Comment by anoncow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anoncow | Hacker News Reader

I can't find a source which has all the financial figures for YouTube, but YouTube had a gross revenue of 29 bn USD in 2022. Alphabet had 55 bn USD in net income in 2022 of which how much was YouTube's share in the net income is unknown (or at least I couldn't find it).

Let's use some assumptions to get to a number.

1. Let's assume that out of the 29 bn USD revenue that YouTube brings in 55% is shared with creators. Thus we are left with 13 bn USD.

2. We know that YouTube's share in the overall revenue of Alphabet was 10.5%. Let's assume that all of Alphabet's properties were proportionately profitable (highly incorrect assumption). If the properties were proportionately profitable, YouTube's would have bought in a net income of 5.75 bn.

3. In the past it has been reported that YouTube has been breakeven from a profitability perspective.

This means that YouTube's net profit is in the range of 0 to 5bn USD. This is at best a gross profit margin of 17% which is not good for an internet services company.

I strongly believe technology like NewPipe should exist and companies shouldn't push for more DRM. But end users should not misuse open technologies so much so that companies end up with no other option but E2E encryption for video.

I wonder if a torrent style equivalent for bandwidth sharing for things like YouTube content creators could work. Like you get ads unless you seed enough and then no ads when you consume.

I think it'd only work as a near seamless ui experience and not actually using torrents or any extra setup or complications. Probably branded a bit differently.

Bandwidth costs money, YouTube can probably do it cheaper than end users at scale. But this isn’t about reduced bandwidth expenses, this is about maximising profit extraction.

> But this isn’t about reduced bandwidth expenses, this is about maximising profit extraction.

Arent these goals one and the same?

Profit maximization is required under a capitalist system. By optimizig bandwidth expenses, you are achieving profit maximization.

No, the cost of bandwidth is less than their subscription value, presumably providing this option would result in less profit despite lower server costs, but they already have a global CDN so I assume it’s cost is relatively low anyway. I imagine if this was a path they wanted to go down, they could crowdsource it via chrome directly, without providing any positive value for users.

The problem with p2p for video is that the storage and bandwidth requirements are enormous most platform consumers are using mobile devices with limited storage and bandwidth which would have difficulty contributing to the network.

Maybe some type of appliance one could run out of their home to buy in or something? But a lot of home users have terrible upload or no internet at all.

Peertube is great but could never keep up with the sheer volume of data uploaded to YouTube.

Exactly what you described exists and is called PeerTube.

https://joinpeertube.org

https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube

> Let's assume that out of the 29 bn USD revenue that YouTube brings in 55% is shared with creators. Thus we are left with 13 bn USD.

That’s a very poor and totally off assumption to start with, and makes it seem like YouTube is extremely generous. I’d guess YouTube shares, at best, 20% of the ad revenue with the content creator.

It's 55%. This is the first non-Google result from a Google search:

https://www.yrcharisma.com/the-youtube-revenue-split-who-kee...

Yes but this is only for creators who are large enough. Smaller creators still get ads on their videos, but dont get paid for it

Right. Creators not in YT's partner program are not paid.

Should YT run ads on non-monetized content? It's a fair question, and I can see a justifications either way.

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