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Youtube has been a fantastic demonstration of how valuable it can be to enable democratized, low-barrier-to-entry content publishing. Think of how much treasur

Youtube has been a fantastic demonstration of how valuable it can be to enable democratized, low-barrier-to-entry content publishing. Think of how much treasure there is on the service, with millions upon millions of hours of educational, informative, or archival content, all published and viewable for free, with incredible reliability and availability. Of course this is also fantastically expensive to build and maintain; I believe that we have been fortunate that Google's ad business was willing to subsidize it for us for so long with so little required in return. Unfortunately it appears that possibly the screws are getting turned, and there is less appetite for the subsidy. In a better, more utopian timeline I imagine an equivalent service supported by taxpayers or nonprofit means. Just how the 1900s gave us the public library system, imagine if the 2000s give us a video platform without for-profit encumbrances - what a world it would be!

mvdtnz 3y ago
What screws are really being turned though? This content is still available completely free of charge to anyone with an internet connection. You just need to watch a couple of ads if you're not willing to pay.
- thot_experiment 3y ago
  The problem is you can't just tape the shows and fast forward through the ads etc, or at least that's the direction things are going, it's a very very bad precedent.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    How do you suggest creators are paid and infrastructure is maintained in your ideal world? And don't say people will donate because we all know that's BS.
    - thot_experiment 3y ago
      In my ideal world? Taxes mostly I'd guess, the infra to share videos should be considered a public utility, much like libraries. Practically speaking I might be willing to pay google if there was more transparency about how much of my money actually goes to creators vs how much of it goes to google, and especially I would like to be able to chose to watch unmonetized videos only. Happily paying for Nebula and some patreons though.
      - zeruch 3y ago
        "I might be willing to pay google if there was more transparency about how much of my money actually goes to creators vs how much of it goes to google" That would be a major step forward, akin to old Bandcamp. But that isn't YT's model.
gretch 3y ago
> I believe that we have been fortunate that Google's ad business was willing to subsidize it for us for so long with so little required in return. Unfortunately it appears that possibly the screws are getting turned, and there is less appetite for the subsidy. Um well no. They still have appetite to support the business with Ads (and they offer a paid version if you don't like Ads). The thing they no longer have appetite for is people using Ad blockers.
- spaceribs 3y ago
  well it's not their computer, and I'll run what I want on it (...so far)
  - Waterluvian 3y ago
    I feel this is a perfectly valid response. Equally valid is Google then saying, "well then we don't want to send you bytes."
    - LightHugger 3y ago
      The endgame here is adblockers that spoof ad views and even sometimes clicks rather than just blocking them. This is very very bad for google if they force adblockers to work like that. People will do it.
      - slimsag 3y ago
        Another possible endgame is all YouTube videos are livestreams and you cannot skip on the timeline, with ads inserted directly into the stream. In that world, the best an adblocker would be able to do is show a blank screen for 30s while it waits for the real video's frames to resume.
        HlessClaudesman 3y ago
        If YT only live streams content, content caching services will strip out the ads, and play with a delay. Youtube will never monetise tech savvy users and should just stop trying. We only need to be slipperier than the average gazelle and the lions will never catch us.
Clubber 3y ago
I just pay the $15 a month to not get ads. The content is worth way more than that to me. I wish they would stop censoring stuff (like raw news, firearms learning channels, etc). Content warnings over just taking the videos down would be much preferred. That's really my only gripe.
- katbyte 3y ago
  I also pay to avoid ads AND support the creators i watch as they make more per my paid view then an ad supported view.
  - Clubber 3y ago
    >support the creators i watch as they make more per my paid view then an ad supported view. I didn't know that. Good to know, thanks!
    - Waterluvian 3y ago
      Either way they're making incredibly little compared to supporting them more directly like Patreon. Even Patreon takes a tasty cut. If the mental gymnastics helps, awesome. But paying Google is paying Google more than it is supporting creators.
      - Clubber 3y ago
        Of course blocking ads doesn't support anything. >If the mental gymnastics helps, awesome. What a smarmy thing to say.
      - katbyte 3y ago
        what mental gymnastics? I pay to both avoid ads and support creators more. If i just watched YT with ads they would literally make less, regardless of supporting them directly. and google takes 45% of premium with 55% going to creators. feel like you are the one doing mental gymnastics
logifail 3y ago
> Of course this is also fantastically expensive to build and maintain "Fantastically expensive" is quite the claim. Google won't tell us, but how much do we think it actually costs to operate it?
- oerpli 3y ago
  Quite a bit? You have a lot of videos, most of which in many formats, often up to 4k. Storage alone likely costs a few pennies (if not more). Then all the network traffic (a sizable fraction of the entire internet traffic), transcoding & upkeep for all these things. That's only VoD. Then there's live video which is basically the entire thing above with the additional constraint that there's less room for error and latency. Some other services tried live video as well, e.g. Netflix or Apple for some keynotes in the past. For Netflix I recall a few were covered in the media, e.g.: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/16/23685828/netflix-love-is-blind-reunion-live-delay-problems https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/16/23685828/netflix-love-is-....
- JAlexoid 3y ago
  YouTube gets 4.3Petabytes of data every day. To just receive, transmit and store that in AWS S3, just one day's worth of data is - 317 thousand dollars. That's literally doing nothing other than transmission and storage. Just that.
  - kuchenbecker 3y ago
    That's a surprisingly small amount, it would mean that a year of video is only 1.5 EiB. IIRC google has like hundreds of EiB in storage.
seydor 3y ago
I could say the same for bittorrents, napster, kazaa and audiogalaxy in the 00s. Maybe we turned to youtube because all else had become illegal? We can still watch demonetized channels, google doesnt seem to nag me about those.
- cykros 3y ago
  They were illegal then too. Just not as well enforced. Paying for a VPN is where a lot of people dropped off, and while streaming pirate sites are a thing, most people don't realize that search engines that aren't in the US are a thing, and so them not showing up easily on Google or Bing means they may as well not exist. Just means my fmovies streams don't get so bogged down with too many simultaneous viewers.
- zeruch 3y ago
  "We can still watch demonetized channels, google doesnt seem to nag me about those. " They do.

mvdtnz 3y ago

What screws are really being turned though? This content is still available completely free of charge to anyone with an internet connection. You just need to watch a couple of ads if you're not willing to pay.

thot_experiment 3y ago
The problem is you can't just tape the shows and fast forward through the ads etc, or at least that's the direction things are going, it's a very very bad precedent.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  How do you suggest creators are paid and infrastructure is maintained in your ideal world? And don't say people will donate because we all know that's BS.
  - thot_experiment 3y ago
    In my ideal world? Taxes mostly I'd guess, the infra to share videos should be considered a public utility, much like libraries. Practically speaking I might be willing to pay google if there was more transparency about how much of my money actually goes to creators vs how much of it goes to google, and especially I would like to be able to chose to watch unmonetized videos only. Happily paying for Nebula and some patreons though.
    - zeruch 3y ago
      "I might be willing to pay google if there was more transparency about how much of my money actually goes to creators vs how much of it goes to google" That would be a major step forward, akin to old Bandcamp. But that isn't YT's model.

gretch 3y ago

> I believe that we have been fortunate that Google's ad business was willing to subsidize it for us for so long with so little required in return. Unfortunately it appears that possibly the screws are getting turned, and there is less appetite for the subsidy. Um well no. They still have appetite to support the business with Ads (and they offer a paid version if you don't like Ads). The thing they no longer have appetite for is people using Ad blockers.

spaceribs 3y ago
well it's not their computer, and I'll run what I want on it (...so far)
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  I feel this is a perfectly valid response. Equally valid is Google then saying, "well then we don't want to send you bytes."
  - LightHugger 3y ago
    The endgame here is adblockers that spoof ad views and even sometimes clicks rather than just blocking them. This is very very bad for google if they force adblockers to work like that. People will do it.
    - slimsag 3y ago
      Another possible endgame is all YouTube videos are livestreams and you cannot skip on the timeline, with ads inserted directly into the stream. In that world, the best an adblocker would be able to do is show a blank screen for 30s while it waits for the real video's frames to resume.
      - HlessClaudesman 3y ago
        If YT only live streams content, content caching services will strip out the ads, and play with a delay. Youtube will never monetise tech savvy users and should just stop trying. We only need to be slipperier than the average gazelle and the lions will never catch us.

Clubber 3y ago

I just pay the $15 a month to not get ads. The content is worth way more than that to me. I wish they would stop censoring stuff (like raw news, firearms learning channels, etc). Content warnings over just taking the videos down would be much preferred. That's really my only gripe.

katbyte 3y ago
I also pay to avoid ads AND support the creators i watch as they make more per my paid view then an ad supported view.
- Clubber 3y ago
  >support the creators i watch as they make more per my paid view then an ad supported view. I didn't know that. Good to know, thanks!
  - Waterluvian 3y ago
    Either way they're making incredibly little compared to supporting them more directly like Patreon. Even Patreon takes a tasty cut. If the mental gymnastics helps, awesome. But paying Google is paying Google more than it is supporting creators.
    - Clubber 3y ago
      Of course blocking ads doesn't support anything. >If the mental gymnastics helps, awesome. What a smarmy thing to say.
    - katbyte 3y ago
      what mental gymnastics? I pay to both avoid ads and support creators more. If i just watched YT with ads they would literally make less, regardless of supporting them directly. and google takes 45% of premium with 55% going to creators. feel like you are the one doing mental gymnastics

logifail 3y ago

> Of course this is also fantastically expensive to build and maintain "Fantastically expensive" is quite the claim. Google won't tell us, but how much do we think it actually costs to operate it?

oerpli 3y ago
Quite a bit? You have a lot of videos, most of which in many formats, often up to 4k. Storage alone likely costs a few pennies (if not more). Then all the network traffic (a sizable fraction of the entire internet traffic), transcoding & upkeep for all these things. That's only VoD. Then there's live video which is basically the entire thing above with the additional constraint that there's less room for error and latency. Some other services tried live video as well, e.g. Netflix or Apple for some keynotes in the past. For Netflix I recall a few were covered in the media, e.g.: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/16/23685828/netflix-love-is-blind-reunion-live-delay-problems https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/16/23685828/netflix-love-is-....
JAlexoid 3y ago
YouTube gets 4.3Petabytes of data every day. To just receive, transmit and store that in AWS S3, just one day's worth of data is - 317 thousand dollars. That's literally doing nothing other than transmission and storage. Just that.
- kuchenbecker 3y ago
  That's a surprisingly small amount, it would mean that a year of video is only 1.5 EiB. IIRC google has like hundreds of EiB in storage.

seydor 3y ago

I could say the same for bittorrents, napster, kazaa and audiogalaxy in the 00s. Maybe we turned to youtube because all else had become illegal? We can still watch demonetized channels, google doesnt seem to nag me about those.

cykros 3y ago
They were illegal then too. Just not as well enforced. Paying for a VPN is where a lot of people dropped off, and while streaming pirate sites are a thing, most people don't realize that search engines that aren't in the US are a thing, and so them not showing up easily on Google or Bing means they may as well not exist. Just means my fmovies streams don't get so bogged down with too many simultaneous viewers.
zeruch 3y ago
"We can still watch demonetized channels, google doesnt seem to nag me about those. " They do.