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Comment by Htsthbjig | Hacker News Reader

"Is youtube profitable?" Oh yeah, very, it is eating traditional TV alive.

In Europe Governments want to intervene because it is taking so much money from their tv companies, and sending good jobs and money abroad.

"If search-engine-ad-$ go puff, does it stay up or go down?"

And if a meteorite crashes in the Earth?, or a big megaexplossion on the Universe sends cosmic rays to the planet?

If nothing like this happens, there will be markets that grow, like TV from the Internet, and markets that recess, like traditional TVs. Early adopters use to benefit from growth in their markets.

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Nope, its not profitable. Infact, like the sun its dilated the advertising dollar, which means not only traditional TV mediums are loosing viewers to, they are loosing value per advertising minute sold.

Its also not eating traditional TV. You don't sit down to watch a series on youtube. There is no such thing as longform youtube. There are no profitable 30minute episodic videos on youtube that aren't pirated.

Content is king, and if you are producing shit content (cough 90% of the US TV market) saturated with adverts and repetition, users don't turn to youtube, they turn to netflix.

Netflix will eat all, Youtube is, and unless something changes (like no user uploads) will always be a subsidised media charity store.

Yes, its cornered the MTV music video and nutshot compilation market. It has enabled niche video makers for things like hobbies and such. but there is literally no money in that either.

> Its also not eating traditional TV. You don't sit down to watch a series on youtube. There is no such thing as longform youtube. There are no profitable 30minute episodic videos on youtube that aren't pirated.

Minecraft UHC (ultra hardcore) competitions are one example of longform youtube series. Each episode is 20 to 30 minutes; you'd probably watch a couple of different people.

I assume bigger channels make money from doing it.

I'm currently watching LapisDemon (associated with the now broken ZipKrowd server) and Xisuma (Hermitcraft) playing as a team and I dip in and out of other viewpoints.

This definitely reduces the amount of telly I watch.

Is that a good thing, though? I'm not a gamer, and there are times when I take a break from YouTube and Reddit because it can be difficult to discover new content without the results being dominated by gaming (especially Minecraft).

To an outsider performing random searches, it would seem our civilization is based on games, guns, fingernail polish and BDSM.

I make no judgement. Parent post said you don't get serial content on youtube, and that's just false. You do.

If you like watching Minecraft it's great - there are thousands of hours on YouTube.

FWIW Once you start watching something YT tends to recommend more of the same.

Watching this "World's smallest v12 engine" video leads me to more engine engineering videos, no Minecraft in sight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3KdpzL3Hkk

>There are no profitable 30minute episodic

By episodic TV I mean drama, comedy, traditional TV format. Stuff that people are prepared to pay for (see netflix et al.)

Broadcasting sports is super cheap, and has little value for anything other than tier 1 events. (the expense is the rights management, something that games broadcasting has yet to really encounter.) Also note that like I said, its a niche thing, which limits its profitability. Niches always exist.

Also note the profitable. Channel4 in the UK used to deliver its catchup TV via youtube. Despite the heavy promoting it failed to get more than a few hundred thousand views across the entire library.

> There are no profitable 30minute episodic videos on youtube that aren't pirated.

I'm not sure what you mean by this sentence. Are you really suggesting that there aren't people / companies that make money with longform, original Youtube content? Or are you missing a "high quality scripted fiction" in there?

If not, here are a couple of episode lengths of shows I watch on regular basis:

* TableTop: 30-45min * Day9TV: 90min (!) * Nobbel87 lore videos: 20-30min

Niche content? Yes. But in all three cases it's their primary occupation. So those are profitable, longform Youtube videos. And they are far from the only ones.

We are talking about killing traditional TV. None of this competes with traditional TV.

The thing that is killing traditional TV is netflix and the like.

Its not even the case that Tv series start on youtube and graduate to TV/netflix. The personalities do, but I'm struggling for a show that has. Not even "zoella" has managed it. the most she's managed is an advert.

Of course this replaces traditional TV. The time I spend watching TableTop I might have spend watching a traditional game show a decade ago. I talk with other people about what happened in the latest episodes. Those shows don't fill a vacuum - they replace something else. And that something is a certain part of traditional TV.

You are right that content produced for Youtube does not in general replace scripted drama/comedy. But that is only a tiny part of traditional TV.

> In Europe Governments want to intervene because it is taking so much money from their tv companies

The European Government is planning to intervene, to stop Google putting paid adds into the search results, masquerading those adds as search results.

They also are claiming Google is fudging the actual search results by moving non add-paying competitors to the lower pages of the search.

I would go to say that youtube is a sideline: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/eu-google/ its a medium to dump adverts on.

> "Is youtube profitable?" Oh yeah, very, it is eating traditional TV alive.

Eating/destroying does not imply profitable. Look at streaming vs. the music industry, for example.

I would argue that all the changes that Google has been making to YouTube show that it, in fact, isn't particularly profitable.

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