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Comment by animal_spirits | Hacker News Reader

In the end we will all lose, in my opinion. Google will start to charge more for access to YouTube, along with increasing ads. They will begin to pay creators less due to the increased cost in serving the ads. We will see a decline in the quality and quantity of high production video education.

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If we get independence in ad space, we may see publications flourish again, which is a net win. I would prefer a local newspaper be profitable than have youtube creators be paid more.

It's difficult to imagine margins in advertising and app store management would remain as high as they are when opened to competition.

The primary reason Google has fought so hard is because it knows, even if left whole, its margins would drastically shrink once it has to compete on price.

They won't be as high, but the profit will be more dispersed.

The economics of youtube being what they are now, most content is already extremely low quality. The quality of YouTube content was much higher when it wasn't a viable platform for monetization

I'm sorry but that's just abundantly wrong. There are whole educational companies built on top of YouTube, Complexly for example. We also have all kinds of university courses recorded and publicly available for free.

I didn't say all content

Google will charge more for access to YouTube, which makes competitors like Nebula more appealing.

The problem here is Nebula doesn't have to do any more innovation to attract customers. There are two ways to compete; sell the same product for a better price, or sell a better product for the same price. You can sell the same product for a better price by innovating on technology/business, but when we artificially increase the cost of Google's product, it makes competitors artificially cheaper. The competitors don't need to actually do anything better than Google and they win out at the expense of the consumer.

Nebula is not a competitor to YouTube for creators, only for consumers. A true competitor to YouTube needs to allow anyone to upload videos.

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