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Comment by davidiach | Hacker News Reader

I would add that part of the reason YouTube is struggling is because it has become a pretty lousy product for today's standards.

- comments are completely broken

- finding stuff is a process of trial and error

- too many invasive ads

- no pleasant surprises; every time I open Facebook or Twitter I find something new that interests me, which makes me wanna come back, not so with YouTube. In fact I might find better pleasant surprises opening the homepage of Amazon.

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Those reasons would explain why the product is failing but the product isn't failing. It has 1bn viewers and $4bn revenue. By any measure those are signs of a very successful product offering.

Youtube's problems are that their costs are too high. If you have $4bn coming in, but providing the service to generate that $4bn costs $4bn, then you need to do things to make your business more efficient. It really is that simple. Making a "better" product won't change anything if every dollar you bring in still costs a dollar to service. You'd just push the revenue up and still make no profit.

For comparison, note that YouTube has ~3x as much revenue as Netflix, and ~20x as many viewers.

http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/NFLX/4026650765x0x804...

> Youtube's problems are that their costs are too high.

Is that true? I'm definitely not saying it's not, but it's not self-evidently true.

Is $4 per user per year a lot to pay for being the platform they watch video on?

I agree with your point that their challenge is not about making their product more attractive to new users, but an equally valid conclusion would be that their problem is that their product isn't generating enough value per user, so they can't ask enough value in return - which would be a product design problem, or that their product is generating significantly more value for its users than it's managing to demand in return, which would be a "monetisation" / revenue stream issue.

I only meant that their costs are too high compared to the revenue per user. It's absolutely true that they could solve their profitability issues by increasing their revenue per user assuming that didn't in turn increase the costs.

  Is $4 per user per year a lot to pay for being the 
  platform they watch video on?

If the billion viewers are watching hours of HD video every day, it's a great price.

If the billion viewers include anyone who has viewed a single video at any quality in the last 10 years, it's a lot less impressive.

Youtube is the most frustrating example of feeling like software innovation for the user is getting stagnant. I'm sure there is constant progress being made behind the scenes, but it feels like it's the same at best, or worse even than it was 3 or 4 years ago as a user:

- I watch a lot of games channels, yet have never watched and constantly tell them I'm not interested in channels that are about Minecraft, yet every time I go my 'What to watch' list there are more Minecraft channels to tell them to ignore.

- I watch a lot of powerlifting/strenght training and rehab videos, and then get recommended with lots of sports channels that are entirely about soccer.

- Recommended channels are almost always non-sensical related to my preferences and browsing history. Currently they have tons of Bollywood/Hindi channels and Jimmy Kimmel in there. No idea why.

- The subscriptions list doesn't order them to put the ones with unviewed new videos near the top of the list. On my laptop there is only room to show 3 channels before the rest get put into a hover-to-show overlay, so I have to take that extra step every time to discover whether there are new vids in 90% of my subs.

On the plus side:

- They also finally removed the need to click twice to not be interested in a channel, even though it was the only option in the click-to-show list.

I'm not suggesting that change for the sake of change is an essential part of UI innovation, the opposite is often true; the right experience can stand the test of time. But the Youtube user experience has been pretty poor for a long time in my opinion, and in places feels actively worse by design.

My only real success story with it is their live stream service for watching live League of Legends is awesome compared to Twitch or Azubu.

I think failing is perhaps an overly strong interpretation of the situation though.

i occasionally binge on a specific topic for a few minutes and all my recommends are shot to heck because of it. Also, my country seems to be thrown between Japan, Singapore, India, and china (Hong Kong) pretty randomly, making for even stranger foreign language inclusions in my recommend list.

> I would add that part of the reason YouTube is struggling is because it has become a pretty lousy product for today's standards.

Add to that list:

- searching for music is completely (but silently) broken after Youtube music was launched and geo-restrictions imposed on the serarch-results.

Knowing what used to be there, it just seems like someone took a format c: over entire youtube and nobody running the show noticed.

Genuine question: What on earth is interesting about Facebook, especially why is Facebook more interesting than YouTube?

I agree that YouTube's ads are invasive and annoying but finding stuff is fairly easy. Agree on comments. Twitter is not at all interesting to me but I can at least understand why some find it interesting, but Facebook - I just don't see that.

> Genuine question: What on earth is interesting about Facebook, especially why is Facebook more interesting than YouTube?

Quality content. It's a bit like HN, but with more bells and whistles, broader topic coverage, and with most of the commenters being your personal, real-life acquaintances. Of course Facebook experience strongly depends on the type of friends you have, but I guess a lot of other things in real life depend on that as well.

And the video quality is (still) terrible, or possibly even getting worse.

You might have a weak link somewhere in your connection to YouTube. ISPs have been known to throttle YouTube to reduce bandwidth costs.

Almost all of the content I find on YouTube is 1080P, and some of it is running at 60FPS.

I mean the (re-)encoding, not the resolution.

The quality varies - most of my subscriptions now are in 1080, and one of them is 1080p60 (very nice). The 4k content only works for me Tuesday-Thursday-ish (too much network congestion, it seems, despite being on Time Warner's new 100mb service).

What I'd like is the option to filter by video length. Anything under 45 seconds seems to be posted by teenagers, and I just don't care.

I would also add that finding stuff is hard because there is no way to see the ranking from the search results (and it sometimes yields to videos having more downvotes than upvotes)

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