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Comment by Ferret7446 | Hacker News Reader

There's a pretty big difference in that analogy, in that video game pirates literally cost companies nothing, as the data is served by pirates. Whereas Google directly loses money serving data for each "pirated" view of a video.

If you downloaded the videos and torrented/streamed them to other users, then the analogy would be more comparable.

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I also share a video link with many, many, many more people than I ever could convince to buy a game. I might convince 2 or 3 friends to buy a game but I can incidently get 30,000 people to watch a video with a single tweet.

Think of it more like a loss leader. Costco sells hotdogs at a loss because it brings in more than what it costs them.

I'm sure Google/YouTube has crunched the data and came to the conclusion that it isn't worth it anymore but I also don't think data can even give a complete picture. Data can't predict how many people will leave vs subscribe when all is said and done. Results from limited rollouts are not guaranteed to follow in a full rollout.

If you block ads, there's a high likelihood that many of the people who are following you also block ads.

So not only are you directly costing YouTube money, but by tweeting it, you getting thousands of people to also cost YouTube money, thus magnifying your negative impact by many orders of magnitude.

It can certainly swing both ways but I don't follow the logic that if I block ads that people follow me block ads. It varies largely from audience to audience. If my followers are mostly young, tech-savvy individuals then sure many of them are also likely blocking ads. If I'm a big Minecraft content creator and most of my audience is 9-13 year old though? It becomes much less likely.

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