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Comment by ApolloFortyNine | Hacker News Reader

>So in that respect, it's kind of a shitty move by Google.

12 years of free video hosting with no ads and a platform for people to discover your videos is quite the deal.

They always had to add ads at some point, hosting video, and the bandwidth and transcoding that goes with it, is incredibly expensive, not to mention the dev time going into creating such a massive platform.

If you thought you could eat a free lunch forever... Well, I guess this is your rude awakening. But you honestly should have expected it.

The discovery feature of Youtube shouldn't be understated either. A large number of creators have most of their audiences because of Youtube. And honestly your example of Jim Sterling sounds like a smaller company would have gone out of their way to ban them. He's reaping all the benefits of the platform while giving nothing back.

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I don't really understand bringing up the "hosting video is so expensive; poor poor Youtube being exploited by nasty creators" angle.

It's a symbiotic relationship. Without content creators, Youtube is nothing. Without Youtube's massive user base, content creators will reach no one. Meanwhile, Youtube is the one making money over fist (4-5 billion dollars per quarter), so I don't understand why we should feel sorry for their hosting costs.

>Without content creators

Without content creators who refuse to allow ads in exchange for free hosting, is it nothing? Probably not, most creators do enjoy making money, and most of the ones putting out content for free, but without ads, will struggle to find a competitor who will indefinitely provide free hosting.

>4-5 billion dollars per quarter

In revenue, not profit. Very, very important distinction.

I mean... you take the good with the bad to get the breadth and depth in your platform. You make a shitload of money on PewDiePie and nothing on Mieleman (sorry; I forget the name of the German guy who posts videos of washing machine cycles), and balance the two. It's not difficult.

~~Okay then, 15 billion in profits last year. I'm no businessman but to me that's pretty damn good profits with those revenue numbers.~~

Edit: Alright, Google search failed me. Searching for profits gave me revenue. Sorry about that. Profits are still secret, it seems. But the hosting costs won't eat the lion's share of that, I can assure you.

...again my friend, that is the revenue number. Searching Youtube revenue 2019 gives you exactly that number.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21121370/youtube-advertisi...

Well according to this $8.5 billion of that is given to creators. Leaving 6.5 billion for hosting costs, development, and all the management that goes with a platform of that size. About 2.8 billion hours were spent watching youtube in 2019.

> They always had to add ads at some point, hosting video, and the bandwidth and transcoding that goes with it, is incredibly expensive, not to mention the dev time going into creating such a massive platform.

This isn't about covering expenses that they couldn't afford otherwise. This is about making enormously rich people even richer.

Most businesses don’t give away products or services away for free on a mass scale despite being able to afford to do so.

But they're not giving it away, they're harvesting massive amounts of information even off of videos without ads.

What value does that information have, other than to sell ads?

>This isn't about covering expenses that they couldn't afford otherwise. This is about making enormously rich people even richer.

So you truly believe people should be entitled to free video hosting?

It literally costs money to host content. If you make the platform no money, Youtube has no obligation to keep you around. Just because I pay for my groceries doesn't mean you get yours for free. Just because one person is paying doesn't mean an equal numbers of others don't have to.

I simply stated that this isn't about covering necessary expenses that wouldn't have been able to be covered otherwise, which is how you initially framed it.

YouTube made it big encouraging that wide range of creators to come to their platform, then once they've established their monopoly they turn around and kick off the ones that are inconvenient for them. That feels immoral.

>This is about making enormously rich people even richer.

Isn't Youtube still not making a profit?

Are you sure? Google has been on a kick for some time now to try and ensure each product area is independently profitable. Up until a few years ago the status quo was that search/content ads made all the money, and every other product burned it in a giant furnace of endless massive losses. Seems they're now trying to get a grip on that as they're realising even search ads can't keep growing revenue forever.

It's entirely possible that YouTube has never been profitable. The costs involved with it are stupendous. It's far more than just bandwidth. Storage and CPU for transcoding, the enormous databases required for Content ID, recommendations, comments and anti-spam, all the private videos you can't even see at all, etc. Then there's software development costs to manage the bandwidth and operations.

> If you thought you could eat a free lunch forever... Well, I guess this is your rude awakening. But you honestly should have expected it.

just sucks & is such a Lucy pulling out the football move, that YouTube helps everyone & especially the very small folk, rises to meteoric heights/total monolopy, then won't let some small fry newcomers enjoy either an unbelievably modest revenue or give away an ad-free experience to their new watchers.

> The discovery feature of Youtube shouldn't be understated either.

100% a video monopoly. youtube has us, has us all.

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