Just curious, if you owned YouTube with an overhead of tens of millions of dollars per year, how would you monetize it without ads/commercials, just to even keep up with operational costs?
They can block people who are using adblocker from watching, as long as they don't do that I can't really see any moral grey area here.
That’s not quite correct. YouTube pays out creators who monetize their channels using YouTube ads (separate from any sponsors in the video itself). The amount paid out varies but is around $3-5 per 1000 views.
With YouTube Premium, among other features you get to avoid seeing ads. But Google still pays out creators a share of the YouTube Premium fee. See https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276
So from my perspective paying for YouTube is more important than paying for Netflix, since with YouTube you help support smaller creators, while with Netflix money gets consolidated into big names and brands. The platform takes a cut at both, but it is still better to have some go to small creators instead of everything going into giant corporations.
you can listen to any video on mobile in the background, also no ads on mobile (so you don't need some hacky 3rd party app)
And you get YouTube music, which is comparable to Spotify (I prefer it in fact)
There's more content on YouTube then any other video platform, so in my opinion 15 per month is worth it
It’s nice to know I’m directly supporting the channels I watch too, as I can’t feasibly sign up to dozens of Patreons.
It's actually amazing that Google has let Patreon eat its lunch on this front, the latter becoming the predominant platform for direct monetization while YouTube continues playing the chump's game of seeing how much advertising they can inflict on users before they revolt.
[edit] I'm well aware of YouTube Premium, but Google's insistence on bundling it exclusively with YouTube Music greatly limits its appeal. If they offered a standalone subscription (as they are piloting in some European markets), they could probably expand their subscriber base by a significant factor.
Put another way, if Netflix were only available as part of a bundle with a cable subscription, do you imagine they'd have more or fewer subscribers than they do right now?
The salient point is YouTube/Alphabet has completely missed the opportunity of facilitating Patreon-style commerce, despite being best positioned to do so.
But instead of enabling creators to receive money directly from audiences, an advertising juggernaut like Alphabet would probably rather keep their volunteer content creators incentivized to be shills desperate for advertising dollars.
I predict all the quality creators capable of garnering support via systems like Patreon will eventually abandon YouTube altogether, leaving YouTube to become even more of a raging dumpster fire of advertising upon advertising upon advertising masquerading as content from "influencers".
I've never even had a YouTube login, but the few channels I access fully via the web interface only ever spam me with YouTube Premium offers for eliminating ads.
There's zero offering/marketing of direct-to-creator subscriptions, not that I've seen.
There's also zero chance of my buying YouTube Premium, but a non-zero chance of my giving money exclusively to the specific creators I value - even if YouTube took something along the lines of a haircut for making just those channels ad-free.
Hopefully the difference is clear.
People just ignore the ads instead.
I often bypass to Wikipedia, because it shows me what something is, not only where I can buy it.
The moment a video is born, it lives until its sponsored time runs out.
If a content creator wants to leave something up and reap some internal ad-sales, or tip-generation scheme... they just have to sponsor the video with more time.
People who like it, can also sponsor it.
And sure, have some sort of "Library of Congress" feature to save videos deemed as significant...
But once the time is up... the video is gone. Exists only in memories.
Seems like a huge portion of videos are just taking up space... start pruning.
And a lot of videos... they don't matter. 40 different versions of the same old song, 20 different shots of the same sports blooper, 900 different versions of the same boring news cast. Like... none of these need to be on there taking up space / inflating the hosting bill.
At some point, no matter how cheap cold storage is, the "dead" content costs will trump the live content streaming. Like postpone but... at some point content needs to be pruned. What's the value in keeping everything forever? 1 year after the video was last viewed? 5? Like when can you safely purge videos?
Now if 15 years from now storage has stopped becoming cheaper, the rate of new content has stopped growing, the size of new content has stopped growing, and the old content is starting to become a significant fraction of the operating costs then sure. At the moment (and for the last 15 years) none of those things is happening though.
With a strong market dominance one can then focus on profits with minimum risk. One way to raise profits would be to impose taxes, like with streamers get donations through "youtube bits". They could go further and demand taxes when any company do things that has monetary value, like say when a company want to make a video about their products. They could do like Facebook and many dating sites and offer a service of "promoting" users above other users. One can couple access to the site to hardware products like mobile phones, or split off features to "exclusive" access users. One can down rate the speed/quality of freeloaders, pushing users to upgrade their accounts to premium accounts.
The ways to monetize a market dominant position is to many to count. The hard problem is the iron grip needed on keeping users on the platform.
This is kinda what's happening already. Most major websites stopped hosting their own and instead publish on YouTube and embed it
As such they're selling their users' tracking which I hate, but they love it for the extra income and exposure their videos get.
Hosting videos is not hard at all. But this is not the reason why nobody hosts their own anymore. YouTube's very dominance is what keeps it dominant.
Also, YouTube has a data trove of metrics that interest advertisers. Why not selling those? You have a commercial page that let’s say sells clothes and you want to upload a video to target women aged 18-25. Here’s the data to show you what you need to do, and we’ll charge you $15k to give you a detailed report. Brands would go bananas for metrics like these.
It was kind of like that when interest rates were near zero, affording endless deferral of income.
I'm waiting for the day when we can solve these ills of private property with technology.
The employees and servers are expending real energy keeping YouTube operational. Meaning, whether it's through ads, a more centralized body stepping in, or some other less pervasive, opt-in business model - the thing needs to cover its own costs. I don't think a lack of private property would solve much there.
You're still thinking in the framework of capitalism.
Let me be clear that I think that doing anything but capitalism is bound to fail while we're living in a resource restricted reality.
Nonetheless, if we want to think about it for arguments sake: there are no costs associated without capitalism, only necessary work and resources. It's really hard to think without the restrictions of capitalism for me, because that's the only way I've ever experienced and it's so effective at prioritizing resources and productivity. Anything else has historically always fallen short.
Though it's still a pretty fucked up and heartless system
That's just redefining the term costs to not include work and resources. The term resources alone makes up nearly every operational cost possible: time, man power, CPU power, metals, environment, ...
Capitalism has nothing to with defining what something costs, it has everything to do with resource ownership and its distribution.
"Necessary work and resources" is exactly what is meant by costs. Scarcity is a property of the universe we live in. Capitalism doesn't prescribe or create scarcity, it just offers a framework for dealing with it. All other systems also have costs and operational expenses—they just aren't borne primarily by those making the decisions.
The problem is using social services to generate capital. A public good for private interests is wrought with contradictions. And, as you can see, covering costs =/= generating capital.
Not even mentioning that the mode continuously works to undermine itself in making production more efficient by developing technology and driving down prices but profits as a whole too.