How I tried to compete with YouTube and Google with Livevideo.com
techpost.io
techpost.io
The "final blow" was adsense being cutoff. Their revenue model to compete with google was ... adsense. OK.
Their traffic model was google search. Ok.
Between the lines it sounds like some aggressive SEO, and maybe the network click bounce thing (you click on one video, and then it clicks through to another site etc). Be curious what their content moderation story was.
Seriously, if you are building a google competitor, you probably need to use something other than adsense. And a reminder, adsense is a key revenue generation value add.
The paying of creators definitely anti-competitive. I do think there will be a youtube alternative (small scale) eventually.
The problem is a lot of these "competitors" get filled with absolutely trash / hateful content right away because the first people to use them are the rejects from youtube and the moderation teams are so glad to have someone show up they don't moderate heavily enough. Checkout some of the reddit competitors, total disgusting trash.
That literally happened.
Isn't that the case because mainstream American advertisers don't want anything to do with it? I don't think it's a matter of west coast tech companies being prudes, but rather tech companies appeasing big consumer goods companies that spend billions on advertising, like P&G, J&J, PepsiCo, etc. And those companies are in turn likely appeasing 'middle america' by trying to keep their brands as bland and "family friendly" as possible.
Edit: (And now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure Amazon sells pornography, so that's one of the big tech companies at least that is willing to. And I don't think it's a coincidence that advertising from those big consumer goods companies isn't nearly as important to Amazon... Then again Amazon doesn't allow nudity on twitch, which perhaps could be considered roughly analogous to Google's similar ban of pornography on youtube. Perhaps twitch, as a consumer brand, is subject to the same social pressures from the American public as PepsiCo?)
Although that also describes another beverage, coffee. The difference between the coffee and soft drink industries is interesting though. Two massive corporations dominate almost the entire soft drink industry, with a handful of minor providers (notably Keurig Dr Pepper) and a long tail of much smaller 'boutique', novelty, or regional brands. Comparatively, no coffee company controls as much of the industry as either the Coca Cola Company or PepsiCo do.
(Also, PepsiCo in particular owns a ton of other non-beverage brands. Their subsidiary Frito-Lay produces the brands Lay's, Cheetos, Doritos, etc. PepsiCo is huge for American consumers. To your point though, snack food isn't much better than sugar water.)
You can make the same argument for anything, from butter to guns to video games to literally anything that plugs into the wall and consumes electricity.
Use anything beyond reason and it becomes destructive.
Amazon also runs an entirely separate and special cloud staffed only by US citizens to assist the military in running software that decides who to detain, torture, and possibly murder, so it is unsurprising that they have no corresponding aversion to media depicting less violent interactions.
First, Google isn't a monopoly on search. Popular? yes. Best product? For most use cases, yeah. The fact that the search competition is a click away makes it dominant in the market but not a monopoly or monopsony.
Second, companies are doing fine in this regard by bypassing Google. There are online businesses that exist solely on Amazon and Instagram. Building out a strong social presence is one way to get traffic without relying on Google search. Several major content hosting sites (images/gifs) have taken off in part because of their social saturation.
Is it easy? No, but to GP's point it doesn't sound like they were being strategic in this regard either.
Also I don't care too much about the OP's attitude or lack of strategy, actors don't have to be paragons of virtue in order to be wronged and their situation be an example of a larger problem.
Also, finally, why do you need to dispute the basic facts, no one in their right mind thinks Google isn't a monopoly on search, I think that is more or less an established fact at this point.
I disagree. I have worked at several companies with very successful sales and marketing departments where referrals from google were a noticeable but ultimately unimportant part of the revenue picture. I have also worked at a place that literally lived and died by the grace of a top ranking on google, once we hit the 2nd and then 3rd page, the business was basically dead. This sucked, but it was very nice for the company that replaced us. There is no inherent reason why one company should be entitled to the slot any more than any other (besides the google algorithm that determines ranking).
"A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity" [0]. Bing exists so by definition, you are wrong.
But as site owner, you need traffic. SEO for some search engine built by your brother, used exclusively by your family, wont help you grow your business. You need eyeballs, and more than 90% of those are on google [0]. Pretending this is a perfectly functioning market and websites can just ignore google is... unrealistic.
If Google were to try and charge users for search, everyone would immediately switch to bing which keeps them in check from raising prices like they would if they were the only provider of search. They are in no way a monopoly.
If you substitute "harmfully disproportionate market power" for "monopoly", the points most people are making remain similar.
> educating people such that they can properly discuss a topic using the proper terms
Where did you do that? The only recommendation for a better term I see is "harmfully disproportionate market power", still quite a usable mouthful and made by someone else. Your contribution seems to boil down to "your wrong", and I'm still unsure if this is intended to be about the use of the word or the actual point. Probably both, with one being secretly used to support the other.
Google -> search results (for free) -> website (owner paid for seo/adwords and charge the customer)
Similar thing happened with google maps while they were never a monopoly by your definition because other solutions exist.
For example, Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning:
Any abuse by one or more undertakings of a dominant position within the internal market or in a substantial part of it shall be prohibited as incompatible with the internal market in so far as it may affect trade between Member States. Such abuse may, in particular, consist in: (a) directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices or other unfair trading conditions; (b) limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers;
With Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 we get supreme court cases that states things like: The purpose of the [Sherman] Act is not to protect businesses from the working of the market; it is to protect the public from the failure of the market. The law directs itself not against conduct which is competitive, even severely so, but against conduct which unfairly tends to destroy competition itself.
And in an other supreme court case:
The goal was to prevent restraints of free competition in business and commercial transactions which tended to restrict production, raise prices, or otherwise control the market to the detriment of purchasers or consumers of goods and services, all of which had come to be regarded as a special form of public injury. For that reason the phrase "restraint of trade," which, as will presently appear, had a well understood meaning in common law, was made the means of defining the activities prohibited.
Not a word about monopoly but a lot about behavior which in common speech people call monopoly but actually refer to behavior which is illegal according to anti-trust.
Whether you use anti-trust synonymously with the word monopoly doesn't change the fact that Google will still show Bing and Yandex in the search results.
An example of anti-competitive behavior here is actually from Amazon, when they had de-listed Apple TV and Chromecast from their marketplace for years because it competed with their Fire Stick.
Are you suggesting that we should ignore people misusing economic terms when discussing economic policy? I don't see how ignoring blatantly false facts is better than educating people such that they can properly discuss a topic using the proper terms.
Its actually very common practice and has been for a very long time (way before 2007). Once people get mindshare, they get offers. The top you tubers, twitch streamers, etc have negotiated contracts with terms that are very different that what a standard creator has.
Think of it just like Hollywood. The top talents are sough after and franchises are built around them, the rest have to audition.
The same is true of YouTube if you heavily scrutinize your subscription list.
It’s extremely annoying because there are pockets of communities that remind me of the Internet before the masses trashed it and everything was centralized around a handful of sites. I’ve been playing with Mastodon lately and that reminds me more of the 90s Internet.
If I'm interested in a subject / person, I try to both read about it and listen video about it / from him. I found that the two information sources are often complementary.
I'm not suggesting you change your personal choice, but as someone who is a sometimes member of those communities, I resent being called trash.
When you paint a medium or platform with a broad brush, and chastise them for not censoring it to your liking, you should at least check the alternative you're recommending is at least as censorial.
It's really not any different than what Netflix is doing now, right?
Discounting SEO, the major issue was that they didn't build their own ad network. You set up business in Google's front yard and didn't like it when they told you to get out.
The ad network (or rather the monetization model) is the hardest part of building a video sharing site. If that part wasn't figured out then it's hard for me to believe you were actually serious about building a content network.
Given how much this guy cried about how much money he is "owed" I'm less likely to believe he was slighted and more likely to believe he was a greedy exec who was in over his head.
> he walked away with about $50 million when News Corp purchased my space. He should have walked away with a lot more
He thinks that News Corp should have paid more for myspace? Because they got so much value from it.
I think Peertube and other Fediverse stacks like Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed & Lemmy will continue to bleed users from more traditional sites over the next few years. They've significantly lowered the barriers to running your own social site, creating a great variety of communities that otherwise would be much smaller or non-existent.
If you stream 5min clips, that's 1200 clips for 1 euro. There should be enough ad networks that offer 2 euro CPM to make a profit.
On the other hand, how can they make a profit if nobody is discovering their site?
[1] https://superuser.com/questions/434532/what-data-transfer-ra...
1200 views for 1 euro, that's 1000 eur for a million views. On top of that YouTube's rates of paying creators are in the same ballpark at 1k/million views.
So yeah your ad model needs be paying 2k+ per million views ( any one more familiar with the ad industry know the real value made curiously? ) on a video or your screwed
But it's not. Your example is contrived, as Hetzner likely doesn't expect you to stream a 100 hours of 1080p HD content to 100 people simultaneously. Your users would have a laughably bad experience at scale. On a single box, it's unlikely you could max out your throughput - you could at most support 45 users on a single Hetzner node (1080p @ 22Mbps on a Gigabit connection in the best case).
If you are going to be serving content with any level of seriousness you need a CDN. 1TB of bandwidth on Cloudfront costs $87. Akamai charges $100-$150. Thats 100x than 1 euro/TB you initially priced out.
With a 1Gig connection you can only serve ~45 concurrents streaming 1080p. If you wanted to support more than 45 concurrents, you would need
1. To distribute content to separate instances
2. A routing infrastructure to reliably route connections to that content.
And then, congrats, you have just built your own CDN - albeit in one datacenter. If you don't want your users on the other side of the country constantly complaining that your site is slow compared to Vimeo, you would have to build it on the other side as well.
If you believe your hodgepodge CDN is going to be much cheaper than Cloudfront (on the order of 1 Euro/month, where you could support it on ~1.5M views/month), then you should probably skip the whole video sharing nonsense, and get rich becoming a CDN provider :)
If you believe otherwise, please enlighten me on how you can build a HD video streaming service for 100 concurrents without a CDN. Like I mentioned, on a 1GbE connection, you can serve a theoretical max of 45 users on one node. Where do you go from there without something that looks like CDN?
https://fortune.com/2016/10/18/youtube-profits-ceo-susan-woj...
That's kind of the point. Using Monopoly power in one industry (advertisement or search) to cripple a competitor in another (video) is kind of the definition of anti-competitive behavior.
Google has been stung and made to show search results in an unbiased way with relation to their products. While it happened in the past the current monopoly, anticompetitive, antitrust commission in Europe California and some awaking Asian countries prevent that kind of behavior
That is the crux of antitrust/monopoly protection commission. The reason the exist
OK but this story begins in 2006. At that time there basically was only Google for generating significant traffic. Facebook was growing and Twitter had just launched but neither had the size of audience (or real ad products) to generate the type of traffic Google could
These people where on reddit up until recently you just never visited the subs that got banned. It took some loud squealing to make the admins do something, then the result was way worse. It made the "disgusting trash sites" and the people that use them more vigilant that why none are really growing.
Then a bunch of subreddits got banned and more quarantined. They labelled those who subscribed to a quarantined as a "community" and not just something you subbed to.
Now any subreddit you "join" and "leave" and they have dropped the subscribe/unsubscribe wording further enforcing the isolated community angle of invested enthusiasts rather than the casual subscriber to random things. Now if you subscribe to some random subreddit you can be viewed as agreeing with all its postings and viewpoints where previously people wouldn't think this way about using the site.
Things won't grow as they are aopealing to the hardcore focus users rather than the casual ones. Any competition would do well to appeal to the more casual and disconnected users.
> I would get called on a regular basis from Google ad execs begging me to put Google ads on my website.
> Like you basically have to give them their cut, otherwise they’re not gonna let you play and they’re going to screw with your search traffic.
Yeah, no, it doesn't work like that. Google search ranking is not perfect, but they have taken search/ad separation very, very, very seriously. You can't even ask questions like "The google ad customer I'm talking to disappeared from search results, did you guys do anything overnight?" It's a big no-no.
It sounds more like a sadly misinformed rant. 90% of startups fail - failure is a natural result. You don't need to bring up a Google conspiracy to explain it.
Less plausible is the scenario of failing as a result of ad-pay for search-play. If the equation is proven out, then he, a rational and effective founder, would’ve paid!—And his site would’ve played another day.
Or are we supposed to read an implication that it was worth burning the company to the ground to take a principled stand against 2008 Google?
Meanwhile, the traffic claims defy belief. Livevideo failed to launch.
But I would be really surprised if anyone could follow through with their promises.
Honestly, things didn't go sideways until Google decided to mess with LiveVideo and the rest of our web properties in search results. Had Google never purchased YouTube, LiveVideo would have probably won that battle hands down.
Without Google money, YouTube would have failed, not LiveVideo.
And apparently she ended up being fired by Yelp.
Google did not destroy them. A combination of poor business decisions and possibly corruption did. I watched these decisions unfold in person and I won't provide certain details because I don't want to say anything that might be considered libelous, but this guy is straight-up throwing a pity party for himself. It has nothing to do with reality.
Google was not actually evil back then. Did they offer contracts to content creators? Maybe. No reason Live Universe couldn't have done the same.
There actually was lots of adult content on the Live Universe network of sites. Just -- everywhere. Content moderation was ineffective because so much of the community was driven by porn: Users wouldn't flag adult content because that's what they were there for, so massive amounts of it just piled up. Google had every reason to stop doing business with them.
This guy straight-up admits there was child porn on the site and they were engaged in shady SEO tactics then bitches that Google delisted them.
"I literally [built a YouTube competitor" -- no you didn't, man. You were just an employee for someone who did.
As someone who did SEO for many years, Google was very serious about eliminating the 'black hat' SEO tactics. They were cheap, they were plentiful. Google eliminated them throughout their index because bad actors were skewing the results. This article does sound like a pity party but it sounds like someone isn't willing to accept they dropped the ball when it was passed to them.
I don't see where the concept of "deplatforming" fits into the narrative provided.
You can check their old site out on Archive.org (the pages all seem to have "Family Filter" set, despite the fact that the tag clouds and "Most Popular Videos" callouts seem to have adult content in them).
The adult content was put behind a mature section where ads weren't run against the mature content.
LiveVideo and the parents companies network of sites were deplatformed from search results.
Delisting competitors from search results who are meeting all of the requirements of their advertising policies at the time is the issue. The mature content was moderated and put behind mature content filters.
We did not promote any adult content on LiveVideo.com itself. So LiveVideo.com itself wasn't in violation of these rules.
Some of the other sites in our network possibly had more adult content in nature, but were not adult content websites and were not running AdSense on them.
1. The story seems to acknowledge that there was adult content on the site.
2. There is adult content evident in the Archive.org snapshots of the site.
3. Some of that content appears to be promoted content, links from the front page appear to go to content tagged "xxx", and many of the categories in the directory are also tagged with things like "sexy" and "girls".
4. It's not at all clear what the distinction you're trying to draw between UGC video and... what other kind of video is there on the site? Why is there a family filter at all if there's no adult content on the site?
(...after the district court found in favor of youtube and after it came out that some of Viacom's claims were for things that other parts of Viacom had uploaded for publicity)
Also, Google Videos was Google's own YouTube competitor from before they bought YouTube, which arguably was anti-competitive because it was much easier to search for Google Videos from Google than for YouTube videos.
The more likely explanation for why their search rank plummited is their shady backlinking between their properties.
> The only one that survived was Justin. That eventually became twitch because they picked video games as a category and just eliminated everything else. And YouTube didn’t really go after one market like that. They went after all video on the internet, so Google let them kind of have video games and that was it.
Their explanation for why Twitch succeeded doesn't hold water. My understanding is that video gaming is currently one of the most popular categories on YouTube today and probably has been since the beginning (e.g. PewDiePie started as a video gaming youtuber). They're directly going after Twitch with YouTube Gaming. And Twitch obviously hasn't been deplatformed by Google Search.
But you're right - there are lots of players who carved out niches on the market to be profitable, since hosting video content is expensive. Vimeo, Twitch, even LiveLeak, cater to specific content while the generalist Youtube burned money for over a decade. When all the other generalists were pivoting, LiveVideo plowed ahead with something that wasn't profitable. This post-hoc rationalization and finger pointing feels like sour grapes.
YouTube was a simply better product. As was Facebook compared to mySpace.
The innovative features weren't the right ones. YouTube may not have had them but ultimately in the market today we haven't got those features that seemed such a good idea at the time. Just because you can do clever stuff, e.g. showing multiple streams, doesn't mean that is what people want.
The content was better on YouTube unless you really did want porn. It is not a problem Google paying people to do content for their platform in exclusive deals. They had pockets deep enough to do such things and this investment has paid off.
Sure the startup with $50 million isn't going to be able to just sign up all of the big names but they also were not going to be able to pay as well as Google when it came to monetisation since they were going with adSense. Had they developed something special when it came to ad sales then they could have been on to something.
Then in the search results there is no reason to believe Google were doing anything shady. The shadiest part could be the way Youtube was built for SEO. Every developer wants good SEO so it is only natural to try and excel in this area. Within YouTube they potentially had a better idea of how the Google search engine works so they could have written their front end to specifically game the system. I doubt they did that to a level beyond what outside developers can achieve.
> you know, adult content and there’s child porn on some of your properties and whatever
> [getting] sued by the major, by the major record companies for [hosting lyrics]
> Today we get sued by the record companies
I'm not well read on the situation, but it sounds like they had serious moderation problems. It looks like they had adult content on their popular video's page occasionally even with a filter enabled. If they were being de-listed from DMCA and legal complaints, that's on them. A lot of the regulation and laws in this space give a lot of power to copyright holders, and YouTube likely has agreements that give them some leniency that other companies just can't get. I feel like that's less of a Tech Giant problem and more of a massive legal barrier to entry problem.
The government never had an issue with us, and we worked with them. The only company enforcing anything was Google, and they kept moving the goal posts every time we talked to them until it became clear there was nothing we could do to resolve these issues to meet their standards, standards they themselves have not met in the past 11+ years.
I think the biggest thing I don't understand is CDNs and delivering the video quickly. If I get some traction in the course, maybe I could launch a site with that content. The monetization options on YouTube are just lacking. You have ads or 5$ / mo subscriptions (if you have 100k subscribers).
My model is going to be 90% free videos with just the solutions to assignments paid. I'll make a small bit on ads, but mostly through 1$ video sales. I was going to offer pdf chapters for each module as well, but since ph only allows image formats and it would be a lot of work to write, I've nixed that idea.
I find this hilarious, but at the same time I am wondering whether you're serious? I'm confused now..
I suppose getting to the content by bypassing firewalls could be part of the learning experience lol
I'm pretty sure they will, and they already have a lot of experience doing that.
It's incredible how many people in this topic mention "PornHub", but not "MindGeek". They could just start yet another video streaming site and probably most people wouldn't know that it's using the same technology as the top porn sites.
Or you could do unlisted YouTube videos and a simple pay site. Or Vimeo has some embedding options.
The main problem I see is product differentiation, e.g. MIT has a computer security course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqmQg-cszw4&list=PLUl4u3cNGP.... If someone wants to learn they'd probably watch something like that instead of your course.
As for differentiation, simply, my course will be the best. It's designed to take you from zero to security analyst. Those MIT lectures are taught with chalk and don't lay the foundations properly. The topics are good though, cool to see something on symbolic execution.
I want to give people the background knowledge. Like buffer overflows are easy if you understand stack frames, and assembly. I want to teach that stuff first before telling someone to go stumble through an exploitation exercise. I want to do that for every topic.
Have you considered Patreon?
No offense, but it looks like a 1990s yahoo.com version of youtube, and that introductory how-to video is already way more than enough to lose the attention of the majority viewers. A search engine landing page with more words/distractions from the search bar than google.com has (even a fraction of a second longer than what people expect) is already a red flag. Similarly, a streaming site must have extremely uniform, visually stimulating, well defined and relatable content for any hope of keeping visitors interested at a fraction of the rate youtube does. Consider how even the cheapest of porn websites (an industry with tens of millions of competing and ever-improving video streaming websites) know to float uniform rows of well tested, clickable video thumbnails as the first thing one sees, along with any and all instructions/options compressed onto a single dropdown button in the top corner— sometimes they don't even show the title unless you hover over it.
My point is you have to figure out a way to make it even more accessible to new visitors than google is to their non-new visitors; and the amount of front-end text, options, and non-uniform content on livevideo.com is several leagues behind where it would need to start to consider a plan of attack... even against YT or the googs 10 years ago, circa 2009
Had the company been allowed to exist and compete fairly, it would have evolved into something more modern and mobile friendly. Judging a startup from before the pre-mobile era, and blaming the design for its failure is kind of silly.
This was the norm back then, if I were creating a video sharing website in 2019 of course I'd approach it differently, but alas there's no point in even trying.
Hmm ok. Are you sure that was the only reason?
All those organic links from those 74 million of websites do not disappear even if you do disappear from the search results.
The mention that google executives contacted them to discuss the $3,000 a month he could of made if he ran google ads - that is genuinely peanuts. This makes me think that was a really small operation that didn't have a hope in hell in going big and competing with vimeo or dailymotion, let alone google. For comparison I was running an AdSense site around the same time and was easily clearing £800-1000 (approx $1500 I guess) a month with only about 150,000-200,000 visits/month (CPMs were higher in those days - I get about the same traffic now but only about £150-300 a month now)
If you these google "executives" (p.s. these wont have been "executives" wasting their time on a tiny publisher like this, you'd be lucky to even get a call from an actual google employee at that size - any tiny publisher deals like this would be farmed out to third party "partner" companies... the real actual executives would be talking to the New York Timess/Conde nasts/ESPNs of the world where the serious money is worth their time) are suggesting you could get up to $3,000 a month then sorry you were never destined for the big time.
Sounds like those 74 million (74,000,000 sites linking to you - that is loads) sites sending traffic your way were actually only sending in a trickle of users otherwise you'd be able to sell a lot of advertising. Even if each site only sent a single measly user per month, 74,000,000 visitors a month is a chunky visitor base and would easily net you more than $3,000 - even with a CPM of 25c ("good" publishers can expect rates well in excess of this - easily $1 and perhaps $3,4 or even 5 for really top-tier stuff) you'd be looking at about $18,500 a month. You'd easily be able to do direct deals with advertisers and get better CPMs at that sort of level.
Start ups fail all the time. It is hard and it is sad but I don't like it when people don't accept responsibility for their own failures though. This attitude of "it was everyone's fault apart from mine!" annoys me a lot
I find this statement extremely arrogant. It incorrectly assumes that the value and quality of a product is correlated with the financial success of the product. It hasn't been the case for decades. To everyone outside of the elite 'I used to go to MIT and was an early employee of MySpace' crowd, this was always the case and it's not news at all.
When I build a product, I assume that there is a 90% to 99% probability that it's going to fail and I know exactly why it's going to fail and it will have nothing to do with product quality or strategy. I just assume that I'll have to build many exceptional products to even get a shot at making a living out of one of them. I expect success to be completely random and inexplicable.
There are many superior products and technologies around but nobody talks about them and they are not being built upon. Everyone only talks about the mediocre tech that comes out of Google, Facebook, Amazon, or the elite Silicon Valley VC startup funnel.
I enjoy reading these kinds of articles about elites getting a dose of the highly centralized monopolistic reality that they and their friends helped to create (e.g. especially those about Foursquare founders whining about Google over and over) - They're getting a taste of their own poison IMO. And yes, if you used to go to MIT, Stanford or Harvard or were on the founding team of MySpace, you are part of the elite; you have no excuse to complain, you are in the 'in crowd'; you could just have called the right people to make your problems go away; you failed to do that. Most people don't even have the option to socially network their problems away.
But by all means keep whining; at least when elites whine, maybe other elites and politicians are more likely to listen.
I read the first couple of paragraphs and between the rantings how he should be a multimillionaire and how Google will destroy all of his projects, I gave up.
It is obviously a very emotional subject for Trent, but that's just not the best way to present what happened to a third party.
Live Video was a more successful video platform in the mid 2000s until Google bought YouTube and leveraged their monopoly on search and ads to cut off traffic to Live Video. They also paid content creators to leave Live Video and sign exclusive contracts with the cash Google injected to the company. The only reason Justin TV survived is that they pivoted to gaming to avoid competing with YouTube.
At the time, some fairly medium-to-high prominence YouTubers (back when Peter Oakley/Geriatric1927 was the most popular channel) had moved to LiveVideo so I tried uploading my video there. They didn't re-compress it all and it was still high quality.
Time passed, and YouTube changed their rules to not compress so much. I re-uploaded my video (having to make a small change to avoid the hash collision) and it stayed up.
It is not possible to compete with Google using Google-like business model. It is already being used by Google and Google is very good at it.
Who manages to compete with Google using a slightly different business model? Facebook. Why? Different USP. Different product.
Who else? Amazon. Why? Different USP, different product.
Who else? Pornhub. Why? Different USP, different product.
List goes on.
So for example, you make metube.com and it shows up on all the search engines. Off the top of my head, maybe it watches the rank over time, kind of like a stock ticker. If Google detects metube.com and buries your listing, but the listing stays the same on more egalitarian search engines like duckduckgo.com, that would show as a divergence in the historical rankings.
So you could get answers like "there's a 77% likelihood that Google buried your link" or "Google's result diverges 23% from other search engines" or something like that.
Then an overall measure of the top million sites or whatever could be used to generate an overall fairness/bias rating.
If it showed enough manipulation over a long enough time, maybe that would be grounds to regulate or break up the largest search engines. Or maybe the law wouldn't be necessary, because a browser plugin could say "there's a 95% chance that this search result has not been manipulated" or even request results with a high degree of manipulation as a way of finding the canonical truth.
Hmmm that gives me an idea for a search engine...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8174763.stm
https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/microsoft-and-yahoo-renew-...
You would need to go to the country-specific search engines like Yandex and Baidu, which may not be that great for english or US-based content.
Did Livevideo offer anything new or different to what Youtube already had? Was it better than Youtube in any way?
We shouldn't forget Google couldn't compete with Youtube either. Google had to buy Youtube because Googlevideo was not as good.
Twitch found a way to compete just fine.
Justin.tv which eventually became Twitch actually struggled and almost failed before they were able to capture the live streaming gaming market.
"Get up, stand up, don't give up the fight!"
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
From your source (emphasis mine):
> Providers of [..] online search engines should not be required to disclose the detailed functioning of their ranking mechanisms, including algorithms, under this Regulation. [..]
> A general description of the main ranking parameters should safeguard [against bad faith manipulation of ranking by third parties]
Main parameters being defined as:
> The notion of main parameter should be understood to refer to any general criteria, processes, specific signals incorporated into algorithms or other adjustment or demotion mechanisms used in connection with the ranking.
I admire the spirit. It's right up there with lets see who we can attack....hmm...US military...yeah they seem about the right size as a worthy opponent.
Some editing would be great to readability.
I closed at this point.
I'm no fan of Google, but if your business fails, I expect there to be some self-reflection.
I can’t see it, but Id like to listen to this instead of reading it
I could maybe track down Toan, I still check in with his brother occasionally. But Brad is in the wind, tried to track him down but it seems he doesn't want to be found.
- "Google/YouTube made an anti-competitive move against LiveVideo". Ok, on the face of it (if you believe everything Lapinsky says) then it is really bad, as in "illegal" kind of bad. It makes me wonder how Google/Youtube avoided being sued. I whole heartily condemn YouTube/Google IF they did this. It sounds plausible btw, since they have done jerk things to Yelp or flight search engines, etc...
- "There is child porn on YouTube". Really? I don't believe it. They do a very good job with regular porn. I have never seen a pair of boobs on YouTube over the years. I don't know how they do it, but it seems to me that moderation of "nakedness" probably using AI works pretty damn well. I have never seen an article about porn issues on YouTube.
- "Google is no longer a neutral digital intermediate because they promote fairness". Yes. They do. And if they were not doing it, governments around the world would force them to do it. Also their advertisers do not want to be associated with the likes of Alex Jones and are putting pressure on YouTube to sort the issue. This is the sad reality, but Google, Facebook and Twitter are forced to moved from a "neutral" digital platform to something more akin to a "publisher". People on the board of Google are no more elected that the directors of publication of the largest newspapers. And if you think that shows an anti-conservatice bias, look at who is President of the US, who is going to be Prime Minister in the UK, etc... I don't think this is going to be easy but Google (and social media) to find a right balance where most people are able to publish, but the most fringe/toxic members of the community deserved to be demonetized. Will Google abuse its powers of f//k up from time to time? Sure they will. But I agree with the overall trend. And again, they do not have a choice.
- "Google changed its search engine to promote sites with responsive designs". I absolutely agree with the change. Most people use mobile devices. You waited until 2013 to realize you had to do that? A website that is not responsive today and back in 2013 probably sucked anyway, and it is "right" for Google to demote them. There is nothing anti-competitive about that. Btw, I can predict the future too. For instance, at some point Google will promote sites that support HTTP/2 and not just HTTP/1.1, so maybe you think of doing that on your next "Wordpress business".
- "Google wanted ads on my website". Just say "no". And I don't believe in the logical fallacy that _because_ you refused that is why the website was delisted. Seriously dude, your website was way to small for Google to care that much.
- The business was overly dependent on Google search results. Google tweak its algorithm from time to time. Most of the time Google has genuine reasons for the changes. Sometimes they want to demote a "large" competitor in an anti-competitive move (which btw, I think it's going to get harder and harder for Google to get away with that). But your tiny site that depends on search results... it's just an unintended consequence. Google does not care about you. And if you get most of your sales from Google, your business model is highly volatile and can disappear overnight. I don't want Google to stop making tweaks to improve the quality of results and destroy dark SEO hacks, just because occasionally they happen to accidentally destroys someones under-diversified business model. I am sure it sucks to be on the receiving end of this, but imagine a world where Google never tweaked the algorithm. Search results would be utterly worthless today.
YouTube is a key factor in Alphabet exercising the cultural 'guidance' that Eric Schmidt argues is not only Googles responsibility but moral obligation. For people who agree with Schmidt and disagree with the position that the public should be permitted to decide their own future, good or bad, it will be impossible to gain their support. Make no mistake, that viewpoint is the one that has supported every monarchy, dictatorship, theocracy, and non-democratic social structure throughout history. Political scientists call is Conservatism with a capital C, whereas the view that the public should play a role in their own governance and decide their own fate, for good or ill, is the alternative that drove the American Revolution, French Revolution, and countless blood-soaked revolutions across the globe. It won every single one of those wars. But it, too, lost to Google.
Just consider, if 70+% of the public today believed that interracial marriage was offensive and disgusting, which was true when interracial marriage was legalized by the Supreme Court in the 1960s, Google would deplatform anyone who agreed with the legalization of interracial marriage in order to defend that status quo. They do not seek to provide an open, global platform that can host or play a part in public debate about serious issues. They seek to exercise cultural guidance as Eric Schmidt sees fit. It has been the public which has reliably improved over time and progressed while still containing contingents of nuts and extremists. And it has progressed not despite that, but because of it. No closed and centrally managed society in history has become more progressive except through dreadfully bloody revolutions that destroyed its management.
Maybe do some filtering on the autotranscripts? Interesting read otherwise.
So to compete and beat facebook and google one has to be good at the ad game not just the content game.
Whoever thought google will allow a competitor to use google’s own platform to grow and threaten their own video ad stream should probs not be in a company’s board for a while.