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Comment by impulser_ | Hacker News Reader

Ads is still growing and very profitable, YouTube is back to growing, GCP profitable for two quarters in a row, and lower losses on other bets.

Google is still Google.

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GCP is an interesting one -- I helped a company go through some of the hoops for GCP and AWS and the former was... difficult. It felt like someone tried to copy AWS, didn't fix all the links or think the whole thing through, and just sort of put it out there. I remember we were locked out of our account for like a month for some reason and there was a lot of handoff between different reps, for churn or for some business process reason I wasn't aware of, but it was a pretty jarring experience that made us not want to invest a lot of time there

This is very interesting. My experience at a large company migrating to GCP. The consultants and reps were 10x more eager to help us compared to AWS, and the migration went fairly smooth for most parts

Which aligns with the primary difference between Google and Amazon, customer service. Amazon is as good at service as Google is bad. If my memory serves me correct, Google had outsourced at least some of the GCP customer service to HP.

Customer service isn't wildly different between GCP and AWS. I think it's the finish of the product. AWS has far more finished product and even for smaller services it mostly works as intended. While GCP it is very hit or miss. I have seen so many edge cases in smaller GCP services like composer, old ML platform, dataflow etc.

While GCP is definitely more intuitive. You don't need to create 2 different IAM profile for anything you want to solve. So GCP feels more like Digital Ocean + bunch of services with varying quality.

GCP has a smaller number of services but they tend to be very well designed with excellent taste.

AWS has a bazillion services, often very obviously designed by people without good taste and/or experience.

GCP's incompleteness is super annoying. The general daftness of AWS service design is tiring and somewhat soul-sucking.

I used to think that Google would eventually get there, but lately I've realized that they are totally happy offering an 80% product forever. So for now I'm very reluctantly team AWS.

> GCP has a smaller number of services but they tend to be very well designed with excellent taste.

I would have said the same before using GCP. At first everything goes super smoothly and the experience is definitely better than AWS. Then you start seeing undocumented behaviour again and again. In comparison, it is much rarer to get any undocumented behavior in AWS.

Fully agree with this. I have used GKE at scale as an example. It starts to break down significantly once your cluster reaches a couple hundred nodes. Only way to solve it is to have support resize your controller nodes manually. And as support for anything google is horrible, that task takes multiple hours.

Not my experience. They tend to work well. The problems comes when you want to do something very slightly unusual.

> The problems comes when you want to do something very slightly unusual.

That's exactly what I said. Main services are more or less stable, but there are edge cases in smaller services if you want to do something unusual.

It’s growing because they are slaughtering golden geese at an alarming rate propping up growth

- Youtube ads assault - Endless scrolling on SERP to show more ads as you need to scroll through degrading results. - etc

every surface has increased ad load, every service increased prices. So of course that props up growth.

Ads is in full value extraction mode now, the question is, how sustainable it is, but that’s a question for another quarter

See Facebook the same. You can’t share actual links outside the app anymore which drives engagement as every user clicking on a link now goes back right to being a monthly active

Yes, very noticeable. Rows and rows of ads in Google Search, and I am seeing less and less quality results over time.

Not just ads in YouTube, but a 20% price increase

I myself contributed to those ad earnings by watching 4 ads in a 10 min video.

I’m genuinely curious to know: why do some folks browse the web without using an ad blocker? That’s not a rhetorical question. I understand grandma may not be technically savvy enough. But for anyone reading HN, why aren’t you using an ad blocker?

There are some people who see it as an ethical position: ad supported businesses need to serve ads to survive. If you don't want to see those ads, and the business doesn't offer a subscription plan, just don't go to those websites.

> just don't go to those websites

I know this is Youtube, but in general: I would gladly avoid those sites but they are gaming the SEO. They are getting in the way.

Maybe they watched it on a TV and do not have access to an ad blocker on the Youtube app on the TV.

SmartTube is a life-saver on TV. It replaces the default youtube app and removes all the ads/sponsored sections

Ad blockers don't work on phones, which is increasingly the medium of consumption.

Ad blockers currently work on Android devices[1][2][3][4], preferably by gaining root on the device and using a de-Googled Android, using F-Droid[1] and/or manually installing packages with FFUpdater[1].

If you really have to use Apple devices and other post-general-purpose-computing locked down devices (e.g. televisions), you could try self-hosting privaxy[5][6] (or similar) which performs MITM manipulation of web traffic to remove ads, including via JS or CSS injection.

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.marmaro.krt.ffupdater/

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi...

[3] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-android

[4] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/ublock-origin...

[5] https://github.com/Barre/privaxy

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31432848

On android, just use firefox. Pretty enjoyable if you just switch to firefox everywhere.

Brave works just fine on phones...

Honest question: Why not subscribe?

IIRC content creators get more revenue per user from YT premium than ads.

I pay, and it’s worth it for me, but I hate giving money to Google, and paying nearly twice what any streaming service charges is painful.

Twice? For me YT Premium is cheaper than even the cheapest Neflix plan, same for Disney and HBO, only Apple TV is cheaper (barely).

YT premium is now $13.99.

Netflix starts at $6.99.

That's exactly double if you ignore the missing pennies.

Netflix Standard is $15.49 though, if we're comparing without ads.

The $6.99/mo Netflix plan is with ads. The comparable YouTube plan is $0/mo.

The comparble Netflix plan to YT premium is $15.49/mo.

And YouTube includes music streaming.

In the UK YT Premium is £11.99, Netflix Standard (no ads) is £10.99

For comparison my 5G phone plan is £10/month, and my home fibre connection ADSL is £22/month.

YouTube premium is therefore a tough sell - with netflix you at least get loads of stuff you wouldn't have seen otherwise, YT you get the same stuff you could see anyway, just without ads.

I personally don't see that as a good deal. If it was like £2 or £3 a month to remove the ads, then great sign me up. But it's not.

Apparently I’m paying considerably extra for the ease of managing my subscription through Apple.

Don’t worry, I offset you some by installing adblockers on many older people’s phones and computers, especially people who aren’t technical and had no idea how to do it themselves.

Ditto. But I do wonder how much ad time is just people using it to listen to music in the background and not really listening to ads (maybe this is priced in anyways and it doesn't matter, but traveling around eastern europe a lot I was surprised how many people used Youtube this way)

The advertising people know that they can slip information and impressions into your brain whether you think you're listening/reading/clicking or not.

All they really need to do is tick a few % of the marginal decision-makers who need to (for example) buy a car to say "I should consider a Ford" and they've covered the ad budget.

This is why "impression" metrics are not very useful. Perhaps 99% of impressions are just wasted so advertisers prefer to pay for clicks, or even conversions.

You could find ways around that .. after all this is Hacker News.

YTDL over my dead body.

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