Get fucked. I vote we remove API access to any focus state information.
Fuck you google.
One might also say it was unsustainable from the start, video is incredibly expensive to host and especially moderate.
All we're seeing right now is the beginning of the end of the ad-financed world. Someone has to pay the bills in the end and advertisement spending is on the way down, more and more of it is going to influencers/TTL instead of traditional ATL/BTL marketing.
‘YouTube is failing because free tier is too expensive to be offset by ads’ and ‘YouTube premium is overly expensive’ can both be true. Shareholders care about maximising profits now, not overall product longevity.
Agree in principle, but I'd raise the serious question if Youtube is profitable in the first place. Every minute, 500 hours of video are uploaded [1], so the storage growth given 1.5 GB/h is at least (not including compression, duplication across multiple DCs, edge nodes, whatever) 750 GB / minute, 45 TB / hour or 1.080 TB / day.
At 10 $/TB (and that is a figure from before the AI boom making all costs explode) they have to spend 10.800 $ per day just in HDD costs, on top of that comes the server hardware, racks, switches, datacenter construction costs, and then the cost of running all of that - electricity for the servers, cooling, internet egress bandwidth (in total, all video sites made up 65% traffic of the entire Internet pre-AI boom).
It is estimated that YT makes about 36 billion $ of revenue [3], assuming a split of 50/50 with creators [4] that means 18 billion $ end up in Youtube as gross revenue. From that, take off 10% for music licenses (estimated [5]), 25% for taxes (assuming for simplicity an average 20% corporate tax plus 5% VAT), that leaves 11.7 billion $. And that's... not that much, given that R&D, infrastructure investment, advertising expenses, costs of preferential deals with device manufacturers and phone carriers ("zero rating"), operational expenses (i.e. electricity, bandwidth) and headcount (moderation!) haven't been taken into account.
In the end, I think that unlike 2015 [6] Youtube is actually profitable - but barely, nowhere near close to the profit margins of Google Ads. Certainly not enough to appeal to the stonk markets and beancounters, and that is what drives the ever increasing push for ads and premium.
As a side question... I think what irks Google the most is that individual "influencers" can make millions of dollars in monthly income from sponsorships but Google sees nothing of that money at all.
[1] https://soax.com/research/how-many-hours-of-video-are-upload...
[2] https://www.tubefilter.com/2023/01/20/sandvine-video-data-ba...
[3] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/youtube-statistics/
[4] https://digiday.com/marketing/what-it-takes-to-get-paid-by-y...
[5] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/gema-ts-104.html
[6] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make-go...
We'll see. Until then, it's cheap and works fine.
What basic browser function is that? Video playback with the video tag? It's only been around for about 15 years and mainstream for 10 years.
* tangiential rambling old-person side-note: RealPlayer was a weird early example of a piece of software that was actually _better_ on Linux: The windoze version was notorious for also installing a thousand other pieces of spyware/adware and other trash, taking over your system and making it worse, to the point that people avoided it like the plague... But none of that crapware supported Linux, so the Linux version was just this relatively clean player that came as a self-contained, easy to install rpm and worked pretty well. I used to use RealPlayer a fair bit back in my early Linux days. When I used to tie an onion my belt, which was the style at the time.