Slightly OT, but is youtube even usable without an ad blocker?
Occasionally I make the mistake of going to it in a browser without aggressive ad blocking and it's miserable.
Occasionally I make the mistake of going to it in a browser without aggressive ad blocking and it's miserable.
It seems absolutely intuitive to me that if you don't want to see ads on a content enterprise, which are monetizing that content enterprise, you should generally be prepared to pay. Why is that deemed so outrageous with regards to YouTube?
YouTube used to be totally different, also it was free with very unintrusive ads. It's hard to sell people on the current monetization model and a lot of the current practices to get you to pay just antagonize viewers. The content is also not always perceived to be worth your money.
There are also moral issues, like Youtube showing ads on demonitized videos, or on channels that don't qualify for monetization. Meaning not all creators even benefit from YouTube's ads.
But eventually it boils down to user experience. You can block ads and get a massively better experience for free, or pay to have an OK experience (sponsor block isn't included in YouTube premium).
Patreon is OK for some things but you have to be very passionate about what this creator is doing to spend the time (besides money) to follow and consume their content on an additional platform.
I completely and fully respect people who choose to do this, but as a more casual YouTube user who just wants to see a video once in a while from one of my subscribed channels, this is not something I am going to do personally.
To each their own but personally I feel as if ads and sponsor blocking is the best experience you can get at this time, and it doesn't cost you anything. It's a hard deal to beat.
Producer pays for content and profit is derived from distributers that charge for access to the content. If people don't view money is lost.
YouTube is different:
Creators pay to create their own content and are imbursed as they gain views.
YouTube, the distributer in this case, has no skin in the game. They have no overhead, it's all profit.
Perhaps that has something to do with it. It feels somehow like you're paying the middle man for nothing?
But I definitely can see the dystopia in an algorithmic platform seeking content hegemony at highest possible profit as opposed to how traditional firms work which is... not too different to me. But I can see a higher ceiling to the gray goo problem in the notoriously willing-to-be-bad-at-customer-service Google.
And in the case of YouTube the answer seem to be: we created and refined some amazing video compression and streaming techniques. Now that that's done we just want to profit indefinitely?
I have just about zero warm and fuzzy feelings towards big corporations. But to claim that Youtube's giant infrastructure its development and maintenance has no cost (zero overhead) is totally wrong.
Well, this requires numbers. Like percentage. Do you have any or it is just an assumption?
Are they unreasonable assumptions in your eyes? May I ask why? They seem reasonable to me.
Anyhow, if we assume storage costs for YouTube are the same as what AWS charges per month (roughly 2 cents), this would mean that it costs YT about $2.4 billion per year just to store those 10 exabytes. I'm assuming that Google can cost its storage at quite a bit cheaper than 2 cents per GB at the immense scale it operates on, so let's halve that. This still means simple storage costs of $1.2 billion per year.
These of course don't include hardware replacement, other capital costs, or the bandwidth costs of all that video being uploaded (and downloaded).
Youtube's revenues for 2019 (so a bit out of date) were nearly 16 billion (2), so while they certainly have lots of costs beyond what I described above, they're also wonderfully profitable it seems.
1 https://www.productmanagementexercises.com/9018/estimate-tot...
2 https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2019Q4_alphabet_earnings...
They also promote your content and find and auction off ads for you. Unless if you're an advertiser, you aren't paying YouTube anything. If you have a problem with it, you're free to host your content on another platform. Keep in mind that that YouTube has to serve the hundreds of millions of videos that get a handful of views, and if you're a monetized YouTuber, it's only fair to be taxed to pay for hosting these videos as everyone starts in that position.