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Comment by helpfulclippy | Hacker News Reader

I am... OK with the Youtube algorithm. I find that it is pretty good at this point at not giving me stuff I find awful. However, I think it has lost a lot of ground in helping me find newer, more obscure topics that I'd also find interesting, compared to where it was 5-6 years ago.

Overall I think Youtube IS a jewel of the Internet. The amount of astoundingly interesting, informative, entertaining, educational, insightful, important or just plain COOL content that has appeared over the time it has been up is phenomenal, and it is like a Library of Alexandria of our time.

My big fear is that someday, Youtube will no longer be profitable. And then, like so many other beloved services, it will send out an e-mail saying it's been a great X years, blah blah blah, we'll be shutting down in a few months, bye.

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> My big fear is that someday, Youtube will no longer be profitable

Why do you think it's profitable? It makes for a decent chunk of Alphabet's income, but they don't break down costs so we have no way of knowing exactly how much it costs to store and seemlessly deliver zettabytes of video.

YouTube is like 10% of Alphabets profits and there are thousands of creators relying on it for a living. Anecdotal but the creators I follow all talk about YouTube giving them a much better monetization strategy than any other platform. So I don't think this will be any time soon

Twitter's recently rolled out their ad revenue sharing arrangement and it's a 20% margin (under $50k is 3%) vs YouTube's 45%. Maybe low balling the early days to build traction? Also people probably aren't consuming 1 person's Twitter the way they consume Youtube channels.

https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/creator-dashboard

Still it will be interesting to see how many hundreds/thousands of mom & pop careers will be built off Twitter now.

Is that really about Twitter sharing ad revenue? The page is just talking about paid "subscriptions" to Twitter creators. That seems like a business model where the revenue cut is irrelevant. Nobody will pay $5/month to subscribe to one person's tweets.

Yes the FAQ sucks but it's the same deal as TikTok/Youtube/etc: you get a 80% of revenue made from ads that appear on your content.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-share-ad-revenue-...

It apparently hasn't fully rolled out yet so the docs are confusing. They claimed it has started on Feb for Blue subscribers but that may change.

They'll just get much shittier long before they ever actually shut down.

i do share that fear of the day that most of the youtube content will be "gone" (behind some kind of login-wall)

Why would they be unprofitable? They have a range of steps before that. Heck there are github repos that let you use youtube as free(terabytes) storage, by encoding data as noisy video. I think first step before "bankrupcy" would be to remove all videos that have 0 views in 24 months (which is most of their library).

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