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Just curious, if you owned YouTube with an overhead of tens of millions of dollars per year, how would you monetize it without ads/commercials, just to even kee

Just curious, if you owned YouTube with an overhead of tens of millions of dollars per year, how would you monetize it without ads/commercials, just to even keep up with operational costs?

bigbillheck 5y ago
Not my problem.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Atlas667 5y ago
Alas! Your question reveals how capitalist production is both for the consumers but at the same time must contradict the interests of the consumers. I'm waiting for the day when we can solve these ills of private property with technology.
- somethingAlex 5y ago
  People seem to invoke the word capitalism whenever things aren't a utopia for everyone involved. Still, even without capitalism, you'll have to contend with the issue of how to cover operational expenses. Say some, more centralized, agent decides YouTube is worthwhile - how would it get paid for? A state sponsorship made possible by a tax of some sort? Perhaps it would transition to be completely pay-to-play? The employees and servers are expending real energy keeping YouTube operational. Meaning, whether it's through ads, a more centralized body stepping in, or some other less pervasive, opt-in business model - the thing needs to cover its own costs. I don't think a lack of private property would solve much there.
  - y4mi 5y ago
    > Still, even without capitalism, you'll have to contend with the issue of how to cover operational expenses You're still thinking in the framework of capitalism. Let me be clear that I think that doing anything but capitalism is bound to fail while we're living in a resource restricted reality. Nonetheless, if we want to think about it for arguments sake: there are no costs associated without capitalism, only necessary work and resources. It's really hard to think without the restrictions of capitalism for me, because that's the only way I've ever experienced and it's so effective at prioritizing resources and productivity. Anything else has historically always fallen short. Though it's still a pretty fucked up and heartless system
    - xboxnolifes 5y ago
      > Nonetheless, if we want to think about it for arguments sake: there are no costs associated without capitalism, only necessary work and resources. That's just redefining the term costs to not include work and resources. The term resources alone makes up nearly every operational cost possible: time, man power, CPU power, metals, environment, ... Capitalism has nothing to with defining what something costs, it has everything to do with resource ownership and its distribution.
    - nybble41 5y ago
      > Nonetheless, if we want to think about it for arguments sake: there are no costs associated without capitalism, only necessary work and resources. "Necessary work and resources" is exactly what is meant by costs. Scarcity is a property of the universe we live in. Capitalism doesn't prescribe or create scarcity, it just offers a framework for dealing with it. All other systems also have costs and operational expenses—they just aren't borne primarily by those making the decisions.
  - Atlas667 5y ago
    The contradiction of the capitalist mode of production is not that it tries to cover its costs. That is necessary in any system of trade/production. The problem is using social services to generate capital. A public good for private interests is wrought with contradictions. And, as you can see, covering costs =/= generating capital. Not even mentioning that the mode continuously works to undermine itself in making production more efficient by developing technology and driving down prices but profits as a whole too.
hbgl 5y ago
By building a profile of each user based on their viewing history and then when they use the search engine that I also own I would show them personalized results with sponsored links to products to buy. Plus I would be selling that information to third parties. And then I would of course also show some ads to all of the the normies that surf without an adblocker.
- danuker 5y ago
  Why not both? I get nothing but ads on Google lately. I often bypass to Wikipedia, because it shows me what something is, not only where I can buy it.
- pwython 5y ago
  You wouldn't even come close to breaking even from display/search ads like you mentioned. Advertisers would rather pay a lot more for pre-roll video ads, even if the user doesn't click. Those video ads usually result in a much higher ROAS. And people searching for funny cat videos on YouTube is a hell of a lot harder to categorize and monetize than traditional SERP.
marcodiego 5y ago
I don't think everything needs to be monetized. I wouldn't monetize it, I'd use a p2p protocol like peertube.
- danuker 5y ago
  So, it would be a public service? It was kind of like that when interest rates were near zero, affording endless deferral of income.
wintermutestwin 5y ago
I would gladly pay for an ad free youtube if they weren't also stealing my data.
- Aachen 5y ago
  This. I'd have been paying for years if it weren't Google who'd only use the payment details to link it to an identity. I have and pay for Spotify and Netflix because they're independent companies without an ad and tracking business as their main profit center, I'd be happy to add another video service to the mix. I've tried Nebula but saw all the interesting content ever posted (it's that small) in two evenings.
elliekelly 5y ago
Charge the content creator based on tiered usage. Why does it have to be different from any other hosting service?
dbg31415 5y ago
There was a weird movie with Justin Timberlake called "In Time" and I would use that model. The moment a video is born, it lives until its sponsored time runs out. If a content creator wants to leave something up and reap some internal ad-sales, or tip-generation scheme... they just have to sponsor the video with more time. People who like it, can also sponsor it. And sure, have some sort of "Library of Congress" feature to save videos deemed as significant... But once the time is up... the video is gone. Exists only in memories. Seems like a huge portion of videos are just taking up space... start pruning. And a lot of videos... they don't matter. 40 different versions of the same old song, 20 different shots of the same sports blooper, 900 different versions of the same boring news cast. Like... none of these need to be on there taking up space / inflating the hosting bill.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  Cold storage is next to toilet paper on their expense sheet. The vast majority of cost is in processing the incoming video and serving it, somewhere on the order of 25x more than the cost of storage if I recall an analysis from a ways back. Deleting the old content with such a system doesn't save much money, doesn't sound good to the users, and adds complexity. It'd be an interesting take on a popularity algorithm but they always seem to be toying with that too much as it is.
  - dbg31415 5y ago
    Hmm... I'm skeptical. At some point, no matter how cheap cold storage is, the "dead" content costs will trump the live content streaming. Like postpone but... at some point content needs to be pruned. What's the value in keeping everything forever? 1 year after the video was last viewed? 5? Like when can you safely purge videos?
    - zamadatix 5y ago
      It's not just a postponement, old content takes less $ to store over time as well as takes up less % of storage over time. Just because it grows in absolute quantity doesn't mean it will inevitably become the largest costs. Now if 15 years from now storage has stopped becoming cheaper, the rate of new content has stopped growing, the size of new content has stopped growing, and the old content is starting to become a significant fraction of the operating costs then sure. At the moment (and for the last 15 years) none of those things is happening though.
mortenjorck 5y ago
When YouTube was primarily cat videos, it made sense as an ad-supported platform. Now that it's dominated by medium-to-high-production-value content creator stars, a subscription business model would be a much better fit. It's actually amazing that Google has let Patreon eat its lunch on this front, the latter becoming the predominant platform for direct monetization while YouTube continues playing the chump's game of seeing how much advertising they can inflict on users before they revolt. [edit] I'm well aware of YouTube Premium, but Google's insistence on bundling it exclusively with YouTube Music greatly limits its appeal. If they offered a standalone subscription (as they are piloting in some European markets), they could probably expand their subscriber base by a significant factor. Put another way, if Netflix were only available as part of a bundle with a cable subscription, do you imagine they'd have more or fewer subscribers than they do right now?
- jpambrun 5y ago
  Sounds like you ignore that YT has a subscription business model along side the ad-based one..
  - pengaru 5y ago
    Subscribing to what amounts to a search+CDN video w/ads service wholesale isn't even in the same ballpark as throwing money directly at the creators you want to support. The salient point is YouTube/Alphabet has completely missed the opportunity of facilitating Patreon-style commerce, despite being best positioned to do so. But instead of enabling creators to receive money directly from audiences, an advertising juggernaut like Alphabet would probably rather keep their volunteer content creators incentivized to be shills desperate for advertising dollars. I predict all the quality creators capable of garnering support via systems like Patreon will eventually abandon YouTube altogether, leaving YouTube to become even more of a raging dumpster fire of advertising upon advertising upon advertising masquerading as content from "influencers".
    - julienb_sea 5y ago
      Youtube has a Patreon competitor service literally built into the platform, you can "Join" a channel and it behaves exactly like Patreon. They were just very late to the party and most creators promote their Patreon more heavily.
ajmurmann 5y ago
I'm honestly appalled by the price for YouTube Premium. It's $15/month. That's the same as HBO Max, almost twice of Disney+ and more expensive than F1TV or Showtime which come in around $10. Per month this is 50% more than Prime! Only my UltraHD Netflix plan is more expensive. This price to me is outrageous, given that Google, unlike everyone else listed here, doesn't provide any of the content and their services is known to be awful/non-existent. All they do is in essence provide the platform.
- synergy20 5y ago
  I bought prime youtube, it's basically a pay-to-get-rid-of-my-ads, fine with me but yes lower price will be better. maybe that's what they earn from a visitor per month via selling ads?
  - kmonsen 5y ago
    But you might as well just install an adblocker instead? It is free and there are no ads. They can block people who are using adblocker from watching, as long as they don't do that I can't really see any moral grey area here.
    - synergy20 5y ago
      I ran ads blockers but they seems not blocking Youtube's embedded ads shown up randomly every a few minutes, which is annoying. But you might be correct, just found out: Adblock for Youtube at chrome store, will try it. Thanks.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  And even if you pay for YouTube, you'll still get ads, despite YouTube detecting and tracking advertisements in videos.
  - pwython 5y ago
    YouTube itself doesn't serve ads if you're paying for premium. Outside of that, sure, content creators can do their own "sponsored by" ad segments within their videos.
elorant 5y ago
With AdWords text ads at the bottom of the video. Which is something they already do. It's less intrusive than showing a thirty second commercial in the start of every video. Also, YouTube has a data trove of metrics that interest advertisers. Why not selling those? You have a commercial page that let’s say sells clothes and you want to upload a video to target women aged 18-25. Here’s the data to show you what you need to do, and we’ll charge you $15k to give you a detailed report. Brands would go bananas for metrics like these.
belorn 5y ago
If I owned YouTube with the goal of maximizing profits, and I did not have any self imposed ethical constrains, I would focus on controlling the market of hosting videos. The technology needed to operate a video hosting is widely available and been so for the last few decades, so the only way to prevent competition and keep a market dominance would be to make sure that competitors can't compete. Keep users on the platform or else the users will end up on any number of competing platforms, splintering off the user base into more and more fragments. With a strong market dominance one can then focus on profits with minimum risk. One way to raise profits would be to impose taxes, like with streamers get donations through "youtube bits". They could go further and demand taxes when any company do things that has monetary value, like say when a company want to make a video about their products. They could do like Facebook and many dating sites and offer a service of "promoting" users above other users. One can couple access to the site to hardware products like mobile phones, or split off features to "exclusive" access users. One can down rate the speed/quality of freeloaders, pushing users to upgrade their accounts to premium accounts. The ways to monetize a market dominant position is to many to count. The hard problem is the iron grip needed on keeping users on the platform.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  > If I owned YouTube with the goal of maximizing profits, and I did not have any self imposed ethical constrains, I would focus on controlling the market of hosting videos. The technology needed to operate a video hosting is widely available and been so for the last few decades, so the only way to prevent competition and keep a market dominance would be to make sure that competitors can't compete. Keep users on the platform or else the users will end up on any number of competing platforms, splintering off the user base into more and more fragments. This is kinda what's happening already. Most major websites stopped hosting their own and instead publish on YouTube and embed it As such they're selling their users' tracking which I hate, but they love it for the extra income and exposure their videos get. Hosting videos is not hard at all. But this is not the reason why nobody hosts their own anymore. YouTube's very dominance is what keeps it dominant.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
HWR_14 5y ago
Just to keep up with operational costs? Throw up banners like Wikipedia asking for money, occupying the top bar until I hit my funding goal.

Just curious, if you owned YouTube with an overhead of tens of millions of dollars per year, how would you monetize it without ads/commercials, just to even keep up with operational costs?

bigbillheck 5y ago

Not my problem.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Atlas667 5y ago

Alas! Your question reveals how capitalist production is both for the consumers but at the same time must contradict the interests of the consumers. I'm waiting for the day when we can solve these ills of private property with technology.

somethingAlex 5y ago
People seem to invoke the word capitalism whenever things aren't a utopia for everyone involved. Still, even without capitalism, you'll have to contend with the issue of how to cover operational expenses. Say some, more centralized, agent decides YouTube is worthwhile - how would it get paid for? A state sponsorship made possible by a tax of some sort? Perhaps it would transition to be completely pay-to-play? The employees and servers are expending real energy keeping YouTube operational. Meaning, whether it's through ads, a more centralized body stepping in, or some other less pervasive, opt-in business model - the thing needs to cover its own costs. I don't think a lack of private property would solve much there.
- y4mi 5y ago
  > Still, even without capitalism, you'll have to contend with the issue of how to cover operational expenses You're still thinking in the framework of capitalism. Let me be clear that I think that doing anything but capitalism is bound to fail while we're living in a resource restricted reality. Nonetheless, if we want to think about it for arguments sake: there are no costs associated without capitalism, only necessary work and resources. It's really hard to think without the restrictions of capitalism for me, because that's the only way I've ever experienced and it's so effective at prioritizing resources and productivity. Anything else has historically always fallen short. Though it's still a pretty fucked up and heartless system
  - xboxnolifes 5y ago
    > Nonetheless, if we want to think about it for arguments sake: there are no costs associated without capitalism, only necessary work and resources. That's just redefining the term costs to not include work and resources. The term resources alone makes up nearly every operational cost possible: time, man power, CPU power, metals, environment, ... Capitalism has nothing to with defining what something costs, it has everything to do with resource ownership and its distribution.
  - nybble41 5y ago
    > Nonetheless, if we want to think about it for arguments sake: there are no costs associated without capitalism, only necessary work and resources. "Necessary work and resources" is exactly what is meant by costs. Scarcity is a property of the universe we live in. Capitalism doesn't prescribe or create scarcity, it just offers a framework for dealing with it. All other systems also have costs and operational expenses—they just aren't borne primarily by those making the decisions.
- Atlas667 5y ago
  The contradiction of the capitalist mode of production is not that it tries to cover its costs. That is necessary in any system of trade/production. The problem is using social services to generate capital. A public good for private interests is wrought with contradictions. And, as you can see, covering costs =/= generating capital. Not even mentioning that the mode continuously works to undermine itself in making production more efficient by developing technology and driving down prices but profits as a whole too.

hbgl 5y ago

By building a profile of each user based on their viewing history and then when they use the search engine that I also own I would show them personalized results with sponsored links to products to buy. Plus I would be selling that information to third parties. And then I would of course also show some ads to all of the the normies that surf without an adblocker.

danuker 5y ago
Why not both? I get nothing but ads on Google lately. I often bypass to Wikipedia, because it shows me what something is, not only where I can buy it.
pwython 5y ago
You wouldn't even come close to breaking even from display/search ads like you mentioned. Advertisers would rather pay a lot more for pre-roll video ads, even if the user doesn't click. Those video ads usually result in a much higher ROAS. And people searching for funny cat videos on YouTube is a hell of a lot harder to categorize and monetize than traditional SERP.

marcodiego 5y ago

I don't think everything needs to be monetized. I wouldn't monetize it, I'd use a p2p protocol like peertube.

danuker 5y ago
So, it would be a public service? It was kind of like that when interest rates were near zero, affording endless deferral of income.

wintermutestwin 5y ago

I would gladly pay for an ad free youtube if they weren't also stealing my data.

Aachen 5y ago
This. I'd have been paying for years if it weren't Google who'd only use the payment details to link it to an identity. I have and pay for Spotify and Netflix because they're independent companies without an ad and tracking business as their main profit center, I'd be happy to add another video service to the mix. I've tried Nebula but saw all the interesting content ever posted (it's that small) in two evenings.

elliekelly 5y ago

Charge the content creator based on tiered usage. Why does it have to be different from any other hosting service?

dbg31415 5y ago

There was a weird movie with Justin Timberlake called "In Time" and I would use that model. The moment a video is born, it lives until its sponsored time runs out. If a content creator wants to leave something up and reap some internal ad-sales, or tip-generation scheme... they just have to sponsor the video with more time. People who like it, can also sponsor it. And sure, have some sort of "Library of Congress" feature to save videos deemed as significant... But once the time is up... the video is gone. Exists only in memories. Seems like a huge portion of videos are just taking up space... start pruning. And a lot of videos... they don't matter. 40 different versions of the same old song, 20 different shots of the same sports blooper, 900 different versions of the same boring news cast. Like... none of these need to be on there taking up space / inflating the hosting bill.

zamadatix 5y ago
Cold storage is next to toilet paper on their expense sheet. The vast majority of cost is in processing the incoming video and serving it, somewhere on the order of 25x more than the cost of storage if I recall an analysis from a ways back. Deleting the old content with such a system doesn't save much money, doesn't sound good to the users, and adds complexity. It'd be an interesting take on a popularity algorithm but they always seem to be toying with that too much as it is.
- dbg31415 5y ago
  Hmm... I'm skeptical. At some point, no matter how cheap cold storage is, the "dead" content costs will trump the live content streaming. Like postpone but... at some point content needs to be pruned. What's the value in keeping everything forever? 1 year after the video was last viewed? 5? Like when can you safely purge videos?
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    It's not just a postponement, old content takes less $ to store over time as well as takes up less % of storage over time. Just because it grows in absolute quantity doesn't mean it will inevitably become the largest costs. Now if 15 years from now storage has stopped becoming cheaper, the rate of new content has stopped growing, the size of new content has stopped growing, and the old content is starting to become a significant fraction of the operating costs then sure. At the moment (and for the last 15 years) none of those things is happening though.

mortenjorck 5y ago

When YouTube was primarily cat videos, it made sense as an ad-supported platform. Now that it's dominated by medium-to-high-production-value content creator stars, a subscription business model would be a much better fit. It's actually amazing that Google has let Patreon eat its lunch on this front, the latter becoming the predominant platform for direct monetization while YouTube continues playing the chump's game of seeing how much advertising they can inflict on users before they revolt. [edit] I'm well aware of YouTube Premium, but Google's insistence on bundling it exclusively with YouTube Music greatly limits its appeal. If they offered a standalone subscription (as they are piloting in some European markets), they could probably expand their subscriber base by a significant factor. Put another way, if Netflix were only available as part of a bundle with a cable subscription, do you imagine they'd have more or fewer subscribers than they do right now?

jpambrun 5y ago
Sounds like you ignore that YT has a subscription business model along side the ad-based one..
- pengaru 5y ago
  Subscribing to what amounts to a search+CDN video w/ads service wholesale isn't even in the same ballpark as throwing money directly at the creators you want to support. The salient point is YouTube/Alphabet has completely missed the opportunity of facilitating Patreon-style commerce, despite being best positioned to do so. But instead of enabling creators to receive money directly from audiences, an advertising juggernaut like Alphabet would probably rather keep their volunteer content creators incentivized to be shills desperate for advertising dollars. I predict all the quality creators capable of garnering support via systems like Patreon will eventually abandon YouTube altogether, leaving YouTube to become even more of a raging dumpster fire of advertising upon advertising upon advertising masquerading as content from "influencers".
  - julienb_sea 5y ago
    Youtube has a Patreon competitor service literally built into the platform, you can "Join" a channel and it behaves exactly like Patreon. They were just very late to the party and most creators promote their Patreon more heavily.

ajmurmann 5y ago

I'm honestly appalled by the price for YouTube Premium. It's $15/month. That's the same as HBO Max, almost twice of Disney+ and more expensive than F1TV or Showtime which come in around $10. Per month this is 50% more than Prime! Only my UltraHD Netflix plan is more expensive. This price to me is outrageous, given that Google, unlike everyone else listed here, doesn't provide any of the content and their services is known to be awful/non-existent. All they do is in essence provide the platform.

synergy20 5y ago
I bought prime youtube, it's basically a pay-to-get-rid-of-my-ads, fine with me but yes lower price will be better. maybe that's what they earn from a visitor per month via selling ads?
- kmonsen 5y ago
  But you might as well just install an adblocker instead? It is free and there are no ads. They can block people who are using adblocker from watching, as long as they don't do that I can't really see any moral grey area here.
  - synergy20 5y ago
    I ran ads blockers but they seems not blocking Youtube's embedded ads shown up randomly every a few minutes, which is annoying. But you might be correct, just found out: Adblock for Youtube at chrome store, will try it. Thanks.
heavyset_go 5y ago
And even if you pay for YouTube, you'll still get ads, despite YouTube detecting and tracking advertisements in videos.
- pwython 5y ago
  YouTube itself doesn't serve ads if you're paying for premium. Outside of that, sure, content creators can do their own "sponsored by" ad segments within their videos.

elorant 5y ago

With AdWords text ads at the bottom of the video. Which is something they already do. It's less intrusive than showing a thirty second commercial in the start of every video. Also, YouTube has a data trove of metrics that interest advertisers. Why not selling those? You have a commercial page that let’s say sells clothes and you want to upload a video to target women aged 18-25. Here’s the data to show you what you need to do, and we’ll charge you $15k to give you a detailed report. Brands would go bananas for metrics like these.

belorn 5y ago

If I owned YouTube with the goal of maximizing profits, and I did not have any self imposed ethical constrains, I would focus on controlling the market of hosting videos. The technology needed to operate a video hosting is widely available and been so for the last few decades, so the only way to prevent competition and keep a market dominance would be to make sure that competitors can't compete. Keep users on the platform or else the users will end up on any number of competing platforms, splintering off the user base into more and more fragments. With a strong market dominance one can then focus on profits with minimum risk. One way to raise profits would be to impose taxes, like with streamers get donations through "youtube bits". They could go further and demand taxes when any company do things that has monetary value, like say when a company want to make a video about their products. They could do like Facebook and many dating sites and offer a service of "promoting" users above other users. One can couple access to the site to hardware products like mobile phones, or split off features to "exclusive" access users. One can down rate the speed/quality of freeloaders, pushing users to upgrade their accounts to premium accounts. The ways to monetize a market dominant position is to many to count. The hard problem is the iron grip needed on keeping users on the platform.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
> If I owned YouTube with the goal of maximizing profits, and I did not have any self imposed ethical constrains, I would focus on controlling the market of hosting videos. The technology needed to operate a video hosting is widely available and been so for the last few decades, so the only way to prevent competition and keep a market dominance would be to make sure that competitors can't compete. Keep users on the platform or else the users will end up on any number of competing platforms, splintering off the user base into more and more fragments. This is kinda what's happening already. Most major websites stopped hosting their own and instead publish on YouTube and embed it As such they're selling their users' tracking which I hate, but they love it for the extra income and exposure their videos get. Hosting videos is not hard at all. But this is not the reason why nobody hosts their own anymore. YouTube's very dominance is what keeps it dominant.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

HWR_14 5y ago

Just to keep up with operational costs? Throw up banners like Wikipedia asking for money, occupying the top bar until I hit my funding goal.