5 ms·

Is there some business school teaching people that the sure way to profit is through an arms race against your own customers?

acdha 3y ago
How are people who don’t pay for what they use customers? They cost YouTube money but if they’re not watching ads they’re not bringing in revenue and it’s highly unlikely that they’re bringing enough promotional value to defray that. I could see some push for ethical ads or security but at some point you need to pay for what you like, either by subscribing to premium or watching ads.
- yummypaint 3y ago
  Until this very moment google has considered the wisest move to be trying to keep all potential users on their platform, and it's arguably part of why they have maintained such dominance. It has always depended on network effects and the nearly uncompensated efforts of creators. They have been getting greedier and greedier under the relentless quarter over quarter pressure to grow. Now we have mandatory ads on all videos, including non-monetized ones, and creaters who made the mistake of trusting youtube are systemtically defrauded through arbitrary demonetization. I certainly feel no obligation to pay tithes to google.
  - acdha 3y ago
    Paying for what you use isn’t tithing. It’s straight up capitalism – if you don’t like it, don’t take the deal. It’s completely optional and you’ll probably be better off for it given how many people describe their YouTube usage as an addiction.
    - EA-3167 3y ago
      Surely the corollary to this is users monetizing their data? Or is it just Youtube allowed to freely extract whatever value they feel like?
      - acdha 3y ago
        That’s what’s happening: YouTube offers things people want which cost money to produce and host, while users pay for those costs either directly (Premium) or by selling their attention and activity data to a middleman (Google). Understanding that is key to understanding why ad blocker users complaining about being blocked is unreasonable. If you don’t like the terms of a deal, you can ethically walk away from it but not decide you don’t want to pay. If you prefer to mooch, sure, it’s not a huge crime but you don’t have any standing to complain, either.
        pixxel 3y ago
        Here’s another line of thought: YT could have straddled P2P tech and hosting directly (premium 4K offerings etc.). But Google wants all the content and all the control. The world’s video library is controlled by one corporation. They could farm the cost to peer tech but they won’t. So fuck them, I’ll circumnavigate my way into the library to watch some guy in his shed work on his hobby who isn’t begging for likes and subs. And if I did pay? Google will still be logging my data. So fuck them once again.
        acdha 3y ago
        Sure, nobody says you have to like them any more than you have to like every restaurant in town. The solution in both cases is not to give them your business – not complain when they refuse to give you freebies.
    - 6D794163636F756 3y ago
      It's not even capitalism. Socialism definitely involves paying for services rendered. Exchanging something for something else is a basic building block of human society.
    - yummypaint 3y ago
      It's important to remember that piracy and theft are also capitalist practices. Companies routinely break the law and do unethical things, and consider it a sucess as long as money was made overall. Yet there is somehow this sense that individual consumers MUST play by the unfair rules often set up by these monopolies themselves. The incredible asymmetry in how copyright law is abused is an example. These companies deserve the same level of contempt they show their users.
      - acdha 3y ago
        Nobody is saying consumers MUST do anything. YouTube is not oxygen, if you don’t like it you can live a perfectly full and rich life without it.
    - Buttons840 3y ago
      Are healthy competition and several good options for consumers benefits of capitalism? If so, then this ain't capitalism. What I mean is people often tout the merits of capitalism while ignoring that the merits aren't actually happening.
- lp0_on_fire 3y ago
  The definition of "customers" has shifted in the ad-supported tech world. There's nothing inherently wrong with that model when it's unobtrusive and useful ads; It's when they get overly aggressive with the advertising that it drives people to block, IMO. Also there's a pattern in the industry of introducing ads (or "promotions" to get around legalese) to "ad-free" subscriptions once they have sufficient lock-in.
  - acdha 3y ago
    My point is simply that Google is providing something which costs money to produce. They offer two ways to pay for it but someone who rejects both of them has no reason to expect Google to subsidize their activity – it’s like whining that the concert hall closed the window you used to camp out at for free music.
  - 6D794163636F756 3y ago
    Customer is generally whoever is giving you money. With YouTube ads it's advertiser with the viewer being a second customer as the viewer gives YouTube the attention/click through. That falls apart if the user refuses to engage in that transaction
- EA-3167 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure that the ethics of interacting with the likes of Youtube or Google are a fair bit more complex than you're giving it credit for, but I'm also pretty sure that this isn't the platform for that debate. Suffice it to say that as others have pointed out the definition of "customer" in the world of data brokers and advertising has become a lot less meaningful.
  - acdha 3y ago
    It’s not complicated unless you’re trying to avoid honoring the terms of the deal. YouTube is a completely optional service – you can use it with ads or pay not to have ads, that’s it. If you don’t like it, don’t use the service – and that goes a thousand times over for privacy concerns since there’s no way to avoid giving Google your activity data unless you don’t use their service.
    - EA-3167 3y ago
      What deal? I didn't make a deal with Youtube.
      - acdha 3y ago
        You did when you used their service under the offered terms. You might not like them but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a legal relationship.
        chienandalou 3y ago
        When someone wants to sell me apples, I can pay for them or choose not to buy them. That's capitalism. But if someone hands me apples for free, they really can't force me to study the ads on the wrapping paper, can they? I have never signed anywhere that I agree to this 'deal'. That's not how capitalism works as far as I understand it. And their terms aren't legally enforceable. Where I live adblockers are legal. When I access YT with Firefox and uBlock Origin it's legal for me to filter YTs datastream how I want to. If this was a capitalistic transaction of goods, I would have to login to use their service. I would have to agree to some kind of legally binding contract. I would first have to pay, and could then use their product or service. But all that isn't necessary to watch videos on YT. There is no legally binding 'deal' between YT and me.
Workaccount2 3y ago
Googles customers are the advertisers. The viewers are the product. It's amazing google has tolerated bad product (Ad-block users) as long as they have.
- EA-3167 3y ago
  Presumably Google (you know, the people who run Ad Sense) find the sheer amount of viewing data valuable on its own, given the marginal cost of "bad product" as you put it. How many advertisers would pay to have that sort of marketing data pipeline?
  - acdha 3y ago
    It’s no coincidence that this is happening against a background of budget cuts. I suspect Google is seeing less demand for ads right now while simultaneously dealing with expectations that their profits not go down correspondingly. One thing I’m sure the mess over at Twitter has done is getting companies to reconsider the value of their ads in general, too. That’s always hard to measure which means it looks like an east spot to cut, and I believe there’ve been multiple companies claiming that cutting to zero didn’t affect sales so I’d be surprised if Google wasn’t looking at a soft market where cost cutting looks like a more reliable path to improve their profitability.
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      >I suspect Google is seeing less demand for ads right now while simultaneously dealing with expectations that their profits not go down correspondingly. This seems like the root of the problem right here. Why shouldn't corporate profits go down when the economy falters? This should be expected. If you just keep running the company the same way and not pissing off the users/customers, things will improve when the economic situation improves. Rocking the boat just increases risk.
      - wkat4242 3y ago
        Yes but investors don't care. They will immediately drop their stock and tank your value the moment a competitor offers a higher return. We should have some kind of model that incentivises long-term investment not this kind of short term profit extraction.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

acdha 3y ago

How are people who don’t pay for what they use customers? They cost YouTube money but if they’re not watching ads they’re not bringing in revenue and it’s highly unlikely that they’re bringing enough promotional value to defray that. I could see some push for ethical ads or security but at some point you need to pay for what you like, either by subscribing to premium or watching ads.

yummypaint 3y ago
Until this very moment google has considered the wisest move to be trying to keep all potential users on their platform, and it's arguably part of why they have maintained such dominance. It has always depended on network effects and the nearly uncompensated efforts of creators. They have been getting greedier and greedier under the relentless quarter over quarter pressure to grow. Now we have mandatory ads on all videos, including non-monetized ones, and creaters who made the mistake of trusting youtube are systemtically defrauded through arbitrary demonetization. I certainly feel no obligation to pay tithes to google.
- acdha 3y ago
  Paying for what you use isn’t tithing. It’s straight up capitalism – if you don’t like it, don’t take the deal. It’s completely optional and you’ll probably be better off for it given how many people describe their YouTube usage as an addiction.
  - EA-3167 3y ago
    Surely the corollary to this is users monetizing their data? Or is it just Youtube allowed to freely extract whatever value they feel like?
    - acdha 3y ago
      That’s what’s happening: YouTube offers things people want which cost money to produce and host, while users pay for those costs either directly (Premium) or by selling their attention and activity data to a middleman (Google). Understanding that is key to understanding why ad blocker users complaining about being blocked is unreasonable. If you don’t like the terms of a deal, you can ethically walk away from it but not decide you don’t want to pay. If you prefer to mooch, sure, it’s not a huge crime but you don’t have any standing to complain, either.
      - pixxel 3y ago
        Here’s another line of thought: YT could have straddled P2P tech and hosting directly (premium 4K offerings etc.). But Google wants all the content and all the control. The world’s video library is controlled by one corporation. They could farm the cost to peer tech but they won’t. So fuck them, I’ll circumnavigate my way into the library to watch some guy in his shed work on his hobby who isn’t begging for likes and subs. And if I did pay? Google will still be logging my data. So fuck them once again.
        acdha 3y ago
        Sure, nobody says you have to like them any more than you have to like every restaurant in town. The solution in both cases is not to give them your business – not complain when they refuse to give you freebies.
  - 6D794163636F756 3y ago
    It's not even capitalism. Socialism definitely involves paying for services rendered. Exchanging something for something else is a basic building block of human society.
  - yummypaint 3y ago
    It's important to remember that piracy and theft are also capitalist practices. Companies routinely break the law and do unethical things, and consider it a sucess as long as money was made overall. Yet there is somehow this sense that individual consumers MUST play by the unfair rules often set up by these monopolies themselves. The incredible asymmetry in how copyright law is abused is an example. These companies deserve the same level of contempt they show their users.
    - acdha 3y ago
      Nobody is saying consumers MUST do anything. YouTube is not oxygen, if you don’t like it you can live a perfectly full and rich life without it.
  - Buttons840 3y ago
    Are healthy competition and several good options for consumers benefits of capitalism? If so, then this ain't capitalism. What I mean is people often tout the merits of capitalism while ignoring that the merits aren't actually happening.
lp0_on_fire 3y ago
The definition of "customers" has shifted in the ad-supported tech world. There's nothing inherently wrong with that model when it's unobtrusive and useful ads; It's when they get overly aggressive with the advertising that it drives people to block, IMO. Also there's a pattern in the industry of introducing ads (or "promotions" to get around legalese) to "ad-free" subscriptions once they have sufficient lock-in.
- acdha 3y ago
  My point is simply that Google is providing something which costs money to produce. They offer two ways to pay for it but someone who rejects both of them has no reason to expect Google to subsidize their activity – it’s like whining that the concert hall closed the window you used to camp out at for free music.
- 6D794163636F756 3y ago
  Customer is generally whoever is giving you money. With YouTube ads it's advertiser with the viewer being a second customer as the viewer gives YouTube the attention/click through. That falls apart if the user refuses to engage in that transaction
EA-3167 3y ago
I'm pretty sure that the ethics of interacting with the likes of Youtube or Google are a fair bit more complex than you're giving it credit for, but I'm also pretty sure that this isn't the platform for that debate. Suffice it to say that as others have pointed out the definition of "customer" in the world of data brokers and advertising has become a lot less meaningful.
- acdha 3y ago
  It’s not complicated unless you’re trying to avoid honoring the terms of the deal. YouTube is a completely optional service – you can use it with ads or pay not to have ads, that’s it. If you don’t like it, don’t use the service – and that goes a thousand times over for privacy concerns since there’s no way to avoid giving Google your activity data unless you don’t use their service.
  - EA-3167 3y ago
    What deal? I didn't make a deal with Youtube.
    - acdha 3y ago
      You did when you used their service under the offered terms. You might not like them but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a legal relationship.
      - chienandalou 3y ago
        When someone wants to sell me apples, I can pay for them or choose not to buy them. That's capitalism. But if someone hands me apples for free, they really can't force me to study the ads on the wrapping paper, can they? I have never signed anywhere that I agree to this 'deal'. That's not how capitalism works as far as I understand it. And their terms aren't legally enforceable. Where I live adblockers are legal. When I access YT with Firefox and uBlock Origin it's legal for me to filter YTs datastream how I want to. If this was a capitalistic transaction of goods, I would have to login to use their service. I would have to agree to some kind of legally binding contract. I would first have to pay, and could then use their product or service. But all that isn't necessary to watch videos on YT. There is no legally binding 'deal' between YT and me.

Workaccount2 3y ago

Googles customers are the advertisers. The viewers are the product. It's amazing google has tolerated bad product (Ad-block users) as long as they have.

EA-3167 3y ago
Presumably Google (you know, the people who run Ad Sense) find the sheer amount of viewing data valuable on its own, given the marginal cost of "bad product" as you put it. How many advertisers would pay to have that sort of marketing data pipeline?
- acdha 3y ago
  It’s no coincidence that this is happening against a background of budget cuts. I suspect Google is seeing less demand for ads right now while simultaneously dealing with expectations that their profits not go down correspondingly. One thing I’m sure the mess over at Twitter has done is getting companies to reconsider the value of their ads in general, too. That’s always hard to measure which means it looks like an east spot to cut, and I believe there’ve been multiple companies claiming that cutting to zero didn’t affect sales so I’d be surprised if Google wasn’t looking at a soft market where cost cutting looks like a more reliable path to improve their profitability.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    >I suspect Google is seeing less demand for ads right now while simultaneously dealing with expectations that their profits not go down correspondingly. This seems like the root of the problem right here. Why shouldn't corporate profits go down when the economy falters? This should be expected. If you just keep running the company the same way and not pissing off the users/customers, things will improve when the economic situation improves. Rocking the boat just increases risk.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Yes but investors don't care. They will immediately drop their stock and tank your value the moment a competitor offers a higher return. We should have some kind of model that incentivises long-term investment not this kind of short term profit extraction.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]