Even if YouTube could afford to do this, nobody else could, which would lock us into an EU-sanctioned YouTube monopoly...
If YouTube is actually lobbying against this both in public and in private, then I would personally consider that extremely strong evidence this is really bad. However, I have no inside info on their private position.
Profitability and growth aren't dependent on market dominance, even in tech.
Vimeo aims for $100mil this year: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iac-interactive-vimeo/iac...
YouTube Could be a $15 billion business this year: https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/02/18/youtube-could-be-a...
Even in your article it talks about how Youtube isn't exactly profitable, and is dragging down Google's average CPC for the business.
"The market" is a statement about demand, not supply. The market can still shrink if the legislation goes through, because the legislation can have secondary effects that cause people to be less interested in consuming content on a tube-style platform.
I think you'd be surprised at the reach of educational resources like Khan Academy and MIT's Open Courseware. These things aren't 'necessities' only if you don't consider it important to educate yourself.
Or in this case, 80% of a large market more than 100% of a small one.
If the proposed law actually is too expensive for them, I could see them attempting to weaken it to a sweet spot where it's affordable for them, but expensive enough to still keep others out of the market.
If anything, these companies probably welcomed these regulations and now have more power over politicians who have used up much political capital in getting this done. It's unlikely that any corrective actions will be taken anytime soon.
Oh, they'll find things. There are already active formal investigations by GDPR authorities in various countries against Twitter, Facebook, and Google. The companies do like GDPR, as the fines will be nothing more than a small tax on their massive revenue. It's a win for both the companies and the politicians: the companies get a monopoly in exchange for a small tax in the form of fines, revenue hungry EU nations get multi-billion dollar windfalls, and EU politicians get to look like defenders of the people who will be tough on US companies. Everybody wins, except for would-be competitors and the consumers that don't get any choices about the services they use.
But of course, most adtech services do make use of a multitude of private data for profit, and that's why they are having a hard time.
The company I work for (Teachable) is a specialized site builder for course content. We make all of our revenue from people either paying us directly for a plan, or transaction fees on people buying from our customers, no ads or data selling. Nevertheless, complying with GDPR still took well over a month of some of our best engineers time. Even if you don't sell data, the odds you had a plan prior to GPDR for how to handle right to be forgotten - how do you delete PII (which is defined broadly, including ip addresses) from db backups without ruining their integrity? If you use something with an immutable log, like Kafka, how do you remove the data there? Etc, etc
1 - google is the only company (bing to a much much lesser extent) with access to primary search data. If you believe that the original pagerank algorithm is too easy to fool and that it has been massively deprioritized in favor of gathering intent data created by user actions on google, this makes them a natural monopoly. Any other attempt to gather the data to make intent targeting work will be hindered by the lack of consumer touch points.
2 - see consumer touch points above -- very few companies have them. Eg the new eprivacy law (depending on which draft -- there are conflicts between Council / Commission / Parliament), will be a virtual monopoly guarantee for FB / Google / yahoo. One of the features is that company 1 can't ask for consent on behalf of company 2, so, again, only companies with an end-user touch point can get legitimate consent. Thus all 3rd party adtech dies. This seems in direct conflict with pro-competition rules in the EU.
3 - Adsense also becomes much harder to compete against. Google does intent extraction -- buttressed by the data from search -- better than anyone else. You can, of course, attempt to compete algorithmically, but you lack the data.
4 - GA allows to extract behavior post click from within the site. No one else has this. You don't even really need personal data for this to be amazingly useful; merely aggregate is very powerful.
Meanwhile, all other marketing companies are further blocked from interacting with users because of the lack of consent and direct relationships. This makes the existing monopolies even stronger, and makes it much harder for newer companies to even attempt to compete.
They, YouTube, keep mentioning science videos and such but I can't work out what they mean, why would that be any more blocked than cat videos, or videos of people falling over, or whatever else YouTube is hosting -- is quality content somehow more at risk or is that just YouTube's attempt to spin/market their opposition?
This means you not only need a ContentID system in the first place, you also need to be ready to handle the financial & legal consequences of inevitably not being perfect.
They mean then they can't afford the system if their anticipated penalties are imposed && if they fail to catch unlicensed works && are subsequently sued successfully for large amounts && can't recover those costs from the uploader.
How many microseconds would it be after such a regulation passed that media mega corps would pull the trigger and kill the goose-that-laid-the-golden-eggs.
>you not only need a ContentID system //
How does the Directive specify that, I'm afraid I haven't read it yet.
> (a) it demonstrates that it has made best efforts to prevent the availability of specific works or other subject matter by implementing effective and proportionate measures, in accordance with paragraph 5, to prevent the availability on its services of the specific works or other subject matter identified by rightholders and for which the rightholders have provided the service with relevant and necessary information for the application of these measures;
So basically if the rightsholders can convince the courts that they could have done more to proactively prevent copyright infringement, they're liable.
(Curious. Really.)
A guaranteed adserv on every CDN delivery (and again over a certain number of minutes) is more than the content and serve cost. CPMs for video are net 3$, at least. I don't know who's doing the math, but a link would be interesting with someone demonstrating how they are upside down.
Netflix might serve more gigabytes to users, but netflix's content library is tiny in comparison, so edge caches have a near 100% hit rate keeping infrastructure costs a fraction of youtube's costs.
Edit--Found this quote from an article[0] written in 2013, so I'm sure it's much larger now. Also, the Open Connect Appliances[1] have about 240TB capacity each, but they just tail the current popular content.
The master Neflix catalog takes up about 3.14 petabytes of cloud storage space, which is converted and compressed down to about 2.75 petabytes, consisting of 100 different versions suitable for watching on more than 1000 different devices.
[0] https://gizmodo.com/how-netflix-makes-3-14-petabytes-of-vide...
Only if you assume YouTube's business model is the only feasible one. You could have a video hosting service that operates like a traditional web-host, letting you pay a standard rate or fee to host and list your content rather than relying on ad revenue and algorithmic curation.
Twitch has an ad driven model where the content creators get paid based on subscription counts rather than data harvesting. (Though I wouldn't be surprised if there was a big data harvesting component as well).
Just a note though, the video example on the homepage comparing YouTube with SmartVideo (SpaceX launch). I can see compression artifacts on the Smart Video. If I'm honest, that really put me off which obviously isn't your intention.
So wouldn't Twitch be liable for that content under this proposed copyright thing?
With the proposed law, the right holders can sue Twitch for hosting that video, unless Twitch ensured they have permission from said right holders to host that video.
I get that it would massively reduce the 'new content stream' but for their commercial clients things wouldn't change all that much. It would also eliminate unlawful video completely since everything would be pre-screened.