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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for paying for things instead of paying for things instead of ads, but someone enlighten me, is youtube not profitable these days as is, even premium isn't paying for itself? Moreover, even paying for youtube premium, you cannot avoid all ads (for example, sponsored segments).

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Sponsored content doesn't really bother me, I usually skip it, but I watch some of them depending on the creator.

One reason (other than just money in general) that it's useful for YouTubers is because it's pretty easy to get demonetized depending on what kind of content you make.

Ad situations like "the publisher payed me to play this game" is usually fine with me too if the game is interesting and the content is good.

YouTube is profitable, but Google isn't content with profitable. They want profit maximization, which is a bad thing. I feel like the world would be a better place if we had something like eBay but for companies: just like the seller gets the SECOND highest price bid, companies should also be content with the second highest level of profit maximization, defined in terms of percentile...

The only amount of profit that is acceptable is more profit. $5B in profit is utter failure if you made the same amount last year. For a long time now companies will do anything to be MORE profitable.

EDIT: Seems very appropriate https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fq...

> you cannot avoid all ads (for example, sponsored segments).

Look into SponsorBlock, as it allows the community to mark such segments, and your browser will automatically skip them.

There is also projects you can run in your local network that skips the segments when playing youtube videos on chromecast. Using the same crowdsourced data from SponsorBlock. The one I use: https://github.com/gabe565/CastSponsorSkip

I think the average number of minutes per user must be increasing. Creators get paid by watch time, so premium would need to scale with watch time in order to remain lucrative.

it might be profitable but they figure they can make it more profitable; there has been a lot of inflation in the last few years and every other video subscription service has been hiking up their pricing recently

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