Alphabet reports Q1 earnings
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
You paid cable TV $90/m for 12-15 min of ads on 30 min shows.
Especially now that there's ads even on videos by unmonetized channels and YTers who do and share shit because they authentically enjoy it. You know, those that made the site worthwhile in the first place in 200x.
And the mind-crushing amount of clickbait and spam by "professional content creators"? Well, that can go the way of the dodo.
I think they will use ads as a form of tax, to discourage certain behavior, and even certain content. I think I notice this more on libertarian leaning videos (although I definitely haven't done any rigorous analysis re that).
Can't wait for the day everything is decentraly hosted, and we access it through whatever portal we want.
Youtube content creators can choose where to put the ads themselves. You will come across many videos with only the first ad or the ads set sparely in the video, some even put the ads in breaks. You can also chose to let YouTube put the ads but that’s also a one and done, one setting per video. I can confirm though that YouTube, on the automated setting, put way more ads in the past year or two than before.
That is an extraordinary claim, and needs some extraordinary evidence to back it up.
Well, almost (https://sponsor.ajay.app/)
Usually when I'm watching "mainstream" content on Youtube I just skip the first one or two minutes entirely. There's always a lot of ceremony, "don't forget to like and subscribe", fancy intros etc. It takes me a couple of seconds to find out where the content _actually_ starts -- and it almost always starts after the 1 minute mark.
> The Wadsworth Constant is an axiom which states that the first 30% of any video can be skipped because it contains no worthwhile or interesting information.
AND the content creator as well.
Disc: Googler.
Ahh mostly not.
Most youtubers I watch gave up on youtube ads long ago. They make money with parteon, merchandize and in video sponsors.
The ones who still get some kind of relevant revenue from Youtube constantly bitch about demonetization, takedowns and some big entities calming their content.
Your own creators are your own worst critics.
I am happy to support content creators through patreon or whatever monetization platform they choose.
What I am not ok with is having every single click and watching period profiled and stored. I would happily not block your ads if you weren't building up user profiles.
A business model with generic vanilla ads based on the video I am watching instead of my profile would still provide millions upon millions for Google and shareholders.
Targeted ads only benefit Google by selling the illusion of advertisement metrics to marketers. Neither users or content creators stand to benefit from targeted advertisement quite the contrary.
The claim of moral ground is made even less robust when they literally have a platform that attempts to track your every single move in order to monetize on targeted advertisement.
There are other business models to achieve the same profitability without privacy invasion, and I do pay for and favour those business models.
I will repeat it again targeted ads only benefit Google by selling the illusion of advertisement metrics to marketers. Neither users or content creators stand to benefit from targeted advertisement quite the contrary.
Targeted advertisement should be as illegal as robocalls.
To be clear, in the context of this discussion I don't care how you feel about paying through ads. It is their right to lock their content behind those gates.
If youtube wants to cover it's infrastructure costs with ads I will allow it when they stop tracking users.
And there are other ways to support creators if someone were to insist on it. A lot of channels that I support have moved to Nebula, other channels have Patreons, or push their own products.
Killing the app is the easiest way to get it to shut up.
I don't watch nearly enough YouTube to justify $12 a month, but I'm starting to consider ad blockers. Or just stop watching Youtube altogether, which wouldn't be all that hard. There are only a couple of channels I check out from time to time, and one isn't monetized so the ads are fairly reasonable. The other however had ad breaks every 5 minutes, which is just killing it for me.
Go for it. You won't regret. Youtube is unusable without ad blocker (regardless if it's their premium offering or a browser extension).
https://smartyoutubetv.github.io/ for TV
Sorry I don't watch YT on mobile so I have no suggestion for that
Youtube has gone one level beyond with the auto play nuissance and the new hostile EU consent forms. I am at a point that I will just refuse to engage with the platform and only play a video by copying the video id into the url:
www.youtube.com/embed/<video-id>
And then just open it in ff or mpv
They could have extracted a fortune with banner ads and the like. But it is never enough for shareholders, they wanted to scale this further and keep hogging data and profiling everyone.
Targeted advertisement should be as illegal as robocalls.
n.b. that if you have `youtube-dl` and `mpv` built with lua support,
mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...`
Further, you can also do things like
mpv --no-video https://www.youtube.com/watch\?v\=5qap5aO4i9A # chilled cow
Their efficiency at that kind of scale is insane.
Previous leaks suggested that they have more contractors than employees: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/25/alphabet-google-employed-mor...
As you would expect at a company Google's size, there are exceptions to this. Security guards aren't contractors on the MTV campus, but they are on nearly every other site. On the flip side, I've heard anecdotes that some SWEs are temps but I'm not sure of the details there.
A firm like NRG only has 5000 official full time employees but have tens of thousands of oilfield workers, also protects them from legal liability.
see -https://www.fastcompany.com/90355826/leaked-doc-google-has-1...
1. Ads depends on its cloud and core infrastructures to run its system.
2. Majority of its revenue directly comes from owned and operated properties, such as Search and YouTube Ads.
3. Chrome and Android have been key strategical components for being independent from other platforms. Google Ads won't be profitable as is if other OS/browser had 100% market dominance.
Instead of having one highly profitable company focused on ads that pays out excellent dividends, Google leadership chose to spend it on lots of expensive employees instead.
A good counter argument to this is that if Google didn't do it, then a significant portion of their valuation would vanish due to the issue that in technology, companies which can't transition to newer revenue models perish as technology evolves.
So personally I don't agree with the criticism, but I think it's legitimate.
[0]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/conglomeratediscount.as...
The conglomerate market cap may be less than the sum of its parts at any given instant, but that completely discounts the strategic interplay between subsidiaries that results in substantially larger growth prospects & marketshare capture.
This isn't universally true -- e.g. GE Healthcare & GE Aviation probably have very little overlapping strategic benefit. However, Google Adwords, Adsense, YouTube, Gmail ads, etc all benefit from common infrastructure & distribution. Or in the case of Berkshire, the ability to gobble up new investments relies on the tax-advantaged leverage of the insurance float.
Maybe they should just get rid of organic results in Search, and just show Ads. Surely that would be more profitable.
For example, I'm currently looking to buy a car - my recent search history includes "buy z4" and "merc c class". Yet YouTube is showing me generic ads for the local supermarket and off-track-betting (and I've never gambled in my life). So it seems Google has a lot of room to improve the algorithm that matches viewer to advertiser
Yeaahhhhh... people need to work on their algorithms for sure.
Do they?
Most adspace buyers are utterly clueless about how Google algorithms work.
The flaws the OP describe are real, but my bet is 80 to 90% of adspace buyers have no idea of the shortcomings.
Nor do they care BTW: the ROI on their ad dollar when spent on GOOG is so much higher than traditional channels ever were that they just set the drip in place and never look back.
Source: used to work on prediction modelling in ads.
What?
Also, I'm fine with ads not being targeted at me. It's really annoying to look up information on a toaster and then get bombarded with ads for toasters.
If you randomly show ads, what are the odds someone just happens to be in the market for a new one toaster? 1 in 1000?
On the other hand, what are the odds that someone who just bought a new toaster ends up returning it and being in the market for a new one? Probably much higher.
I don't think it's a mistake if after you bought product P, you get ads for P, it probably does work in practice.
Either you have this information, then Rebelgecko's comment explains why it would make sense to still have such ads.
Or you don't have this information, then other information (such as "you searched for P") probably leads to this result as well.
In both cases this strategy makes sense intuitively, and I'm pretty sure that ad-tech knows what it's doing to maximize returns, if only by looking at the metrics.
Second, this whole "what they deserve" idea is just plain weird to me:
- salaries have strictly nothing to do with "what you deserve": they are a function of supply and demand in the labor market.
- one of the (many) reason Google is making so much money is because they can (because of the business they're in) and *have* automated a huge fraction of their day-to-day operations. So ... if the work is done by robots, what is this "deserve" thing you speak of?How is that relevant? Just because they get relatively big salaries, it doesn't mean what they get is just.
> one of the (many) reason Google is making so much money is because they can (because of the business they're in) and have automated a huge fraction of their day-to-day operations. So ... if the work is done by robots, what is this "deserve" thing you speak of?
There is a lot to unpack here, but I'll just say that this is not relevant, as revenue per employee figure clearly indicates that people are heavily underpaid.
If they were, they'd be looking for a job elsewhere.
This is how market economies work.
This whole "deserve" and "justice as applied to salary" business you seem to insist on reeks of collectivism.
youre talking about startups not google which give options not RSUs
Eg. Google took 9 years and Facebook took 11 years to get to a $4B quarter, but of course apples and oranges on business models. Advertising has a massive margin, so Google and Facebook were very profitable at those points. AWS took about 11 years to get to a $4B Q. (You get to do the adjustment for inflation ;-)
The problem is that unless you are monitizing a private cloud (Google-classic, Facebook, Apple, etc), the Cloud revenue sweet spot is enterprise sales, and enterprise sales are hard, with long cycles and expensive sales support requirements. When you are playing catch-up there are many more ways to lose a deal than close one.
Year-over-year, Google Cloud made about $1.25B more, and lost $800M less. It sure looks like they will be in the black by the end of this year. It would be a long business cycle for a VC, but looks like a well managed business expansion.
When will the entire venture go ROI positive? Dunno, but in some ways that is a sunk cash fallacy. It looks like a pretty decent business now.
(Ex-Googler still holding GOOG in case either of those color your view of the above.)
* Free support and consulting (probably useful for some less technical companies)
* Free or discounted resources for POCs (ie: "This customer wants to do a 3 month POC, we're going to spend literally 0 dollars on that infrastructure")
* Other misc stuff depending on the org
Source: received it. Not in a VC/incubator.
Last I saw they definitely do not take equity.
You do however have to be qualified by applying through a partner as you say.
The Google Cloud Platform product (or, "Let's sell some of that extra YouTube server space") is a decade old.
E.g. if I'm leading engineering for a startup and thinking about which of the three to invest in, the long-term profitability and stability of my choice here is important. You can't just rely on the "Google" name - if anything, that signals that they're willing to just shut it down or raise prices if they can't reach profitability targets soon.
Of course the short-term profits being lost don't seem so short-term at this point, so Google is surely debating internally on how long they want to continue this strategy if it doesn't begin to pay off.
I am certain that nobody is considering shuttering a business unit that has an annualized revenue of $16 billion and is growing 46% per year. Anyone who is “surely debating” this would be fired from management at any sensible company.
Google isn't interested in being a minority player in any market, if they can't capture it, they will eventually leave it.
And let's be real, a huge swath of VC funded startups recklessly engage in "growth hacking" to acquire users, without a legitimate business plan, usually, e.g.
Step 1: get users Step 2: <magic happens> Step 3: Profit!
And then it turns out their ideas for monetization don't work, and they get an exit via acquisition by one of the big players as the VCs try to get some of their money back and leave someone else holding the bag.
SV is littered with companies that had millions of users but ended up folding and selling, because ultimately, running a business isn't free, and those users have to generate enough revenue to cover costs plus ROI.
Which is to say, there's probably a decent number of apps Google created and shut down, which probably would've been pretty successful companies on their own with a modest monetization model. But Google never attempted it, because the user count didn't hit nine figures.
Fortunately, AGI is almost certainly not possible in the next decade.
Not sure I understand this response, nor do I agree. AWS drove $13.5B in _profit_ for Amazon in 2020, and has been profitable since at least 2014, _8 years_ after its founding.[1]
Why isn't reasonable to ask "where and when is the profit coming?"
[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2021/amazon-web-services-posts-reco...
Not only did GCP (and Azure, etc.) have to catch up with where AWS was 8 years ago, they've got to invest even more to catch up with where AWS is now.
It's obvious that GCP is a very long-term investment, but also one that it not just purely profit-driven for GCP in isolation, but also hugely strategic for Google as a whole.
Here's the question to ask: if Google stopped investing aggressively in marketing and building new offerings to expand the Cloud userbase could it be profitable today?
Or in other words, is it better to have 30% YoY growth and on paper profitability, or 45% YoY growth and an on paper loss, with the ability to flip the switch and move to the first option whenever you want?
This sounds suspiciously like a line from the WeWork documentary on Hulu.
Given that I expect to never see waymo brand cars shuttling people around, most likely they will license out the tech to companies who deal with customers or to the car companies themselves.
I'm a big supporter of what Waymo is doing, but I've always thought this is real end game for them precisely because of the reasons you mentioned. Google is incredibly shy of anything that involves physical support and running a robotaxi service requires a lot of it along with operations/logistics. They are no Amazon.
Dupe from source
Google could blow all the money buying Coinbase or something, but shareholders would probably prefer Google give them the cash to made that decision individually.
In the absence of any opportunity, all you can do is share buybacks or dividends, or maybe give out even more employee compensation.
b) if they issue RSU's at $Y, then buyback stock to drive the price up to $Z, the employee's take $Y as ordinary income, and $Z-$Y as cap gains, which is usually taxed more favourably
I've reluctantly switched to NewPipe, and can watch videos ad free. I'm all for supporting a business that provides a free service, but now it feels like they're just abusing their position, which is why I switched.
Otherwise, DDG is basically privacy chrome on top of Bing's results.
Are you 100% confident that this is the case? I personally have a completely different experience (their search results have gotten much better than they used to).
OTOH, if it's anything that has been SEO'd, I find google has gotten really bad. Last week I tried to google for what frying pan to buy, and everything I saw was a un-trustworthy ad.
Incidentally, it's the same for python: you google some very common thing like how to sort a list, the first few links are spam (but the docs are still high in the list usually). You google something obscure and usually get the relevant stack overflow first.
It seems like such an obvious next step, but google is too rich for its own good at this point and doesnt need to do anything.
From a user point of view, it's frustrating to look through the result, finding a list of ads, a commercial site, a few videos, a definition, a wikipedia link, a commercial site, and so on.
Instead, users have a pretty good idea of what kind of result they want. It would make it so much easier if the results are grouped together.
For example, a search engine could group results under individual tabs, separating results from user generated content sites, forums, commerce and commercial blogs, Wikipedia, content farms, and so on. Within each tab, there could be subtabs grouping results under each domain.
This would make searching the web a much less frustrating experience.
And don't we know it! YouTube has quickly become unwatchable. Some of my favorite channels are now available on Nebula. I encourage more creators to go there. I think it's $30/yr, I got a promo and got it for $11.