Google is not subtle about where its priorities lie. There is a section in their 10-K titled “How we make money” and the two sub-bullets are “Performance advertising” and “Brand advertising”. The rest is a footnote.
Their revenue breakdown tells a similar story. Google as a whole had revenues of $161B in 2019, and $134B of that was direct revenue from from ad sales. “Other bets” (inclusive of consumer product things like Fiber, Fi, etc) is less than $1B — a rounding error in the scope of their overall business.
I know it’s flippant to say “you’re not the customer, you’re the product” but it’s particularly true in the case of Google. They are a B2B advertising company, not a B2C products company. It’s just not part of their business model to provide support to anyone who isn’t an ad buyer. It honestly ends up thwarting their ambitions in the product space because the kind of customer support required to succeed just isn’t in their DNA.
And I hate to admit, they're doing great. I recently tried some different search engines (DDG among others) and they just never give me results as accurate as Google does.
Fiber has been effectively cancelled; Google has been shopping it around to various telecoms since 2017 but because it's an overlay network and it's not very large, nobody wants the headache of trying to integrate it. Fiber was always an attempt to push broadband providers to update their networks to better support YouTube; Google was never going to throw down the $100B that it would have taken to be competitive. It was never designed for long-term viability because it didn't need to be to serve its purpose.
Essentially YT is a middleman between billboard manufacturers (content creators) and advertisers (drivel manufacturers).
The revenue potential in the advertising space cannot be underestimated. Merch has high fixed costs and does not scale dynamically. Live-streaming is inaccessible for both streamers and viewers (in comparison to YouTube videos). Donation fees aren’t a secure revenue source. Either the donators or the creators could turn off donations at any time. But ads are guaranteed. There’s so much to the ad space that isn’t publicly known; Google’s operating on a whole‘nother level.
It’s also a lot more complicated to start ten $300 million projects than to optimize one $3 billion project. The people steering the ship (CEO, CFO, CTO, ...) only have so much time and brain power. They could delegate projects to others, but that requires hiring the right people and that’s really hard. If you have 4 layers of accounting management, and the probability of a bad hire is 25%, the chance of each layer being managed well is only 32%. Whereas if you have only one or a few big projects, you can have less layers, so the probability of success increases all round.
(You might say that Google should do all these projects so can diversify. But why should they take the risk? There are thousands of startups out there testing the waters. They can just acquire those when they show promise. If those startups fail, Google loses nothing.)
(The claims in this comment are educated guesses from reading a lot of articles. I definitely haven’t run a $300 million project!)
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/01/08/report-ama... [1] https://www.drift.com/blog/squarespace-billion-dollar-growth... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/elisabethbrier/2019/07/16/next-... [3] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
Patreon and Squarespace are not competitors to Youtube, they're in completely different races.
There is no real competition to Youtube when it comes to UX (specially loading speeds and availability of different resolutions) just due to the sheer number of CDNs and server infrastructure that Youtube has. Youtubers can complain and complain (sometimes rightfully), but 99% of them are not willing to abandon the platform, because that's equivalent to abandoning their online career altogether.
You have:
- 2 billion monthly active users
- 73% of US adults
- The most-downloaded iOS app in 2018
- As of December 2018, installed on 5 billion Android devices
- One billion hours of content viewed per day
- 500 hours of content uploaded every minute
The only one that matters is "how many complaint-review-hours do I get?"
For instance, you might lower complaint-review-hours by letting complainants submit timestamps and prioritizing complaints with timestamps.
Let's put a number on the complaint-review-hours with the current stats.
A human can do X cases/hour, but if you have more cases than humans can handle your backlog will start to grow steadily. At this point you either hire more people or start to automate things, after all you don't want a city of people moderating stuff.
So what's your target number and what do you guess the actual number is?