As it has been framed before, it’s like the lemonade stand put all the other stands out of business by handing out free lemonade.
who all got lemonade delivered for free by a million lemonade aficionados who wanted to share their lemonade with the world, for which YouTube showed the lemonade drinkers ads while pickpocketing all the documents in their wallet and copying them, also throwing buckets of lemonade in the trash because it wasn't the officially approved taste of lemonade, some other lemonade claimed there was a hint of taste that "copied" theirs, or for no stated reason at all, just dumped it, sorry, "terms and conditions", which.. we'll never tell you.
See the Vid.me rise and fall illustrates this perfectly. Their closing letter to users even says in so many words "Ya'll don't want to pay, so how can we stay open?"
It's easy to wonder why. The status quo at the time had been that user-submitted video content (YouTube) is free. It was only free because Alphabet had their losses from YouTube subsidized by their profits from Google. Maybe not for all, but for many this is an anti-trust issue.
Also, using money from one business to keep another business alive is not a monopolistic practice. Plenty of tech companies have had the technical and monetary firepower to run a youtube competitor. But you just have to read a few threads on the internet from anytime in the last decade talking about youtube and monetization to see why no one wanted to jump in. This thread included.
Sorry but this take is pretty wild to me. I can understand that there is a paid option but YouTube is free today given that I can currently watch a video after watching a couple ads without paying any money.
> Also, using money from one business to keep another business alive is not a monopolistic practice.
I'm not sure this is true in theory but, regardless, to each their own. This practice of keeping competitors down by subsidizing business losses with profits from another business, only to try to change the status quo for their customers, seems pretty shitty from where I'm standing.
It's been a long time since youtube was free.
Watching ads is what covers the cost of watching a video. It's no secret that running a site like youtube is extremely expensive.
> No one else wants to run a lemonade stand because they can see customers do not want to pay for lemondade.
Of course nobody wanted to pay with ad view time because youtube didn't require that. In practice, one could watch a youtube video without watching any ads and the practice was allowed because it kept competitors down.
> Watching ads is what covers the cost of watching a video. It's no secret that running a site like youtube is extremely expensive.
This is exactly correct, and it's why this practice was so effective. Nobody wants to pay with their time and youtube didn't force them. Why is someone going to go to Vid.me where they will be disallowed from blocking ads? The only reason it wasn't necessary for youtube to show the ads is that they had their losses subsidized by google's profits.
Going back to what you initially wrote:
> No one else wants to run a lemonade stand because they can see customers do not want to pay for lemondade.
Because there was a lemonade stand backed by the profits of one of the most profitable companies in history handing out free lemonade, no questions asked. Yeah, nobody else wanted to pay for something that was free in practice, even in the context of time spent watching an ad.
It's not free. You payment is that you watch the ads.
Others are just so much worse or charge for storage on the creator side... but they don't have ads.
Today you can consume a lot of creator video content straight in platforms like Patreon... but you have to actually pony up some cash for that.
Let's add another step before this:
Understand that people are visiting the store because the soda is free in practice and allow the practice to continue until other stores don't see any business because they can't afford to offer free soda.
Then they complain about other convenience stores being put out of business.
If we're going to start calling people entitled, my eyes are still on Google.
My point is that people who were never intent on paying businesses for their services never cared about the sustainability of those businesses in the first place and are just using it to rationalize their anger. This sort of moral consistency matters with civil law where good and bad aren't trivially obvious.
Society collectively agrees that it's good for supermarkets to offer loss leader rotisserie chickens. An argument can be made that it's anticompetitive because it basically put Boston Market out of business, but I wouldn't be as receptive if that came from someone who was caught stealing supermarket rotisserie chickens.