7 ms·

YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

340 points by bookofjoe 7mo ago

lemonish97 7mo ago
I always see it as more of a social media company rather than a media co.
- busymom0 7mo ago
  I often comment on videos but never do I check replies to my comments there.
  - kami23 7mo ago
    I went to see if I had any replies to a comment I left on a video for the first time today and it's really hidden to get back to them if you don't remember the exact video. I wonder if it's purposeful friction or just not a priority.
    - squigz 7mo ago
      Click History on the homepage left sidebar > Comments on right side of History page https://www.youtube.com/feed/history https://www.youtube.com/feed/history
      - croes 7mo ago
        And now try to find the comment someone replied to
        squigz 7mo ago
        Oh, fair enough. That is indeed not shown anywhere it seems.
        loevborg 7mo ago
        I agree. I wonder how people are motivated to comment if they can't even track replies or check likes. It certainly completely kills motivation for me
        squigz 7mo ago
        Do you and GP not get notifications for replies and (at least some) likes?
        kami23 7mo ago
        In my case I have almost all notifications disabled so maybe there's an option somewhere. Generally find those notification badges too powerful for me to not check and then get waylaid doom scrolling/watching, so I've made it a habit to always disable them everywhere. Somewhat tempted to re-enable it as I only really comment on videos that are for very very niche communities and I'm usually answering or asking questions.
        croes 7mo ago
        I get the notifications but it’s sometimes hard to know for which comment if it’s more than one in a discussion.
        loevborg 7mo ago
        I don't think I get notified but maybe it's because my replies are unpopular
  - Acrobatic_Road 7mo ago
    how do you resist the urge to click on the red notification icon?
    - inquirerGeneral 7mo ago
      [dead]
  - RobRivera 7mo ago
    And so many comments may aswell be bots. >anyone here in CURRENTYEAR >This is scene is so [adjective] Not exactly a forum, more like a concert crowd
    - esafak 7mo ago
      "Who's here from Hacker News??"
  - unclad5968 7mo ago
    I tried to one time, but I couldn't even figure it out so I gave up.
- raincole 7mo ago
  Just anecdotes, but I feel YouTube comments are the bottom of social media. Even Twitter and Reddit are better. But if the 99% garbage is the price of the emerging of channels like 3B1B, I think it's still a pretty good deal.
  - thundergolfer 7mo ago
    Their algorithm has a toxic positivity problem where they weight positivity so much the most moronic, saccharine crap sits at the top and you'd be hard pressed to distinguish the comments from LLM slop.
    - fancyfredbot 7mo ago
      "Epic refresh pull" is my personal pet hate right now. Although "like if you are watching this in <year>" on older videos is close behind.
      - thundergolfer 7mo ago
        The comments pretending Marvel actors (e.g. Benedict Cumberbatch) are their Marvel characters in other movies (e.g. Sam Mendes' 1917) kill me.
  - keiferski 7mo ago
    I don’t agree at all. This was true a decade ago, but today YouTube comments are almost all positive, and you’ll often get some really insightful ones too.
    - redwall_hp 7mo ago
      Channels can moderate their comments too. So channels run by thoughtful, community-oriented people will zap trash comments. The music production sphere is especially good.
      - keiferski 7mo ago
- carlosjobim 7mo ago
  There's nothing social about it. You don't add your friends and chat with your friends on YouTube.
- rconti 7mo ago
  If you watch Shorts, maybe. If you watch normal videos, the comments are pretty much an afterthought. But even shorts, assuming they're like reels/stories, the "social" aspect is very minimal compared with, say, Facebook posts back in the day, where your friends would see and comment and reply to each other. The Algorithm doesn't really want that anymore; it wants to feed you content from arbitrary people to keep you passively engaged, not to foster conversation/active engagement.
qweiopqweiop 7mo ago
It genuinely disgusts me that the world's largest media company shoves addictive, short form content down users throats (especially young people). Anyone working on it at Google should be ashamed of what they're doing.
- ssenssei 7mo ago
  I actually currently run youtube out of firefox in mobile and web, and its pretty much amazing in both and doesn't feel janky. The upside of that is that if you add the correct script to the ad blocker extension, you'll never see a youtube reel for the rest of your life, which HEAVILY improves the experience on youtube. this is the filter list I use: https://github.com/i5heu/ublock-hide-yt-shorts https://github.com/i5heu/ublock-hide-yt-shorts
- sheept 7mo ago
  The social media companies got so large because they optimized for engagement over all else. If they were any less addictive, they'd have way fewer users, and we wouldn't be talking about them now. This can probably only be addressed with regulation
  - asdfman123 7mo ago
    Yes, you can be the guy at a social media company who says "perhaps earning a few extra billion in revenue this way is bad for children," but the executives are just going to replace you.
- FrustratedMonky 7mo ago
  Its what people want. Time to stop thinking corporations will suddenly start policing themsleves.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- Gagarin1917 7mo ago
  Where is it being shoved down anyone’s throat? You literally have to intentionally click a short video or use the shorts tab to see any YouTube short.
ssenssei 7mo ago
you know what... besides everything, good for them. I don't know if many of you remember the olden days of Youtube, when it wasn't lead by corporate greed, and before it was infested by greedy abysmal shitty people - When profits weren't the driving force behind content creation. Whenever I see content creators like that on Youtube right now I just wish them the best, and if they have a platform currently that supports them financially, well good for them. I still remember the 2018 fiasco when the Ads bubble burst because of the bridge incident, and lots of them didn't know what to do cause the revenue was very shit for years and the future looked bleak. My favorite channels thread: - Watch Wes Work: Car Mechanic but super funny - Super EyePatch Wolf and Worm Girl: Niche Horror Video Games and Topics. - Lots of Japanese Drawing Channels - Devaslife: Japanese Developer and Creator of Inkdrop - Miziziziz and countless game developers that want to show their games and tutorials. - Acerola: Best Youtube Content on Graphics Development - jdh: game development in C and super amazing content truly - Ethoslab: He'll always have a spot on my youtube world
- rocketvole 7mo ago
  the fact that I'm into a lot of the topics that you've listed but have never heard of these creators simply underscores the sheer scale of youtube
  - rambambram 7mo ago
    Me too. Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again. To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality from one day to the other a couple of years ago.
- wat10000 7mo ago
  I watch more YouTube anything else combined by a pretty significant margin. I'm sure there's a lot of crap, but it doesn't show me too much of it. It has learned my preferences well enough to know that it should show me chess, Mario Maker, Australian machine shops specializing in resource extraction industries (a very specific genre to be sure, but I'm subscribed to two separate channels here) and various other things of that nature. Things don't sound completely rosy for creators who want to actually make money from it, but it does seem like they manage to get by. From the perspective of a viewer, they absolutely deserve this.
altmanaltman 7mo ago
> MoffettNathanson runs the numbers and comes to the conclusion that YouTube’s estimated $62 billion in 2025 will have allowed it to pass The Walt Disney Co.’s media business, which generated $60.9 billion last year (excluding Disney’s lucrative experiences division). Just for reference in 2025 annual year, the experiences division generated just a casual $36 billion with a pretty high profit margin. This really doesn't seem like an apples to apple comparision. Youtube is nothing like Disney fundamentally
- nonameiguess 7mo ago
  Also pretty sure Disney generates more revenue from merchandise and other licensing agreements to use its media in derivative products than it does from the media itself.
nothrowaways 7mo ago
Could as well eat Spotify in a snap, just has to comment out that stupid disable_minimize()
- jjice 7mo ago
  That one is behind the `hasPremium` feature flag
  - ndriscoll 7mo ago
    Or just install Video Background Play Fix (which should just be the default, or at least in settings, but at least it seems to be a Mozilla repo).
- Willish42 7mo ago
  I wish the audio quality of youtube videos matched other streaming services. Bandwidth-wise it's pretty minimal, but the audio quality isn't quite as good as competitors like Spotify (and the longer they take to upgrade audio bitrate, the longer the problem persists and uploaded content has lower audio fidelity)
nntwozz 7mo ago
Mandatory shoutout to Invidious: https://invidious.io https://invidious.io https://github.com/iv-org/invidious https://github.com/iv-org/invidious An accessible interface to YouTube content without tracking, using a decentralized network of community-run instances that scrape, rather than API-call, site data. [EDIT] Also Yattee doing the Lord's work: https://github.com/yattee/yattee https://github.com/yattee/yattee Privacy oriented video player for iOS, tvOS and macOS with Invidious support.
- Gander5739 7mo ago
  And Morphe (https://morphe.software https://morphe.software) on Android.
  - MrDrMcCoy 7mo ago
    I prefer Grayjay (https://grayjay.app https://grayjay.app). Hacking existing apps is super weird to me.
- Cider9986 7mo ago
  Invidious is great. I quit visiting reddit, twitter, instagram, youtube in favor of frontends and libredirect. Has greatly improved my life because I use these platforms less, but also the peace of mind. Invidious seems to be the least reliable of the bunch of frontends, which makes sense because it is the most bandwith. At some point I will set up a yt-dlp thing to download the videos I want because the public instance invidious experience recently has not been great. I could also try a self-hosted invidious. Something interesting is considering the privacy benefits of watching the content on a privacy frontend while sitll talking directly to youtube. Does it prevent the fingerprinting? Does it improve your privacy significantly? I imagine the shared frontend proxy approach is best for privacy, but is not reliable currently. photon-reddit.com has been a gamechanger for one specific feature—it lets you recover deleted comments and posts. But, I have found it less reliable than redlib.
  - FireInsight 7mo ago
    Try dragging a youtube video URL onto an MPV window. I believe that should use yt-dlp under the hood. Not that much privacy since they still get your IP and you have to browse for the videos somewhere else as well, but great for minimal ad-free playback. Haven't tried this in a while though, but last time I did it worked perfectly.
rickcarlino 7mo ago
My biggest concern about Youtube is that they do not truly have a competitor. They just raised premium prices again making it one of my most expensive entertainment subscriptions.
- tombert 7mo ago
  I suspect they're going to soon do what Amazon did as well, where they start putting ads into the regular YouTube Premium service, and charge an extra $3 a month for a completely ad free experience. I have the family plan shared across six accounts, and it went to $26, which really isn't that much but I'm not entirely sure why they're doing it.
  - meetingthrower 7mo ago
    This has happened to me btw. I can only suspect they are "testing" the reception.
    - tombert 7mo ago
      Ugh. I can't speak for anyone else, but I have a very strong, borderline-irrational distaste for ads. I hate advertising, I hate having to watch advertisements, I will go out of my way considerably to avoid ads. I have over 400 blu-rays specifically because I wanted to guarantee that I don't have to risk seeing ads in my media. I liked YouTube Premium because it was an ethical way to avoid ads on YouTube; there's always been adblock but I always felt bad depriving creators of their revenue; most of them (at least at the time) weren't big heartless corporations, they were individuals creating stuff. If I start seeing ads unless I'm extorted for more money, that might end up being a final straw for me.
      - bigyabai 7mo ago
        I gave up ~2021. Bought one of the 10tb 5200rpm disks and just started yt-dlping entire channels when I found something good. With mixed 360p/480p/720p backups, I've used ~1/5th of the disc across nearly 50,000 files. This does make me the unethical bad-guy, but my aversion to advertisement is so strong that I can't feel any remorse. AdSense is a scourge on the internet, and once Google is held accountable for it they'll immediately try to extort their licensed library of millions of videos to make a living. And they'll have to try a lot harder than that if they want to deprive me of a daily Tom Scott video with my morning coffee.
croes 7mo ago
[flagged]
- stronglikedan 7mo ago
  proportionally the same as everywhere else, so insignificant for comparison
  - croes 7mo ago
    Proportionally to the content or proportionality to the viewed content? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12169571/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12169571/ I personally have never seen the same BS on a Disney site that I have seen on Youtube
CM30 7mo ago
Honestly, I'm not at all surprised. In many ways, YouTube (and other content creation platforms in general) are just a better deal for many people than traditional forms of entertainment. The thing with traditional media is that it's all about limits and compromise and trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The TV and radio airwaves are limited, as is the schedule. Cinemas and screening times are limited. Shops selling books are limited. Etc. So what you get is very generic and milquetoast. It's bland content aimed at a large audience that (presumably) doesn't want to think too hard or leave their comfort zone, which is designed to appeal to every possible region on Earth at the same time and which doesn't scare away corporate types that see anything outside of a few specific genres as too risky to deal with. Much of what's on YouTube isn't like that. Yeah, there are censorship issues and other such problems, but many of the videos and channels there are as niche as niche can be, and all the better because of it. You don't need to care if your videos appeal to 300 million people in the US or are understandable to a few billion worldwide, you just need to care that an audience that wants that sort of content can discover them and find value from it. Almost every commenter on this site watches something different on YouTube, often about topics that appeal to only a tiny percentage of the population. Platforms like YouTube can support that, traditional media companies can't. The cumulative impact of all those different channels and creators is bigger than any small library of mass market works could ever be.
- parasti 7mo ago
  The world's greatest library of knowledge is owned by a private US company. For some reason I am reminded of this more often than I care to admit.
  - signatoremo 7mo ago
    Imagine if it was owned by a government, such as China. What do you think would happen? Even if it was owned by US government, how much content do you think would get purged from the library when someone like Trump got elected? See what happened to NPR or PBS.
- randycupertino 7mo ago
  > YouTube (and other content creation platforms in general) are just a better deal for many people than traditional forms of entertainment. I think a big factor is that it's low friction. Just open the link or search whatever you want and it plays. It's not like cable where you need to sign up for a service, or Netflix where you need to scroll around in previews selecting for your next show, it's always on your phone, laptop or TV fast and free. It's successful because it's mindless, people can just pull something up and consume content. If they start pushing more unskippable ads, or requiring subscriptions or accounts to view, their viewership would go way down and people would move on to next easier thing.
hitekker 7mo ago
I pay for YouTube Premium. No ads; I feel like it respects my time. Algorithm is well tailored too. The “remove video thumbnail” and “remove YouTube shorts” chrome extension is a must install though.
- sevenf0ur 7mo ago
  Good to know. I disabled watch history just so YouTube wouldn't recommend any shorts.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 7mo ago
  What is shocking about youtube's advertising is just how bad the supposedly "targeted" aspect of it is. The entire original advantage these tech companies had over traditional entertainment and media companies was their access to data and their ability to use that for targeted advertising. It was supposed to be a win-win, so they claimed. The viewer would get targeted advertising to match their interests and brands would get their ads delivered in a hyper accurate way. Instead, the ads are just garbage. If anything, most of the ads I see on my tv (the only time I see ads on youtube) are worse than the ads I see in traditional media, like magazines or TV, in the sense that they literally don't feel targeted or curated at all. I watch tons of bike races and highlights on youtube TV and then almost all my ads are for cars, generic laundry detergent, and obvious scam crap products, anything but something bike related! Do you know where I do see far better targeted advertising? Bike magazines and print media! The entire idea that youtube is good at what they do (to make money) just seems to be a sham in my experience.
  - xtracto 7mo ago
    "The ads are just garbage" But the interesting thing is that, statistically what they are serving maximizes their revenue. So they have the best version of what they want to do, and it keeps maximizing their objectives (profit). The problem is that such objective became somewhat perpendicular to what some people like. It's funny but maybe watching that stupid Ad, somehow makes you do something that in the end makes them profit.
  - jldugger 7mo ago
rambambram 7mo ago
Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again. To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality videos from one day to the other a couple of years ago. Just opening up Youtube one day and seeing all kinds of thumbnails with people with their mouth open, very 'colory' thumbnails (more childlike), channels that I would never watch being presented... I should have noted the exact date, but I didn't. I guess it was around two years ago. Even searching for specific topics is hard. I just know there's enough material on the platform, but in my search results I get so many doubles and channels that I already know. I can keep scrolling, but to no result. If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!
- guzfip 7mo ago
  > Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again. Yep, for some reasons the recommendation engines seem to have become “oh you glanced at this post for 2 second or you watched a single video, this must be exclusively what you want” I’ve seen it on social media too, notably Facebook.
  - asdff 7mo ago
    Spotify sucks too with this. Theres certain artists where if I create a radio station from a song/album or whatever, I will know what like 20 of those songs in that generated station will be. Maybe 8-15 artists and the same 1-3 songs they pick from that artist for that given sort of radio generated call. The feature is good for a toe dip into discovery but you hit the bottom of its depth almost immediately. Sometimes it changes the generated playlist, but hardly. Feels way more siloed than actual FM radio. I might have to start building my own playlists again and do old fashioned discovery, which was almost a part time job evaluating discographies and studying genre history.
  - cogman10 7mo ago
    Yup, that's exactly the youtube problem. It's really terrible for finding new interesting things. If you don't already know exactly what you want to watch, you'll never discover something new you might like.
everyone 7mo ago
Its quite funny to me cus they are making money by showing ads to fake accounts and bots. Eg. https://youtu.be/ucRTW4rgrbU?si=dfRIy76BM8ntNQph https://youtu.be/ucRTW4rgrbU?si=dfRIy76BM8ntNQph
deleted 7mo ago
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seydor 7mo ago
OK can they now stop forgetting my chosen settings on TV every time? It's a pain in the butt. And stop recommending me the same videos over and over , gah
adrianwaj 7mo ago
I think the lesson for other media companies is to get all their content into a single online "property" or are their anti-trust issues involved? There's a very low bar for anyone in the world to watch YouTube with a handheld device and an internet connection. What am I missing? I suppose it's their ad program and fast-acting content ID system that juice it - that'd be the hard part to get right. X has a lot of video content too - why not present it better in a video-focused version? Get rid of the "X" branding though - it's not a rating. Maybe "Y"? Micropayments should be tied into all compensation now. x402 as well for monetization. Perhaps if Soundcloud did video it'd be a challenger and there's one area Soundcloud lacks but should be able to capitalize on - music videos as uploaded by artists themselves.
nitrat3 7mo ago
When will Youtube - Block "unverified" browsers? - Force KYC or Youtube premium to watch videos? In their ongoing fight against yt-dlp and others i can already not watch videos using VPNs. Adblockers has made most tech people unaware of the enshittification of most web services. For most normal people when they eventually make this change it will not affect them at all.
- izacus 7mo ago
  When the number of ad blocking and downloading extension users grows enough to make a dent in their revenue. They're not in loss making business after all.
siva7 7mo ago
can someone tell me why youtube music is so good at recommending me music i certainly won't like?
Unsponsoredio 7mo ago
[dead]
foruhar 7mo ago
Hyperbolically, I think it's one of humanity's greatest resources. I can find anything from precision machining, LLM internals, historical footage of WWI, music performances from pretty much any era, and on, and on. There are so many things that I didn't know there was any footage of or that I didn't a single thing about that I find there pretty much daily. I wish the BBC would publish their whole archive through YT. The few things that they do put up are often so mind expanding whether it's Berty Russel, The Beatles, or some cracking Scottish chap going for a bike ride with a bottle of whisky.
- wiether 7mo ago
  > some cracking Scottish chap going for a bike ride with a bottle of whisky. I've seen that one!
  - deanputney 7mo ago
    Here it is for those who haven't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZk2jV5gJbM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZk2jV5gJbM When I looked it up, turns out I've seen it too!
  - HerbManic 7mo ago
    I hope he is doing well, or at least had a great ride through life.
- pjc50 7mo ago
  Quite a lot of stuff is on iPlayer. But as always, licensing is the killer. (Not to mention reputational risk, which is why so many episodes of Top Of The Pops are hidden)
- BloondAndDoom 7mo ago
  Lowkey one the best things about LLMs, finally we have truly indexed YouTube which made up a massive amount of knowledge consumable and searchable in text format. I hate watching YouTube videos but like the information they provide between Youtube’s AI feature and Perplexitiy etc. Video indexing, it’s been a life saver.
peab 7mo ago
Youtube's the only social media left where subscribing to a channel actually means something
- rconti 7mo ago
  Is it? I've heard YouTubers make snide comments about subscribing "as if that has any bearing on whether you see my videos", implying that it has minimal impact on the algo.
  - tredre3 7mo ago
    Many YouTubers claim that some of their subscribers do not get notified when they release new videos (the "hit the bell icon" portion). They've also been claims of users being silently unsubscribed from channels. That is probably what they're referring to in your paraphrased quote. Because it would be shocking to me if there were Youtubers who truly believed that having (or not having) new subscribers had no impact on the algorithm.
    - Dylan16807 7mo ago
      My understanding is that the percentage of viewers that are actually coming from subscriptions has gone down significantly. The recommendations drive everything, and they don't really care if you're subscribed for what videos they offer.
      - rconti 7mo ago
        That makes sense -- yeah, that if you go to the Subscribed page, you still see all that content, but the algorithm is de-prioritizing subscribed channels in the recommended feed.
  - peab 7mo ago
    Well there's a dedicated subscriptions page which is nice. On desktop, the homepage also has subscriptions on the side, with an indicator that someone has a new video.
dmbche 7mo ago
Unrelated plug for a youtube channel: Photonicinduction The very best of what youtube can offer, to me. Pick any video.
Tenemo 7mo ago
Mandatory PSA for Android users because people tend to have similar complaints each time in popular threads: ReVanced allows you to have YouTube with Sponsorblock, background play, no ads, Shorts completely hidden, (estimated) dislike counter brought back etc. Couldn't imagine using YouTube on my phone without it, it's night and day difference – that's despite being a premium subscriber anyway.
dzonga 7mo ago
covered in terms of educational material, covered in terms of conference videos, then you can listen to dj mixes. YouTube is simply goated - no other platform comes to the versatility you can consume in terms of long-form content.
m6z 7mo ago
Love it or hate, it is better than what traditional broadcast television has become. Cannot even watch a TV channel on the television nowadays. It is all just advertisements, sometimes stretching past 5 minutes. Even with youtube advertising more, it is not as painful as watching any kind of show or movie on a television.
- MrDrMcCoy 7mo ago
  The ad frequency and lack of variety is bad enough, but streaming services have gotten very lazy with choosing when to play them. Sometimes an entire show plays them 5 seconds ahead of the clear fade to black for the break, then plays the fade as soon as the commercials are over. Yarr.
deleted 7mo ago
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cchrist 7mo ago
As a creator and founder, i've observed that having an established long-form video presence (on YT) is literally the greatest distribution channel. if someone's willing to sit through a 15-60 min video of yours, they're probably willing to at least check out whatever product/service you may be selling in your videos.
Chrisszz 7mo ago
Disney is not a platform while YouTube is, they can afford more distribution and so experiment more and have faster gtm, while Disney has to struggle more for gtm while testing new ideas.
csours 7mo ago
Something interesting to me is that YouTube doesn't even capture the majority of the value stream. They allow content creators to use things like Patreon and their own ad reads to capture their own value. Of course, the preceding paragraph could be re-written in many different ways.
- tonyedgecombe 7mo ago
  Yet. I’m sure the relentless pressure to increase profits will force them to address that sooner or later.
jjk166 7mo ago
Radically different sorts of business. Youtube's income comes from engagement, and it's value comes from its network effects. Youtube doesn't own any of the content on its platform, and you could replace every video on Youtube and it wouldn't matter so long as it remains the place people post videos. Youtube's survival is about gaining and keeping eyeballs, its competitors are other sites that people may spend their time on. The social media features - the comments, the likes - may not matter to you or most anyone else, but Youtube is thoroughly a social media business. Indeed for Youtube most content is an ongoing cost - they must pay to store billions of videos most people will never watch, and certainly which won't generate ad revenue to cover their hosting expenses, so that they can host the thing which actually does pull a sizeable audience, most of which is ephemeral. Disney on the other hand is an IP curation firm. Sure they make money on movie tickets and subscriptions and merchandise, but they create value by creating and maintaining a litany of characters, stories, and settings which are priced based on the idea they can be milked essentially forever. Disney could pump out flop after flop after flop, but so long as those flops keep Disney owned characters alive in the zeitgeist, it's a financial win. Obviously Disney needs revenue, but it's valuation is only loosely related to its current revenue.
- lotsofpulp 7mo ago
  >Youtube doesn't own any of the content on its platform What additional benefits would ownership grand Youtube? It seems like they have everything worth having (under “License to Youtube, Duration of License, and Right to Monetize”). https://www.youtube.com/static?gl=US&template=terms https://www.youtube.com/static?gl=US&template=terms
  - jjk166 7mo ago
    I'm not saying Youtube ought to own it, I'm just contrasting youtube and disney's business models. Youtube doesn't have any equivalent to Mickey Mouse. Mr. Beast may generate tremendous ad revenue for Youtube, but Youtube can't sell Mr. Beast. Youtube is a machine made of steel that you need to operate to generate profit; it is valuable only for what it does. Disney is a machine made of gold that you can operate to generate profit, but which you could also sell for parts to make immense and instant sums of cash; and critically the operation of this golden machine adds more gold to itself, it is valuable for what it is.
paul7986 7mo ago
Only streaming app I use and always have used. I have subscribe to the others yet always canceled even at $3 a month. They are not worth it compared to YouTube that's free and for me the best using my Mac Mini connected to my TV (wireless mouse as remote).
mistrial9 7mo ago
what happened to the YouTube suggestions in the last quarter? it went from simply annoying, to "yell and close the page fast" here in California
saltyoldman 7mo ago
40+ers Who here thought Google was nuts in 2006 for buying them? (raises hand)
- saalweachter 7mo ago
  I was working at a crawling-based business around that time, and we thought it was because bandwidth contracts at that scale were symmetric, so the idea was that Google could serve video for ~free because they were crawling the whole Internet constantly and serving extremely light weight pages of ten blue links.
- MrDrMcCoy 7mo ago
  I'm just under 40 and thought it was super weird when they bought YouTube. They already had Google Videos, which offered higher quality and was more reliable for me than YouTube, DailyMotion, or Vimeo at the time. Why they didn't just improve the discoverability and UX of what they already had was completely beyond me.
tzm 7mo ago
Disney seems played out. Still feels early for YouTube.
nl 7mo ago
It's wild to me that only 3 years ago there were still people on HN arguing that Youtube can't be profitable[1]. 11 years ago it was already clear there was a great path to profits, even if they weren't profitable at that point. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268272 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9215164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9215164
siavosh 7mo ago
I’ve disabled YouTube recommendations does anyone have a good resource for discovering things based on interest or even better a one time dump of some form of my recent watch history?
- kakacik 7mo ago
  Get another browser and have recommendations enabled there on another account? I get why you did it, but you sorta want the sweet cake without any carbs in it.
h4kunamata 7mo ago
Too big and too broken. YT replaced TV channel for me, its recent push to force AI into everything, its broken copyright policy is destroying the same empire it created.
darepublic 7mo ago
There is a huge amount of amazing YouTube content. I just fear the company that owns it.
dyauspitr 7mo ago
YouTube really is the best. It deserves it. It’s the vast majority of my video consumption and has been for many years.
vivzkestrel 7mo ago
- with a search bar that absolutely refuses to do what it was intended to do for the point where - a third person had to step in and create a search bar for it right here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655392 - i am amazed i dont see a single person complaining about this at any conference, at any google IO event, i live 10000 miles away from california but if I could barge in on a Google IO with Sundar Pichai giving a keynote, I would totally ask him why they broke search
UltraSane 7mo ago
YouTube is very frustrating because it might be the greatest store of human information but has no decent search function. I would pay $20 a month for the best search functionality Google could create, with the transcript of every video fully indexed in BM25 and vector indexes and the videos in a vector index. So you could search for "All videos of pewdiepie wearing a blue shirt talking about bitcoin"
- ButlerianJihad 7mo ago
  I subscribe to YouTube Premium Family (and yes, they raised my monthly rate too.) YT's search functions are nerfed very deliberately. YouTube's main purpose is to shove content at the user that we don't want. Ads or no ads, we're supposed to consume unwanted content at a far higher volume than the stuff we actually sought out. This is the same no matter what the platform or the medium. It's long been a paradigm for scheduling television shows, that the viewers are too lazy to switch channels away from that great show they loved, and so they can "tailgate" a really awful show after a highly-rated one. Radio stations aren't playing what the listeners want to hear, they're shoving sounds into our ears as dictated by the labels and the media companies, and so forth. YouTube (and YouTube Music, especially with its extremely sticky "AutoPlay" switch) are shoveling suggestions at us, and counting on our laziness, to just mindlessly click the first thing that comes under our mouse. I'm obviously all-in on YT and Music as media players, and I use their Playlist features extensively, but it is completely impossible to organize Playlists in a way that will help me find content again! It is completely impossible for me to create a nice, uniform set of Playlists across the months and years. I often create time-and-date sensitive playlists, i.e. I want to find it again in mid-April next year, but that all basically falls by the wayside. I often impulsively create a Playlist based on some theme I envision in the moment, abandon it, and I never find it again. YouTube and Music count on that behavior and they will never show us our own Playlists in suggested stuff, or in searches unless we deliberately hammer on it. YouTube wants us to find "Community Playlists" and stuff that you don't want, but is otherwise hyped or algorithm'd to appear in front of our eyeballs.
chistev 7mo ago
I'm surprised it wasn't.

340 points by bookofjoe 7mo ago

lemonish97 7mo ago

I always see it as more of a social media company rather than a media co.

busymom0 7mo ago
I often comment on videos but never do I check replies to my comments there.
- kami23 7mo ago
  I went to see if I had any replies to a comment I left on a video for the first time today and it's really hidden to get back to them if you don't remember the exact video. I wonder if it's purposeful friction or just not a priority.
  - squigz 7mo ago
    Click History on the homepage left sidebar > Comments on right side of History page https://www.youtube.com/feed/history https://www.youtube.com/feed/history
    - croes 7mo ago
      And now try to find the comment someone replied to
      - squigz 7mo ago
        Oh, fair enough. That is indeed not shown anywhere it seems.
      - loevborg 7mo ago
        I agree. I wonder how people are motivated to comment if they can't even track replies or check likes. It certainly completely kills motivation for me
        squigz 7mo ago
        Do you and GP not get notifications for replies and (at least some) likes?
        kami23 7mo ago
        In my case I have almost all notifications disabled so maybe there's an option somewhere. Generally find those notification badges too powerful for me to not check and then get waylaid doom scrolling/watching, so I've made it a habit to always disable them everywhere. Somewhat tempted to re-enable it as I only really comment on videos that are for very very niche communities and I'm usually answering or asking questions.
        croes 7mo ago
        I get the notifications but it’s sometimes hard to know for which comment if it’s more than one in a discussion.
        loevborg 7mo ago
        I don't think I get notified but maybe it's because my replies are unpopular
- Acrobatic_Road 7mo ago
  how do you resist the urge to click on the red notification icon?
  - inquirerGeneral 7mo ago
    [dead]
- RobRivera 7mo ago
  And so many comments may aswell be bots. >anyone here in CURRENTYEAR >This is scene is so [adjective] Not exactly a forum, more like a concert crowd
  - esafak 7mo ago
    "Who's here from Hacker News??"
- unclad5968 7mo ago
  I tried to one time, but I couldn't even figure it out so I gave up.
raincole 7mo ago
Just anecdotes, but I feel YouTube comments are the bottom of social media. Even Twitter and Reddit are better. But if the 99% garbage is the price of the emerging of channels like 3B1B, I think it's still a pretty good deal.
- thundergolfer 7mo ago
  Their algorithm has a toxic positivity problem where they weight positivity so much the most moronic, saccharine crap sits at the top and you'd be hard pressed to distinguish the comments from LLM slop.
  - fancyfredbot 7mo ago
    "Epic refresh pull" is my personal pet hate right now. Although "like if you are watching this in <year>" on older videos is close behind.
    - thundergolfer 7mo ago
      The comments pretending Marvel actors (e.g. Benedict Cumberbatch) are their Marvel characters in other movies (e.g. Sam Mendes' 1917) kill me.
- keiferski 7mo ago
  I don’t agree at all. This was true a decade ago, but today YouTube comments are almost all positive, and you’ll often get some really insightful ones too.
  - redwall_hp 7mo ago
    Channels can moderate their comments too. So channels run by thoughtful, community-oriented people will zap trash comments. The music production sphere is especially good.
    - keiferski 7mo ago
carlosjobim 7mo ago
There's nothing social about it. You don't add your friends and chat with your friends on YouTube.
rconti 7mo ago
If you watch Shorts, maybe. If you watch normal videos, the comments are pretty much an afterthought. But even shorts, assuming they're like reels/stories, the "social" aspect is very minimal compared with, say, Facebook posts back in the day, where your friends would see and comment and reply to each other. The Algorithm doesn't really want that anymore; it wants to feed you content from arbitrary people to keep you passively engaged, not to foster conversation/active engagement.

qweiopqweiop 7mo ago

It genuinely disgusts me that the world's largest media company shoves addictive, short form content down users throats (especially young people). Anyone working on it at Google should be ashamed of what they're doing.

ssenssei 7mo ago
I actually currently run youtube out of firefox in mobile and web, and its pretty much amazing in both and doesn't feel janky. The upside of that is that if you add the correct script to the ad blocker extension, you'll never see a youtube reel for the rest of your life, which HEAVILY improves the experience on youtube. this is the filter list I use: https://github.com/i5heu/ublock-hide-yt-shorts https://github.com/i5heu/ublock-hide-yt-shorts
sheept 7mo ago
The social media companies got so large because they optimized for engagement over all else. If they were any less addictive, they'd have way fewer users, and we wouldn't be talking about them now. This can probably only be addressed with regulation
- asdfman123 7mo ago
  Yes, you can be the guy at a social media company who says "perhaps earning a few extra billion in revenue this way is bad for children," but the executives are just going to replace you.
FrustratedMonky 7mo ago
Its what people want. Time to stop thinking corporations will suddenly start policing themsleves.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
Gagarin1917 7mo ago
Where is it being shoved down anyone’s throat? You literally have to intentionally click a short video or use the shorts tab to see any YouTube short.

ssenssei 7mo ago

you know what... besides everything, good for them. I don't know if many of you remember the olden days of Youtube, when it wasn't lead by corporate greed, and before it was infested by greedy abysmal shitty people - When profits weren't the driving force behind content creation. Whenever I see content creators like that on Youtube right now I just wish them the best, and if they have a platform currently that supports them financially, well good for them. I still remember the 2018 fiasco when the Ads bubble burst because of the bridge incident, and lots of them didn't know what to do cause the revenue was very shit for years and the future looked bleak. My favorite channels thread: - Watch Wes Work: Car Mechanic but super funny - Super EyePatch Wolf and Worm Girl: Niche Horror Video Games and Topics. - Lots of Japanese Drawing Channels - Devaslife: Japanese Developer and Creator of Inkdrop - Miziziziz and countless game developers that want to show their games and tutorials. - Acerola: Best Youtube Content on Graphics Development - jdh: game development in C and super amazing content truly - Ethoslab: He'll always have a spot on my youtube world

rocketvole 7mo ago
the fact that I'm into a lot of the topics that you've listed but have never heard of these creators simply underscores the sheer scale of youtube
- rambambram 7mo ago
  Me too. Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again. To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality from one day to the other a couple of years ago.
wat10000 7mo ago
I watch more YouTube anything else combined by a pretty significant margin. I'm sure there's a lot of crap, but it doesn't show me too much of it. It has learned my preferences well enough to know that it should show me chess, Mario Maker, Australian machine shops specializing in resource extraction industries (a very specific genre to be sure, but I'm subscribed to two separate channels here) and various other things of that nature. Things don't sound completely rosy for creators who want to actually make money from it, but it does seem like they manage to get by. From the perspective of a viewer, they absolutely deserve this.

altmanaltman 7mo ago

> MoffettNathanson runs the numbers and comes to the conclusion that YouTube’s estimated $62 billion in 2025 will have allowed it to pass The Walt Disney Co.’s media business, which generated $60.9 billion last year (excluding Disney’s lucrative experiences division). Just for reference in 2025 annual year, the experiences division generated just a casual $36 billion with a pretty high profit margin. This really doesn't seem like an apples to apple comparision. Youtube is nothing like Disney fundamentally

nonameiguess 7mo ago
Also pretty sure Disney generates more revenue from merchandise and other licensing agreements to use its media in derivative products than it does from the media itself.

nothrowaways 7mo ago

Could as well eat Spotify in a snap, just has to comment out that stupid disable_minimize()

jjice 7mo ago
That one is behind the `hasPremium` feature flag
- ndriscoll 7mo ago
  Or just install Video Background Play Fix (which should just be the default, or at least in settings, but at least it seems to be a Mozilla repo).
Willish42 7mo ago
I wish the audio quality of youtube videos matched other streaming services. Bandwidth-wise it's pretty minimal, but the audio quality isn't quite as good as competitors like Spotify (and the longer they take to upgrade audio bitrate, the longer the problem persists and uploaded content has lower audio fidelity)

nntwozz 7mo ago

Mandatory shoutout to Invidious: https://invidious.io https://invidious.io https://github.com/iv-org/invidious https://github.com/iv-org/invidious An accessible interface to YouTube content without tracking, using a decentralized network of community-run instances that scrape, rather than API-call, site data. [EDIT] Also Yattee doing the Lord's work: https://github.com/yattee/yattee https://github.com/yattee/yattee Privacy oriented video player for iOS, tvOS and macOS with Invidious support.

Gander5739 7mo ago
And Morphe (https://morphe.software https://morphe.software) on Android.
- MrDrMcCoy 7mo ago
  I prefer Grayjay (https://grayjay.app https://grayjay.app). Hacking existing apps is super weird to me.
Cider9986 7mo ago
Invidious is great. I quit visiting reddit, twitter, instagram, youtube in favor of frontends and libredirect. Has greatly improved my life because I use these platforms less, but also the peace of mind. Invidious seems to be the least reliable of the bunch of frontends, which makes sense because it is the most bandwith. At some point I will set up a yt-dlp thing to download the videos I want because the public instance invidious experience recently has not been great. I could also try a self-hosted invidious. Something interesting is considering the privacy benefits of watching the content on a privacy frontend while sitll talking directly to youtube. Does it prevent the fingerprinting? Does it improve your privacy significantly? I imagine the shared frontend proxy approach is best for privacy, but is not reliable currently. photon-reddit.com has been a gamechanger for one specific feature—it lets you recover deleted comments and posts. But, I have found it less reliable than redlib.
- FireInsight 7mo ago
  Try dragging a youtube video URL onto an MPV window. I believe that should use yt-dlp under the hood. Not that much privacy since they still get your IP and you have to browse for the videos somewhere else as well, but great for minimal ad-free playback. Haven't tried this in a while though, but last time I did it worked perfectly.

rickcarlino 7mo ago

My biggest concern about Youtube is that they do not truly have a competitor. They just raised premium prices again making it one of my most expensive entertainment subscriptions.

tombert 7mo ago
I suspect they're going to soon do what Amazon did as well, where they start putting ads into the regular YouTube Premium service, and charge an extra $3 a month for a completely ad free experience. I have the family plan shared across six accounts, and it went to $26, which really isn't that much but I'm not entirely sure why they're doing it.
- meetingthrower 7mo ago
  This has happened to me btw. I can only suspect they are "testing" the reception.
  - tombert 7mo ago
    Ugh. I can't speak for anyone else, but I have a very strong, borderline-irrational distaste for ads. I hate advertising, I hate having to watch advertisements, I will go out of my way considerably to avoid ads. I have over 400 blu-rays specifically because I wanted to guarantee that I don't have to risk seeing ads in my media. I liked YouTube Premium because it was an ethical way to avoid ads on YouTube; there's always been adblock but I always felt bad depriving creators of their revenue; most of them (at least at the time) weren't big heartless corporations, they were individuals creating stuff. If I start seeing ads unless I'm extorted for more money, that might end up being a final straw for me.
    - bigyabai 7mo ago
      I gave up ~2021. Bought one of the 10tb 5200rpm disks and just started yt-dlping entire channels when I found something good. With mixed 360p/480p/720p backups, I've used ~1/5th of the disc across nearly 50,000 files. This does make me the unethical bad-guy, but my aversion to advertisement is so strong that I can't feel any remorse. AdSense is a scourge on the internet, and once Google is held accountable for it they'll immediately try to extort their licensed library of millions of videos to make a living. And they'll have to try a lot harder than that if they want to deprive me of a daily Tom Scott video with my morning coffee.

croes 7mo ago

[flagged]

stronglikedan 7mo ago
proportionally the same as everywhere else, so insignificant for comparison
- croes 7mo ago
  Proportionally to the content or proportionality to the viewed content? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12169571/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12169571/ I personally have never seen the same BS on a Disney site that I have seen on Youtube

CM30 7mo ago

Honestly, I'm not at all surprised. In many ways, YouTube (and other content creation platforms in general) are just a better deal for many people than traditional forms of entertainment. The thing with traditional media is that it's all about limits and compromise and trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The TV and radio airwaves are limited, as is the schedule. Cinemas and screening times are limited. Shops selling books are limited. Etc. So what you get is very generic and milquetoast. It's bland content aimed at a large audience that (presumably) doesn't want to think too hard or leave their comfort zone, which is designed to appeal to every possible region on Earth at the same time and which doesn't scare away corporate types that see anything outside of a few specific genres as too risky to deal with. Much of what's on YouTube isn't like that. Yeah, there are censorship issues and other such problems, but many of the videos and channels there are as niche as niche can be, and all the better because of it. You don't need to care if your videos appeal to 300 million people in the US or are understandable to a few billion worldwide, you just need to care that an audience that wants that sort of content can discover them and find value from it. Almost every commenter on this site watches something different on YouTube, often about topics that appeal to only a tiny percentage of the population. Platforms like YouTube can support that, traditional media companies can't. The cumulative impact of all those different channels and creators is bigger than any small library of mass market works could ever be.

parasti 7mo ago
The world's greatest library of knowledge is owned by a private US company. For some reason I am reminded of this more often than I care to admit.
- signatoremo 7mo ago
  Imagine if it was owned by a government, such as China. What do you think would happen? Even if it was owned by US government, how much content do you think would get purged from the library when someone like Trump got elected? See what happened to NPR or PBS.
randycupertino 7mo ago
> YouTube (and other content creation platforms in general) are just a better deal for many people than traditional forms of entertainment. I think a big factor is that it's low friction. Just open the link or search whatever you want and it plays. It's not like cable where you need to sign up for a service, or Netflix where you need to scroll around in previews selecting for your next show, it's always on your phone, laptop or TV fast and free. It's successful because it's mindless, people can just pull something up and consume content. If they start pushing more unskippable ads, or requiring subscriptions or accounts to view, their viewership would go way down and people would move on to next easier thing.

hitekker 7mo ago

I pay for YouTube Premium. No ads; I feel like it respects my time. Algorithm is well tailored too. The “remove video thumbnail” and “remove YouTube shorts” chrome extension is a must install though.

sevenf0ur 7mo ago
Good to know. I disabled watch history just so YouTube wouldn't recommend any shorts.
beezlebroxxxxxx 7mo ago
What is shocking about youtube's advertising is just how bad the supposedly "targeted" aspect of it is. The entire original advantage these tech companies had over traditional entertainment and media companies was their access to data and their ability to use that for targeted advertising. It was supposed to be a win-win, so they claimed. The viewer would get targeted advertising to match their interests and brands would get their ads delivered in a hyper accurate way. Instead, the ads are just garbage. If anything, most of the ads I see on my tv (the only time I see ads on youtube) are worse than the ads I see in traditional media, like magazines or TV, in the sense that they literally don't feel targeted or curated at all. I watch tons of bike races and highlights on youtube TV and then almost all my ads are for cars, generic laundry detergent, and obvious scam crap products, anything but something bike related! Do you know where I do see far better targeted advertising? Bike magazines and print media! The entire idea that youtube is good at what they do (to make money) just seems to be a sham in my experience.
- xtracto 7mo ago
  "The ads are just garbage" But the interesting thing is that, statistically what they are serving maximizes their revenue. So they have the best version of what they want to do, and it keeps maximizing their objectives (profit). The problem is that such objective became somewhat perpendicular to what some people like. It's funny but maybe watching that stupid Ad, somehow makes you do something that in the end makes them profit.
- jldugger 7mo ago

rambambram 7mo ago

Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again. To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality videos from one day to the other a couple of years ago. Just opening up Youtube one day and seeing all kinds of thumbnails with people with their mouth open, very 'colory' thumbnails (more childlike), channels that I would never watch being presented... I should have noted the exact date, but I didn't. I guess it was around two years ago. Even searching for specific topics is hard. I just know there's enough material on the platform, but in my search results I get so many doubles and channels that I already know. I can keep scrolling, but to no result. If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!

guzfip 7mo ago
> Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again. Yep, for some reasons the recommendation engines seem to have become “oh you glanced at this post for 2 second or you watched a single video, this must be exclusively what you want” I’ve seen it on social media too, notably Facebook.
- asdff 7mo ago
  Spotify sucks too with this. Theres certain artists where if I create a radio station from a song/album or whatever, I will know what like 20 of those songs in that generated station will be. Maybe 8-15 artists and the same 1-3 songs they pick from that artist for that given sort of radio generated call. The feature is good for a toe dip into discovery but you hit the bottom of its depth almost immediately. Sometimes it changes the generated playlist, but hardly. Feels way more siloed than actual FM radio. I might have to start building my own playlists again and do old fashioned discovery, which was almost a part time job evaluating discographies and studying genre history.
- cogman10 7mo ago
  Yup, that's exactly the youtube problem. It's really terrible for finding new interesting things. If you don't already know exactly what you want to watch, you'll never discover something new you might like.

everyone 7mo ago

Its quite funny to me cus they are making money by showing ads to fake accounts and bots. Eg. https://youtu.be/ucRTW4rgrbU?si=dfRIy76BM8ntNQph https://youtu.be/ucRTW4rgrbU?si=dfRIy76BM8ntNQph

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

seydor 7mo ago

OK can they now stop forgetting my chosen settings on TV every time? It's a pain in the butt. And stop recommending me the same videos over and over , gah

adrianwaj 7mo ago

I think the lesson for other media companies is to get all their content into a single online "property" or are their anti-trust issues involved? There's a very low bar for anyone in the world to watch YouTube with a handheld device and an internet connection. What am I missing? I suppose it's their ad program and fast-acting content ID system that juice it - that'd be the hard part to get right. X has a lot of video content too - why not present it better in a video-focused version? Get rid of the "X" branding though - it's not a rating. Maybe "Y"? Micropayments should be tied into all compensation now. x402 as well for monetization. Perhaps if Soundcloud did video it'd be a challenger and there's one area Soundcloud lacks but should be able to capitalize on - music videos as uploaded by artists themselves.

nitrat3 7mo ago

When will Youtube - Block "unverified" browsers? - Force KYC or Youtube premium to watch videos? In their ongoing fight against yt-dlp and others i can already not watch videos using VPNs. Adblockers has made most tech people unaware of the enshittification of most web services. For most normal people when they eventually make this change it will not affect them at all.

izacus 7mo ago
When the number of ad blocking and downloading extension users grows enough to make a dent in their revenue. They're not in loss making business after all.

siva7 7mo ago

can someone tell me why youtube music is so good at recommending me music i certainly won't like?

Unsponsoredio 7mo ago

[dead]

foruhar 7mo ago

Hyperbolically, I think it's one of humanity's greatest resources. I can find anything from precision machining, LLM internals, historical footage of WWI, music performances from pretty much any era, and on, and on. There are so many things that I didn't know there was any footage of or that I didn't a single thing about that I find there pretty much daily. I wish the BBC would publish their whole archive through YT. The few things that they do put up are often so mind expanding whether it's Berty Russel, The Beatles, or some cracking Scottish chap going for a bike ride with a bottle of whisky.

wiether 7mo ago
> some cracking Scottish chap going for a bike ride with a bottle of whisky. I've seen that one!
- deanputney 7mo ago
  Here it is for those who haven't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZk2jV5gJbM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZk2jV5gJbM When I looked it up, turns out I've seen it too!
- HerbManic 7mo ago
  I hope he is doing well, or at least had a great ride through life.
pjc50 7mo ago
Quite a lot of stuff is on iPlayer. But as always, licensing is the killer. (Not to mention reputational risk, which is why so many episodes of Top Of The Pops are hidden)
BloondAndDoom 7mo ago
Lowkey one the best things about LLMs, finally we have truly indexed YouTube which made up a massive amount of knowledge consumable and searchable in text format. I hate watching YouTube videos but like the information they provide between Youtube’s AI feature and Perplexitiy etc. Video indexing, it’s been a life saver.

peab 7mo ago

Youtube's the only social media left where subscribing to a channel actually means something

rconti 7mo ago
Is it? I've heard YouTubers make snide comments about subscribing "as if that has any bearing on whether you see my videos", implying that it has minimal impact on the algo.
- tredre3 7mo ago
  Many YouTubers claim that some of their subscribers do not get notified when they release new videos (the "hit the bell icon" portion). They've also been claims of users being silently unsubscribed from channels. That is probably what they're referring to in your paraphrased quote. Because it would be shocking to me if there were Youtubers who truly believed that having (or not having) new subscribers had no impact on the algorithm.
  - Dylan16807 7mo ago
    My understanding is that the percentage of viewers that are actually coming from subscriptions has gone down significantly. The recommendations drive everything, and they don't really care if you're subscribed for what videos they offer.
    - rconti 7mo ago
      That makes sense -- yeah, that if you go to the Subscribed page, you still see all that content, but the algorithm is de-prioritizing subscribed channels in the recommended feed.
- peab 7mo ago
  Well there's a dedicated subscriptions page which is nice. On desktop, the homepage also has subscriptions on the side, with an indicator that someone has a new video.

dmbche 7mo ago

Unrelated plug for a youtube channel: Photonicinduction The very best of what youtube can offer, to me. Pick any video.

Tenemo 7mo ago

Mandatory PSA for Android users because people tend to have similar complaints each time in popular threads: ReVanced allows you to have YouTube with Sponsorblock, background play, no ads, Shorts completely hidden, (estimated) dislike counter brought back etc. Couldn't imagine using YouTube on my phone without it, it's night and day difference – that's despite being a premium subscriber anyway.

dzonga 7mo ago

covered in terms of educational material, covered in terms of conference videos, then you can listen to dj mixes. YouTube is simply goated - no other platform comes to the versatility you can consume in terms of long-form content.

m6z 7mo ago

Love it or hate, it is better than what traditional broadcast television has become. Cannot even watch a TV channel on the television nowadays. It is all just advertisements, sometimes stretching past 5 minutes. Even with youtube advertising more, it is not as painful as watching any kind of show or movie on a television.

MrDrMcCoy 7mo ago
The ad frequency and lack of variety is bad enough, but streaming services have gotten very lazy with choosing when to play them. Sometimes an entire show plays them 5 seconds ahead of the clear fade to black for the break, then plays the fade as soon as the commercials are over. Yarr.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

cchrist 7mo ago

As a creator and founder, i've observed that having an established long-form video presence (on YT) is literally the greatest distribution channel. if someone's willing to sit through a 15-60 min video of yours, they're probably willing to at least check out whatever product/service you may be selling in your videos.

Chrisszz 7mo ago

Disney is not a platform while YouTube is, they can afford more distribution and so experiment more and have faster gtm, while Disney has to struggle more for gtm while testing new ideas.

csours 7mo ago

Something interesting to me is that YouTube doesn't even capture the majority of the value stream. They allow content creators to use things like Patreon and their own ad reads to capture their own value. Of course, the preceding paragraph could be re-written in many different ways.

tonyedgecombe 7mo ago
Yet. I’m sure the relentless pressure to increase profits will force them to address that sooner or later.

jjk166 7mo ago

Radically different sorts of business. Youtube's income comes from engagement, and it's value comes from its network effects. Youtube doesn't own any of the content on its platform, and you could replace every video on Youtube and it wouldn't matter so long as it remains the place people post videos. Youtube's survival is about gaining and keeping eyeballs, its competitors are other sites that people may spend their time on. The social media features - the comments, the likes - may not matter to you or most anyone else, but Youtube is thoroughly a social media business. Indeed for Youtube most content is an ongoing cost - they must pay to store billions of videos most people will never watch, and certainly which won't generate ad revenue to cover their hosting expenses, so that they can host the thing which actually does pull a sizeable audience, most of which is ephemeral. Disney on the other hand is an IP curation firm. Sure they make money on movie tickets and subscriptions and merchandise, but they create value by creating and maintaining a litany of characters, stories, and settings which are priced based on the idea they can be milked essentially forever. Disney could pump out flop after flop after flop, but so long as those flops keep Disney owned characters alive in the zeitgeist, it's a financial win. Obviously Disney needs revenue, but it's valuation is only loosely related to its current revenue.

lotsofpulp 7mo ago
>Youtube doesn't own any of the content on its platform What additional benefits would ownership grand Youtube? It seems like they have everything worth having (under “License to Youtube, Duration of License, and Right to Monetize”). https://www.youtube.com/static?gl=US&template=terms https://www.youtube.com/static?gl=US&template=terms
- jjk166 7mo ago
  I'm not saying Youtube ought to own it, I'm just contrasting youtube and disney's business models. Youtube doesn't have any equivalent to Mickey Mouse. Mr. Beast may generate tremendous ad revenue for Youtube, but Youtube can't sell Mr. Beast. Youtube is a machine made of steel that you need to operate to generate profit; it is valuable only for what it does. Disney is a machine made of gold that you can operate to generate profit, but which you could also sell for parts to make immense and instant sums of cash; and critically the operation of this golden machine adds more gold to itself, it is valuable for what it is.

paul7986 7mo ago

Only streaming app I use and always have used. I have subscribe to the others yet always canceled even at $3 a month. They are not worth it compared to YouTube that's free and for me the best using my Mac Mini connected to my TV (wireless mouse as remote).

mistrial9 7mo ago

what happened to the YouTube suggestions in the last quarter? it went from simply annoying, to "yell and close the page fast" here in California

saltyoldman 7mo ago

40+ers Who here thought Google was nuts in 2006 for buying them? (raises hand)

saalweachter 7mo ago
I was working at a crawling-based business around that time, and we thought it was because bandwidth contracts at that scale were symmetric, so the idea was that Google could serve video for ~free because they were crawling the whole Internet constantly and serving extremely light weight pages of ten blue links.
MrDrMcCoy 7mo ago
I'm just under 40 and thought it was super weird when they bought YouTube. They already had Google Videos, which offered higher quality and was more reliable for me than YouTube, DailyMotion, or Vimeo at the time. Why they didn't just improve the discoverability and UX of what they already had was completely beyond me.

tzm 7mo ago

Disney seems played out. Still feels early for YouTube.

nl 7mo ago

It's wild to me that only 3 years ago there were still people on HN arguing that Youtube can't be profitable[1]. 11 years ago it was already clear there was a great path to profits, even if they weren't profitable at that point. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268272 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9215164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9215164

siavosh 7mo ago

I’ve disabled YouTube recommendations does anyone have a good resource for discovering things based on interest or even better a one time dump of some form of my recent watch history?

kakacik 7mo ago
Get another browser and have recommendations enabled there on another account? I get why you did it, but you sorta want the sweet cake without any carbs in it.

h4kunamata 7mo ago

Too big and too broken. YT replaced TV channel for me, its recent push to force AI into everything, its broken copyright policy is destroying the same empire it created.

darepublic 7mo ago

There is a huge amount of amazing YouTube content. I just fear the company that owns it.

dyauspitr 7mo ago

YouTube really is the best. It deserves it. It’s the vast majority of my video consumption and has been for many years.

vivzkestrel 7mo ago

- with a search bar that absolutely refuses to do what it was intended to do for the point where - a third person had to step in and create a search bar for it right here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655392 - i am amazed i dont see a single person complaining about this at any conference, at any google IO event, i live 10000 miles away from california but if I could barge in on a Google IO with Sundar Pichai giving a keynote, I would totally ask him why they broke search

UltraSane 7mo ago

YouTube is very frustrating because it might be the greatest store of human information but has no decent search function. I would pay $20 a month for the best search functionality Google could create, with the transcript of every video fully indexed in BM25 and vector indexes and the videos in a vector index. So you could search for "All videos of pewdiepie wearing a blue shirt talking about bitcoin"

ButlerianJihad 7mo ago
I subscribe to YouTube Premium Family (and yes, they raised my monthly rate too.) YT's search functions are nerfed very deliberately. YouTube's main purpose is to shove content at the user that we don't want. Ads or no ads, we're supposed to consume unwanted content at a far higher volume than the stuff we actually sought out. This is the same no matter what the platform or the medium. It's long been a paradigm for scheduling television shows, that the viewers are too lazy to switch channels away from that great show they loved, and so they can "tailgate" a really awful show after a highly-rated one. Radio stations aren't playing what the listeners want to hear, they're shoving sounds into our ears as dictated by the labels and the media companies, and so forth. YouTube (and YouTube Music, especially with its extremely sticky "AutoPlay" switch) are shoveling suggestions at us, and counting on our laziness, to just mindlessly click the first thing that comes under our mouse. I'm obviously all-in on YT and Music as media players, and I use their Playlist features extensively, but it is completely impossible to organize Playlists in a way that will help me find content again! It is completely impossible for me to create a nice, uniform set of Playlists across the months and years. I often create time-and-date sensitive playlists, i.e. I want to find it again in mid-April next year, but that all basically falls by the wayside. I often impulsively create a Playlist based on some theme I envision in the moment, abandon it, and I never find it again. YouTube and Music count on that behavior and they will never show us our own Playlists in suggested stuff, or in searches unless we deliberately hammer on it. YouTube wants us to find "Community Playlists" and stuff that you don't want, but is otherwise hyped or algorithm'd to appear in front of our eyeballs.

chistev 7mo ago

I'm surprised it wasn't.