That is week's TGIF had incredulous engineers questioning the decision, and Larry explaining that it was indeed steep, but that he saw incredible potential.
He was right yet again.
That was essentially the major reason people thought it was a bad deal - that you couldn't monetize because people would run to the next platform, I mean it was essentially a doomed business idea because the belief was you couldn't get the advertising dollar above the storage and staffing costs.
This isn't just YouTube though, the internet as a whole has slowly shifted in the direction of more ads and more pay walls. I get it, but as someone who vividly remembers the internet before ads and pay walls I still find it odd how people growing up online today just seem to accept it.
I find this odd - you're saying that you're only fond of the way things were when you grew up, but that it's odd how people growing up now accept their own reality?
I have literally no way of knowing what it would be like to have been born in 1994 instead of 1979... it's so crazy how fast things change. What would it be like if the internet was just a given when I was born instead of getting on BBS's and then the internet slowly leaks in.
Lol no. Not if you're a nerd, anyway. You'd mostly be on Reddit and HN. ; p The only people left on Facebook in the West are around your age.
Get Discord and Spotify and you're all caught up.
So it’s not just older == better. The early 90s and before were all shit for video and being bombarded with ads as well.
Indeed, that was another point I wanted to make but refrained from. Having so much content and functionality for free, with absolutely no cost (like your data being mined for pofit) is simply unsustainable... In a way, the early 2000s were the odd time, not today. Maybe that'll look different when/if humanity manages to overcome the major issues we face today and we reach an age of plenty.
I used adguard and it works for like 80 to 90% of the time. For the time where ad did show up, I just reload the page and it is gone.
How long until the streaming services become comglomerated into one or two cable-like packages? Can't be long now and it will break apart again and reform over a hundred years with better tech ... again, maybe?
It's possible for the creator to manually place ads in the middle of the video or to let YouTube automatically place them. In both cases you will likely get ads that are in the middle of a sentence, because the ad placement tool is poor. It can be laggy and imprecise, but most frustratingly, it tends to break if you play around with it for more than 30 seconds. At that point you lose track of where you were and have to do it again. It's been broken like that for a long time. My guess is that the state of that tool is part of the reason why creators don't place their ads precisely. Going from a full fledged video editor with great seek and all that, to a poorly functioning web UI is very frustrating.
My anecdotal experience with ICQ in the 90's was the same. It was dominant, but when they updated to include a modest banner ad at the bottom of the message window, a substantial number of my friends took that as the last straw and moved (mostly to MSN). A shame, since ICQ was a pretty decent messenger for its time.
But there is a solution for phones aswell, YouTube Vanced. https://github.com/YTVanced
It's largely been the advertising people/tech that has made Youtube profitable. Not infrastructure effectiveness. (Sure, I imagine infra cost effectiveness was very important during a few key growth years pre-acquisition.)
YT is worth so much because it is a monopoly. To make it monopoly it is today, Google had to have: extremely deep pockets, efficient infrastructure. Very few other companies could have accomplished that.
https://venturebeat.com/2010/10/27/google-exec-android-was-b...
I loved having a nest thermostat and will definitely buy one for my next place