Hacker News Reader

Comment by joegibbs | Hacker News Reader

Why does YouTube allow people to access it in Albania? Surely if a country doesn't let you make money from your service you'd withdraw from it, or possibly require Albanians to pay for YouTube premium to access it.

View on HN

Another possibility is that they want to quell competition. If Albanians couldn't watch YouTube, that would create a ripe market for a YouTube alternative to make a name for itself. From there, it could expand to other countries in the region, and then maybe to Europe as a whole.

How would such a company pay for those bandwidth costs? YouTube was famously unprofitable until long after the Google acquisition. I don’t think the EU markets would provide as long an investment runway as YouTube got for this theoretical competitor.

I presume the same way YouTube, Amazon, Uber, etc., did it: by operating in the red and getting funded.

I think there are likely a lot of VCs who would be very interested in having a stake in a serious competitor to YouTube.

Albania is a small and poor country, the three million albanians probably don't cause them significant server costs, and they couldn't afford Youtube Premium anyway.

Because Albanians help boost numbers on videos where monitization is viable, thus making the platform look more appealing to advertisers.

That would destroy their position as the one and only video hosting service in Albania and likely spread to other countries.

Because people still watch Youtube and Youtube can legally add these people to the viewcount and then sell that viewcount to the buyers of ads.

Why do the buyers of ads care? I don't get it. They only care about impressions of ads.

Because Youtube 'sells' the viewcount as a substitute for the impressions. 'Hey, look! This video had 55M views! Imagine how many buyers you could have!'

That makes absolutely no sense. The advertisers can't advertise to Albanian so they can't pay for neither impressions nor clicks.

If you mean that the goal of this is to attract advertisers by seeing a larger view count, then that doesn't make any sense either as I don't think there's any doubt among advertisers that YouTube is the leading video platform online.

"Bigger number = better" marketing is still easier than something more fine-grained, even if YT is the leading platform.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com