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On the other hand how much of the things Google has built/bought and grew today we enjoy could exist without the firehose of money that ads represented? I'm not

by rtkwe 3y ago

On the other hand how much of the things Google has built/bought and grew today we enjoy could exist without the firehose of money that ads represented? I'm not sure Youtube happens without the ad money.

owisd 3y ago
Google had enough 3rd party ad revenue before they bought DoubleClick (2008) to buy YouTube (2006).
- rtkwe 3y ago
  I'm mostly wondering if they could have kept it as open as they do to non revenue generating users or would they have had to do something like Vimeo where after a certain number of views they come asking for money or would have had to limit the quality/quantity of uploads from small creators due to the costs of storing and serving their videos with limited ad returns.
nostrademons 3y ago
AdWords was doing just fine before DoubleClick. That's how they got the money to buy DoubleClick in the first place. The problem was specifically DoubleClick management, who then got inserted in high levels within the Ads organization, forcing out the very technically & economically savvy people who were there before. This is a recurring problem in large organizations. People who spend their time learning to be politically savvy will be...politically savvy, and be at an advantage when playing power politics that determines who is in charge. The effort needed to become politically savvy usually comes at the expense of domain/technical/economic knowledge required to actually get the job done. Eventually the organization becomes very good at playing political games and very bad at getting stuff done, until it collapses.
acdha 3y ago
Yes, ad money built a lot of the web. I’m not saying it’s evil on a conceptual level, but rather that a lot of companies start failing when they switch from thinking about what their users would like which happen to be ad supported as opposed to building products which are designed around ad revenue first. It’s what gives you things like Google+ but also things like social media sites optimizing for outrage or other low-quality interactions which maximize ad sales revenue. YouTube has obviously done well, but look at everything they’ve done since the ad sales mentality dominated their thinking. Stuff like Google+ happens when you are thinking “we need X to keep Facebook from cutting into our ad revenue, therefore our users will use X” rather than asking “what will our users like more than Facebook?”. The other side is what we saw with things like Stadia, GCP, or G-Suite where executives used to the ad model have trouble with other business models. The problem there again isn’t that ads are evil but rather that you need to understand your users and what they want so you can think about the product the right way.

by rtkwe 3y ago

owisd 3y ago

Google had enough 3rd party ad revenue before they bought DoubleClick (2008) to buy YouTube (2006).

rtkwe 3y ago
I'm mostly wondering if they could have kept it as open as they do to non revenue generating users or would they have had to do something like Vimeo where after a certain number of views they come asking for money or would have had to limit the quality/quantity of uploads from small creators due to the costs of storing and serving their videos with limited ad returns.

nostrademons 3y ago

AdWords was doing just fine before DoubleClick. That's how they got the money to buy DoubleClick in the first place. The problem was specifically DoubleClick management, who then got inserted in high levels within the Ads organization, forcing out the very technically & economically savvy people who were there before. This is a recurring problem in large organizations. People who spend their time learning to be politically savvy will be...politically savvy, and be at an advantage when playing power politics that determines who is in charge. The effort needed to become politically savvy usually comes at the expense of domain/technical/economic knowledge required to actually get the job done. Eventually the organization becomes very good at playing political games and very bad at getting stuff done, until it collapses.

acdha 3y ago

Yes, ad money built a lot of the web. I’m not saying it’s evil on a conceptual level, but rather that a lot of companies start failing when they switch from thinking about what their users would like which happen to be ad supported as opposed to building products which are designed around ad revenue first. It’s what gives you things like Google+ but also things like social media sites optimizing for outrage or other low-quality interactions which maximize ad sales revenue. YouTube has obviously done well, but look at everything they’ve done since the ad sales mentality dominated their thinking. Stuff like Google+ happens when you are thinking “we need X to keep Facebook from cutting into our ad revenue, therefore our users will use X” rather than asking “what will our users like more than Facebook?”. The other side is what we saw with things like Stadia, GCP, or G-Suite where executives used to the ad model have trouble with other business models. The problem there again isn’t that ads are evil but rather that you need to understand your users and what they want so you can think about the product the right way.