Sometimes the answer really is: it is well managed product.
They take 45% of YouTube premium subscription revenue. That’s higher than the App Store (30%), Spotify (30%), and any other content marketplace on the internet.
I think they get a free pass for now because they allow creators to monetize with their own native ads within videos. If I had to guess, this may become a point of contention in the future…
The fact that we’ve accepted such ridiculously high profit margins from tech companies is simply due to their network effects monopolies, and the impossibility of competing with them.
Just look at any other marketplace business with more competition, like say a grocery store or any brick and mortar retail. Their net margins are often sub-5%. Physically shipping goods across the world is far more expensive than delivering video.
Only other monopolies, like Governments, can get away with charging 45% taxes. Having known a few Youtube employees and also a few federal government employees, I would say the low stress, low effort, low fear of layoffs, low work output expectations are...ahem...similar.
Youtubes profit margin isn't that high so it is pretty close to that, it took a long time for it to get profitable even with Google ads, unlike the digital stores that serves customers for basically nothing compared to how much revenue they bring in.
Twitch also takes around that much from streamers and they still aren't profitable since it costs more to serve the streams than they make.
And then charge even higher rate if you give them more money. Ask them how they spend it? Proudly poorly. /rant
Are you sure? It is a logistics issue, not a technology issue. Streaming video, near instantly, around the world, without any perceivable user-experience issues, infinite times, for infinite users is a massive-massive technology issue.
Amazon same day deliver was problably the most revolutionary thing that came to the domain, but otherwise shipping 1000 cars across the world, while impressive, is a pretty straight forward task. The technology that you need are ships and trucks. You can use a 1950s era technology to do that.
Do you think bandwidth and storage are free?
If I open the Youtube app on my phone, I have to click through 3 menus before I can even see the newest video from the users I'm subscribed to, and then I have to watch 2 ads that change the entire layout of the app to present me more information about those ads - or I can pay $30 a month to skip those ads.
If I have spotty connectivity, I also can't buffer a video to watch anymore. I have to wait for some minimal percent to load, watch that part, then wait again. If I skip ahead, the earlier part is lost and has to be re-buffered.
Furthermore, not of immediate consequence to me, but still insufferably annoying is that creators I follow are regularly suspended from earning income on YouTube due to false copyright strikes, or saying a "bad word" that has no clear enforcement guidelines and seems to be different from person to person or day to day, and thus have begun to produce less content or found other platforms to move their videos to first.
It's pretty terrible, from my point of view. It's a bad service where a good service used to be, surviving on the dregs of goodwill and familiarity from its heyday.
Also, the amount of highjacked accounts and the length of time to regain control is absurdly long.
And Shorts. I wish I could disable Shorts from my feed.
The YouTube management has to be adaptive enough to work in the small window that society allows at that time.
If you see Youtubers getting kicked out constantly you might be subscribing to some weird stuff...
I just scrolled through my subscriptions and it's mostly music, comedy, gaming, entertainment, and science channels.
I always assume it is for DMCA or for saying curse words. Every once and a while it will be because they said something politically incorrect or used the wrong chemicals or showed a gun or something.
I think that pretty much anything except for porn and gore should be allowed. I am just scrolling and I think that this video is a good example of a vid that only lasts about a month on the site, even though it should be allowed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1B_EdVnKFg
It has "guns", it has "drugs", it has political figures, and it has minecraft so therefore it must qualify as a children's video. This channel is basically a magnet for getting wrongfully demonetized and banned by AI or some guy working in an indian call center. But 12 years ago this would be a normal video.
Another example I can think of is "youtube poops" which are unconventional mashups of copyrighted content. They constantly get taken down and need to be reuploaded:
English-speaking channels are usually more "polite" in the way they speak, while Spanish-speaking channels are way crazier, using expressions that no American would dare to use xD
Regarding Japanese, I don't understand enough to have a judgement, but Japanese people are usually very careful and non-confrontational.
A website? ("platform" for advertising) A website's users? ("you are the product") Paid subscriptions? (insufficient revenue to sustain operations)
If YouTube is a "product" does that mean US products liability laws apply? (Please support your answer with facts not opinions)
History so far has shown website popularity varies over time
https://hosting.com/blog/the-most-visited-websites-every-yea...
Would anyone today claim that, for example, Yahoo.com was "extremely well managed"? Yahoo was #1 for many years. Change is inevitable
It is hilarious to see people obsessed with targeting virtually anything for "disruption" until their favorite website becomes the target
In any organisation there is always room for improvement. Monopoly power reduces, perhaps even eliminates, incentive to improve
Creators themselves PAY to upload/host something. Their in-video ads are what allows monetization.
No adds at all from youtube. Uploading COSTS money, maybe a few dollars.
Creators make their money solely from sponsors or selling/advertising something themselves.
It isn't very popular since the internet doesn't advertise your content for you, youtube do that so its much easier for content creators to get big on youtube. Also it is free to upload on youtube, so small creators start there, small creators later grow to big creators and stay on youtube.
Or option 3 - don't use the site. Which is what the person you are responding to decided to do.
Nobody is obligated to buy anything, whether priced fairly or not. Its always valid to simply walk away if you feel like it.
My issues with YouTube are usually limited to some UI problems. I think I can even list them all:
1) Thumbnails autoplay but the disclaimer about paid content is so large that often I click to watch the video and get the paid content info page.
2) Translates stuff depending on my browser language and IP. Very annoying
3) The add to queue button sometimes doesn't work and just plays the video right away. Very annoying
4) When I'm listening to songs, sometimes I just let it auto play the next song it picks and often it picks 2 hours long video of songs sticked one after another. Very annoying
5) The share button adds som ID that I have to remove every time, it's probably to track my sharing behavior. Annoying
6) When chromecasting, tapping on a video or receiving it through airdrop used to give me an option to add it to the queue or play it right away. Now just plays right away. Annoying
7) If I navigate from a page and go back I'm presented with a different page and often the video I noticed previously isn't there.
Besides that, I think I don't have much issues with YT. Best money spent on a premium subscription ever.
you tube is close to perfect using third party clients, like PipePipe.
it automatically skips paid adverts in the video. not even a shadow of actual ads. background music only. etc.
but now they are adding those dumb features, such as translating titles, as if i'm a peasant who don't speak several languages. so lame.
I believe there are positive cases of karma when a person becomes moderator.
Either reducing the number of ads (they really have increased quite a lot) or give a bigger piece of the advert pie to creators.
The problem is that if youtube is ever threatened its trivial for them to do both those things, and they can almost certainly outlast any up and coming competitor in a price war.
It was a few days ago for the AI auto-filter and also Beato copyright claims.
Then there's the issue of AI slop channels, and pre-AI slop directed at children like the infamous Elsa and Spiderman spam.
Every so often they also are in the news for AB testing some anti-adblock measure. And people used to adblock who see it with ads for the first time in a while seem to always be shocked at the level of ads for pure fraud or malware.
YouTube seems to be a terrible place if you put anything up there that you actually care about. But I agree on one thing: it's not "ripe for disruption". Google sank so much losses into it for so many years just to have this monopoly, so it's not going to be easy to replace.
They have all the eyeballs. All creators that got fucked over YT stay on the platform if their accounts are restored. And who can blame them, where are they going to go, Vimeo?