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Comment by jjice | Hacker News Reader

A bit off topic, but what does YouTube gain from offering private and unlisted videos? It's convenient hosting, but it seems like they don't get nearly the same benefit as from a public video.

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As I understand it, private and unlisted videos are often used as a draft mode for videos that eventually become public. Uploaders want to check everything, make sure all the transcoding is done, etc before flipping a video to public. Additionally, unlisted videos are sometimes used to run ads. This way, the ads can be played on YouTube without being listed on the advertiser's channel.

Not sure what Youtube gains except keeping people in the ecosystem, but Youtubers sometimes offer early access to their Patreon subscribers, which is done by uploading a private video and then changing the video to public after the exclusive period has finished.

I'd imagine keeping people in the ecosystem is plenty reason. Sharing sites live and die by their creators, who are a small fraction of the users. Making life marginally more convenient for them should have disproportionate returns.

I use unlisted and private videos. There's plenty of stuff I only want friends/families to see, but not the whole wide world. So, private or unlisted, then send the URL. It works great. So great, in fact, I can't think of anything better. Do you just not have this use case, or are you aware of a product that does this better?

Jjice asked what the benefit is to YouTube, not the benefit/use cases of users.

I don't think the question is why it's useful to consumers, but rather how does it lead to revenue for YouTube? Do private videos drive substantial direct ad revenue, increase engagement, or similar?

Personally I'd bet on driving general engagement with the platform in some way, but the particular manner is not clear to me.

I bet Google just doesn't want you going to competing video sites and uploading content there instead of YouTube.

Bleagh, I misread the post.

Well in that case the answer is super simple: The same reason Google provides any other free service, whether it be Maps, Gmail, Photos, Search, Hangouts, Meet, Pay, whatever. The more Google services you use and the more time you spend using them, the more you can be monetized.

Well, without private, i would not have uploaded anything to youtube. After a few personal uses, I eventually started using youtube to upload and share content. I assume they want to capture the audience like me.

Also, the versitility of youtube as a tool leads me to buy youtube premium for $10/mo.

Also, the most professional content creators upload private, then schedule the video public at a time that will get the most exposure by the youtube algorithm. They also pre-prepare multiple thumbnails and swap them out for the first few hours of public exposure. it's a calculus.

It's an essential feature for scheduling and organization.

Imagine your business is built on Youtube. You want to be able to test things in your videos internally, and upload them prior to a scheduled release date.

To keep people from going to other video hosts who offer those features. It's a value-add for the platform. It lets you upload videos well in advance of publishing them, or temporarily remove them. You also have to consider the fact viewer numbers are so low for private and unlisted videos they may as well be free to host, aside from the drive space they occupy.

For unlisted videos, I'd say it's an useful feature, for when you want to easily share a video to some people, but not the whole world (especially if they already have a YT account). And for YT, it would allow for creators to continue to use YT instead of having to go looking for another solution.

Offering features that users want attracts users to the platform and in turn generates revenue. Not every feature has to generate revenue directly.

My gut guess is training data for their ML. Do ads run on unlisted/private videos?

They have orders of magnitude more video data than they can use for training that is already public

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