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Comment on Goodbye Youtube and thanks for all the fish

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MysticKetchup@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

The amount of ads on YouTube only seems to get more and more invasive over time. And I’d have less of a problem with them if they didn’t keep showing me the same ads over and over and over again.
Even with all that, I would pay (subscription wise, not like I haven’t rented/bought movies from them) if I actually knew where the money was going. YouTube is surely expensive to operate, but we don’t know how much money it costs to actually run it vs how much money is extracted via executives and shareholders.

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fugacity@kbin.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
If you read around you'll find (perhaps surprisingly to you) that YouTube operates at a loss. So in response to your points:

You can pay to get the ads removed. They make less money off of you when they can't serve you ads, and I'm sure they're trying to operate at less of a loss.

Alphabet is a public company, and it must release certain information about YouTube. Anyways, I'm pretty sure they aren't using the money to directly line the shareholder profits. The reality of it is that it's probably just another arm that Alphabet uses as part of its monopolistic tech deathgrip, so it's not gonna be a straightforward computation. Maybe Disney could be used as a metaphor here?

If you don't wanna pay to support that, I don't exactly blame you. But practically, I don't really agree/expect that YouTube should serve you content (or even more so, people with aggressive adblockers) without you giving something in return. Either you eat ads, you pay for a subscription, or you become the product (unfortunately this last point might be true irregardless).
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- MysticKetchup@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Basically every tech company “operates at a loss” because of overzealous growth and money going to their investors/parent company/shareholders. I’ve never seen a detailed breakdown of any tech company’s financials released publicly, so I doubt there’s any way to prove this one way or another.
  
  They make less money off of you when they can’t serve you ads
  
  Genuinely I’d be interested in seeing a source for this since every metric I’ve seen from third parties is that ad free purchases gives them waaaaaay more money per user compared to the tiny RPU from ads. But maybe Google being its own ad provider changes that
  
  But practically, I don’t really agree/expect that YouTube should serve you content (or even more so, people with aggressive adblockers) without you giving something in return.
  
  Never said I was owed anything by them, just that I have no moral or ethical qualms continuing to use adblock on a giant corporation
  
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- makyo@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Where do you read that Youtube is operating at a loss? The last article I can find mentioning that is from something like 10 years ago.
  
  In the last few years they have split Youtube income out of the overall income and it’s not like they aren’t making money with it - roughly $7B in the last report I can find.
  
  Let’s not forget that the strategy of operating at a loss is arguably anticompetitive and monopolistic - not every company has the luxury of doing that, making it extremely difficult to compete against them. Seems pretty clear, with the incessant ads, that they’ve accomplished the first step in that and are rounding the corner to extracting capital from their users now. So they’re not exactly a benevolent actor in this either.
  
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