4 ms·

I wonder if the reason to lower quality is really because of being generous to the rest of the world. That's just not Google. I am quite into the online advert

I wonder if the reason to lower quality is really because of being generous to the rest of the world. That's just not Google. I am quite into the online advertising world and I know that the current cpm/rpm ad revenue in many premium countries went down by 30-60%. This means a way lower margin for Google. One way to decrease the loss is lowering the total bandwidth

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
I'm all for calling out Google where it's warranted, but come on, I think the simplest explanation for this (reducing default bandwidth - note it doesn't prevent people from manually choosing HD - helps the world without costing Google much of anything) is the correct one. Lowering their bandwidth isn't going to make a lick of difference in their overall stock price one way or the other.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- prawn 7y ago
  I don't know that it's calling them out to describe a specific business reason behind a decision. It's not unreasonable for a business to adjust to maintain financial stability, especially for a "free" product served in exchange for ads.
  - gundmc 7y ago
    I'm not sure it would actually save them any money at all. They are still transcoding into the higher quality, so you don't save compute resources. The videos themselves are served from edge CDN nodes. Through peering agreements I doubt Google is paying much for bandwidth. I'm not sure where this would save Google any money. It seems to just be a helpful (if more symbolic) thing to do.
ahupp 7y ago
That's not how costs for these companies work. They have CDNs inside the networks of large ISPs, and everything else goes over leased lines with fixed capacity. They aren't paying by the byte like some Comcast overage fee.
- AznHisoka 7y ago
  Is this also the case for Netflix as well? Or do they actually pay more when people stream more?
AznHisoka 7y ago
If the CPM went down by that much, wouldn’t the huge increase in impressions offset that? Thus basically no change in revenue?

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

I'm all for calling out Google where it's warranted, but come on, I think the simplest explanation for this (reducing default bandwidth - note it doesn't prevent people from manually choosing HD - helps the world without costing Google much of anything) is the correct one. Lowering their bandwidth isn't going to make a lick of difference in their overall stock price one way or the other.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
prawn 7y ago
I don't know that it's calling them out to describe a specific business reason behind a decision. It's not unreasonable for a business to adjust to maintain financial stability, especially for a "free" product served in exchange for ads.
- gundmc 7y ago
  I'm not sure it would actually save them any money at all. They are still transcoding into the higher quality, so you don't save compute resources. The videos themselves are served from edge CDN nodes. Through peering agreements I doubt Google is paying much for bandwidth. I'm not sure where this would save Google any money. It seems to just be a helpful (if more symbolic) thing to do.

ahupp 7y ago

That's not how costs for these companies work. They have CDNs inside the networks of large ISPs, and everything else goes over leased lines with fixed capacity. They aren't paying by the byte like some Comcast overage fee.

AznHisoka 7y ago
Is this also the case for Netflix as well? Or do they actually pay more when people stream more?

AznHisoka 7y ago

If the CPM went down by that much, wouldn’t the huge increase in impressions offset that? Thus basically no change in revenue?