Tech companies are an oligopoly with a few actors. Competitions do not offer enough pressure to make them change. Regulation is the only way forward if we do not want to end in a dystopia.
I’m optimistic that regulations will come, sooner or later.
Can someone explain where the boundary here is for antitrust?
That's of course assuming there's sufficient competition, and the power doesn't just shift over to Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft or some other anti-competitive giants.
Disclaimer in bio.
The number of ads isn't proportional to bandwidth cost, it's about what their research shows they can get away with.
Lower bandwidth prices would both increase service provider competition and decrease costs. The provider competition would then push the cost savings away from providers and toward either paying creators more or attracting viewers by showing fewer ads (or both).
It might not solve the entire problem but it would certainly be a step in the right direction.
I’m no expert though, so I’m more curious than in disagreement.
1 tb bandwidth cost of aws is 236 usd a month.
[1]: https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html#s=CloudFront&...
That will serve your 49MB video roughly 2 million times a day.
Let’s go with 50% average utilization, and say that means we need to monetize roughly 0.0065 cents per view to cover the bandwidth cost.
I think YouTube charges something like 10 cents per ad view, but won’t charge if the user clicks Skip in that 5 second window. I’m not sure what percent of views result in a billable ad, but anecdotally I’ve heard it’s surprisingly high.
I would assume storage is a much bigger cost factor, to say nothing of paying the engineers to develop and support the infrastructure.
Plus technologies like PeerTube can significantly reduce bandwidth expenses if that's really an issue. Google wouldn't use something like that because the federation threatens their monopoly, but a competitor with a different business model definitely could make it work for them.
They don't need to, they have caching servers on most ISP's internal networks. Popular stuff (that consumes most bandwidth) just needs to be sent once from the mothership.
A fresh new competitor to YouTube would face a combination of a lack of advertisers, and a lack of content seeking ad-funding.
On the other hand, when it comes to pay-to-watch content, there's space in the market for new competitors to arise, as the network effects are less significant there.
https://rakuten.tv/ and https://chili.com/ for instance, are far smaller than Amazon and Google.
I guess bandwidth costs are, in a sense, the problem. If if were easy to run a very-large-scale video-hosting site, that would help, sure. Ads wouldn't have to be worth much to make the business work.
Honest question: why not just write "I work for Google" instead of asking people to click through first? It's not significantly longer if that's what you're trying to avoid.
but what kind of regulation? The Access Act?[0]
It’s not hard to serve your own video streams. But good luck getting enough eyeballs to make it worthwhile.