Hacker News Reader

IMO Google just has executive level incentives for cutting waste so someone over at youtube realized they could get a nice juicy bonus if they went after blender for all the subsidized bandwidth they've been using. A marker will be moved, someone will get promoted, and the world will keep spinning.

If Google was really hurting for money they'd curb all the hiring they've been doing.

Is the charging for turn by turn directions also hyperbole? Because I don’t see how that could happen. For one, taking something free and then charging for it generally doesn’t really work. More importantly, though, the free competitors are too sophisticated, so the vast majority would just switch to them.

Not hyperbole. I really do think Google will start charging for that at some point in the next 5 years.

Good luck with that when Apple offer the same thing for free on iOS.

And FLOSS on OsmAnd

I've found that OsmAnd's directions are high quality, but it's UX needs some more TLC. It's something I can use because I found poking around at it somehow enjoyable, but it's not something I can yet recommend to people who aren't peculiar in that sense.

I'm not saying they are perfect, but I installed it on my parents' phone and the learning curve is not that steep. They are perfectly usable by mere muggles.

OsmAnd is being developed at a steady pace, and the UX is being improved.

>Don't hate me for it, but my prediction is that the next lifeline Google will reach for

Lifeline? Google is hardly in a bad financial situation.

I understand that not everyone sees it that way.

For me, it matches up with Google destroying the user value of Google sites (like with the Blender videos in the article), and removing 99% of organic search out of their search engine when their algorithm determines that they might be able to convert the query into some cash, or the line they have crossed repeatedly even after being slapped by the EU not once but twice! to make vendors pay for ranking in the top results of search.

For me, I've been watching their CPC numbers drop for decades (that, in my opinion, is a reasonable proxy for the 'profit margin' on clicks) and I've seen them pay more and more to direct traffic to their sites as their organic traffic has dried up.

I see their business model under siege, their profit margins eroding, their efforts at monetization becoming more and more off putting to the data cows they are trying to milk, and conclude they are in fact dying.

> Google cannot get enough people showing ads on their videos to support people who choose not to show ads.

Or maybe they just don't want to.

That is possible, but I think it unlikely based on the following reasoning, if you are watching a video without an ad on Youtube, when it finishes they have an opportunity to share a bunch of similar videos that you might like, ones that do have ads. If you end up not going to Youtube at all because the ad free video is hosted elsewhere they lose that opportunity to "sell" you on a video with an advert in it.

When I was at Blekko we were analyzing this sort of thing pretty hard. We found that a web page with no ads could point to pages with ads and that the expected rate of return on traffic to the ad free page could be calculated (it was non-zero revenue). I would agree that is only a proxy for browsing behavior as the Youtube example consumes resources for the ad free video as well, but unless YouTube has even worse monetization than the most cynical predictions, I would guess it would be worth it to have the Ad free video surrounded by suggestions.