaires there are.

It goes both ways, YouTube willingly starts business agreements with these people and makes money off their content.

You can't act shocked and surprised if a mentally ill person snaps when you've been happily profit sharing that mentally ill persons content and then change the deal.

YouTube/Google likes to think these relationships are all one way and not think about the consequences of their choices and algorithms on peoples lives. I'm actually surprised it took this long for this to happen, it was a morbid inevitability in my eyes.

If YouTube/Google can't understand when money is involved actions have consequences then maybe the whole partner program should be scrapped.

To some degree, it is though. YouTube has a quasi-monopoly on the promotion and discovery of video content, which is far more important than the distribution (which you're correct, is relatively cheap and straightforward)

If a business capriciously de-indexed from Google search, I think there'd be plenty of room for criticism of Google. I don't think there's a terribly large difference here. It might not rise to the level of illegality, and it certainly doesn't justify shooting employees, but I do think it's a predictable result.

Completely fails to understand network effects and the history of internet business (indeed, big box stores preceding internet business).

Please do not suggest 'you can make your own website' is an answer to issues around the management of massive, subsidized content-aggregation platforms. A thing like YouTube cuts off the air supply of competitors, especially when it's run at a loss, and individual web hosts are not remotely comparable.

YouTube has dedicated caching hardware installed at ISPs, for example. How do plan to compete with that kind of infrastructure?

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