5 ms·

YouTube: 1B Viewers, No Profit

53 points by msoad 12y ago

msoad 12y ago
To get around the pay wall, do a google search for title or follow this link: https://www.google.com/search?q=YouTube%3A+1+Billion+Viewers%2C+No+Profit https://www.google.com/search?q=YouTube%3A+1+Billion+Viewers...
- heinrich5991 12y ago
  This does not seem to work for me.
  - scrollaway 12y ago
    It relies on the Referer [sic] header, so if you are blocking it or copying the link and opening in a new tab, that won't work. Either way, this is a lousy 2-paragraph article that says YouTube isn't making a profit and Google hopes the Music Key program fares better.
- jsprogrammer 12y ago
  Would be nice if posts were tagged [Paywall] so we could avoid them, or just link to the Google search.
davidiach 12y ago
I would add that part of the reason YouTube is struggling is because it has become a pretty lousy product for today's standards. - comments are completely broken - finding stuff is a process of trial and error - too many invasive ads - no pleasant surprises; every time I open Facebook or Twitter I find something new that interests me, which makes me wanna come back, not so with YouTube. In fact I might find better pleasant surprises opening the homepage of Amazon.
- baby 12y ago
  I would also add that finding stuff is hard because there is no way to see the ranking from the search results (and it sometimes yields to videos having more downvotes than upvotes)
- onion2k 12y ago
  Those reasons would explain why the product is failing but the product isn't failing. It has 1bn viewers and $4bn revenue. By any measure those are signs of a very successful product offering. Youtube's problems are that their costs are too high. If you have $4bn coming in, but providing the service to generate that $4bn costs $4bn, then you need to do things to make your business more efficient. It really is that simple. Making a "better" product won't change anything if every dollar you bring in still costs a dollar to service. You'd just push the revenue up and still make no profit.
  - xyzzyz 12y ago
    For comparison, note that YouTube has ~3x as much revenue as Netflix, and ~20x as many viewers. http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/NFLX/4026650765x0x804108/043A3015-36EC-49B9-907C-27960F1A7E57/Q4_14_Letter_to_shareholders.pdf http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/NFLX/4026650765x0x804...
  - gearhart 12y ago
    > Youtube's problems are that their costs are too high. Is that true? I'm definitely not saying it's not, but it's not self-evidently true. Is $4 per user per year a lot to pay for being the platform they watch video on? I agree with your point that their challenge is not about making their product more attractive to new users, but an equally valid conclusion would be that their problem is that their product isn't generating enough value per user, so they can't ask enough value in return - which would be a product design problem, or that their product is generating significantly more value for its users than it's managing to demand in return, which would be a "monetisation" / revenue stream issue.
    - onion2k 12y ago
chinathrow 12y ago
No profit? A shitload of interlinked meta-data about what and how we consume media. Of course that isn't laid out in $$$...
venomsnake 12y ago
Remove Content ID and require manually filed DMCA notices. You tube will surge to the top in no time.
- misnome 12y ago
  Beyond the tech circles, I bet nobody really cares about this at all.
  - venomsnake 12y ago
    Make mass takedowns harder and you will have a lot of increased traffic in youtube. And more popular too. Google also have the legal funds to win cases now.
  - InclinedPlane 12y ago
    Oh, they care. It's a huge problem. Spend a ton of effort putting up a let's play video or a review of, say, a video game only to have it taken down or the revenue snatched away. Or, have someone abuse the system against you, which happens, and be forced to struggle through the kafkaesque bureacratic nightmare to get things fixed. Dealing with the broken aspects of content-id and the particular way youtube has implemented DMCA compliance adds a significant amount of hassle and overhead to a great number of folks who make content on the site.
  - fpgeek 12y ago
    I'd make a stronger statement: Outside tech circles I'd bet that, in practice, the vast majority of YouTube viewers would abandon it in droves if YouTube removed Content ID. I'm sure they don't like Content ID in the abstract (and plenty may be frustrated by personal encounters with it), but I bet most of them care far more about the first-party content on YouTube from the entertainment industry that the Content ID "treaty" has made possible.
    - venomsnake 12y ago
      Yeah. I love the gray screen with a smiley face - this is not allowed in your country. I have spend so much time enjoying the content. Also content ID take a lot of parodies and analyzes and gaming reviews.
mapt 12y ago
"The results reflect YouTube’s struggles to expand its core audience beyond teens and tweens. Most YouTube users treat the site as a video repository to be accessed from links or embedded video players posted elsewhere, rather than visiting YouTube.com daily. Google executives want them to turn on YouTube the way they turn on television, as a habit, where they can expect to find different “channels” of entertainment." If they want me to sit in front of this as passive entertainment, why not start by giving me an interface to view my subscribed content, in order, as an RSS-reader-like experience? I should be able to hit 'play' and have it scan through all the new videos on the channels I am subscribed to, without hitting 'click to skip' length ads, going into a mysterious related videos algorithm, or manually navigating through a list and clicking on each one. For that matter, I should be able to interface with a channel in that way regardless of whether they have created a playlist or not, using 'autoplay in order of upload'. If you wanna get complicated, give me a search functionality that will do the same. 'Autoplay feed of anything mentioning Minecraft mod XYZ in the title/description' Right now, Youtube has a nominal subscription function that actively deters you from using it smoothly. Fix that before you assume you can't turn it into a 'habit'.
- JonnieCache 12y ago
  >why not start by giving me an interface to view my subscribed content, in order, as an RSS-reader-like experience? Can you really not do that? I've never had a youtube account. The plan at the back of my head to build a hideously boring looking "advanced" interface for youtube is creeping forward...
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    Yep, you can't. It will give you a list of videos uploaded, but there is no easy way to just hit play and sit through them as if they were a long playlist.
    - unicornporn 12y ago
      I get a single RSS feed of all my YouTube subscriptions. Then I sift through them directly in my feed reader. Granted, it's not via the YouTube site, but it works perfectly. http://scottnelle.com/466/youtube-subscriptions-rss-feed/ http://scottnelle.com/466/youtube-subscriptions-rss-feed/
InclinedPlane 12y ago
YouTube is an astounding platform with a remarkable social relevancy that many people over ... 25? or so probably don't appreciate. Even more astounding is the degree to which google consistently drops the ball in regard to its development. Much of its success has come in spite of, rather than because of, major changes and "features" google has made to the site. Partly that's because of google's almost pathological inability to develop a real product or to manage a serious customer relationship (where the end-users are also the customers, rather than the merchandise). At this point I hope merely that google doesn't do anything that inadvertently destroys whatever magic is happening at youtube before a diversified field of real competition exists elsewhere.
hurin 12y ago
By comparison, Facebook Inc. generated more than $12 billion in revenue, and nearly $3 billion in profit, from its 1.3 billion users last year. I didn't realize Facebook had such a small revenue figure - could anyone explain their market cap in that regard? It's highly unusual.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  Their market cap is based on fantasy (but which growing tech company's isn't?) Facebook's valuation is founded on the nebulous idea that somehow facebook's combination of tech talent and userbase will result in massive profits in the future. Meanwhile, facebook managed to game the IPO system deftly and extract a huge wad of cash from investors (and win a massive payoff to its early stage investors), it took almost a full year for the market valuation of facebook to get back to a state where the folks who bought in early to the IPO could finally pass their stock off to other suckers without taking a loss.
- onion2k 12y ago
  Market cap is an estimate of future value. Investors believe that Facebook will continue to grow and provide services that generate more money than it makes now. Should they stop thinking that the value of the stock will fall, and, obviously, the market cap will contract. A company could have $0 in revenue and a $100bn market cap if people were convinced that in the future that stock will be hugely valuable.
ZeroGravitas 12y ago
Isn't a bit magical to grow a $4Billion a year business and end up spending exactly that amount to run it? I know this gets talked about a lot with regards to Amazon, but do the people running Youtube actually get any extra benefit from being profitable?
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  Precisely. Amazon and Youtube are both in the same position with regards to profitability. If it were desired they could make it happen, if it's not seen as necessary then they can simply plow all of what would have been their profit margins back into growth and development.
- shubb 12y ago
  So magical it might even be a tax dodge... a lot of companies have a complex structure where some business units are optimized for tax, and other deliver services. They take the profit in the tax optimized units. That might be part of what is going on here...
Coding_Cat 12y ago
It should be noted that all of this is based upon "a person with knowledge of the figure". It's easy to manipulate these kind of numbers, and Google might very well have an interest in doing so. For example, they might attribute the costs of building a new data-center to their YouTube branch, but actually use it for all their services. And they're probably not making their collected data on you into account. Why might they do this? To make their main business seem stronger at the expanse of YouTube for whatever reason, to help justify lower CPM on YouTube content, because admitting that data-mining your customers is your long-term plan is generally not a smart idea (even if you're Google and people should know by now).
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  I don't think they do this or are allowed to do this. They can of course, not break out earnings by division if they want, but if they do, I don't think Hollywood accounting is permitted or useful. There are other ways to play this; e.g. microsoft once included MacBU (very profitable Mac office) in E&D (xbox...). But at the end of the day, it doesn't really help anyone.
Morphling 12y ago
"to read a full story" and I didn't actually even care...
- izietto 12y ago
  Log-in in order to read the full article is really bad to me
MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
I suspect Youtubes main opex is bandwidth. So it all depends on how traffic costs develop over time in relation to advertising revenue. Could this be a motivator for Google Fiber? By cutting out the middlemen, they can lower running costs for their own services.
- Joona 12y ago
  Definitely. They try to compress the videos as much as they can, load comments only if you scroll down etc.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    I doubt lazy loaded comments have anything to do with bandwidth concerns - a page full takes less than a single frame of video. Most likely, it's to avoid internal IO, especially now that they're pulling comments from Google+ as well.
- unicornporn 12y ago
  I believe storage won't be a cheap thing either for this type of business. 300 hours of new video every minute[1] is a lot. [1] https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
gokhan 12y ago
We don't have a TV unit in our home. People in their 30's or older find it awkward. Kids under 15 absolutely don't care about it, they always have something waiting to watch on YouTube and they consume it using whatever device they have access to. My 2.5yo can open YouTube app on whatever device she finds on the coffee table and usually find content through suggestions. 8yo already got banned from YouTube by watching excessive amounts of Minecraft videos, until summer. We hosted a reunion event for kids of close and distant relatives during the semester and 1/4 of the day spent on YouTube, a stat based on 5 kids ranging from 2.5 to 11. I don't see any other platform reaching every kid in the world other than YouTube. Are there any? Google will sure monetize it better than today, all TV entertainment in the future will be consumed through companies like YouTube, Twitch etc. It's easier to see it if you live with younger people.
- duiker101 12y ago
  > 8yo already got banned from YouTube by watching excessive amounts of Minecraft videos, until summer How? I keep youtube in the background for music almost all day and didn't know you could get banned for "watching too much"
  - JonnieCache 12y ago
    I think he means he banned his child.
  - rrrhys 12y ago
    By the parents!
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    I don't think that is what parent meant, YouTube is not doing the banning.
  - skc 12y ago
    I'm interested in knowing what trick you use to keep youtube on in the background for music. I listen to Jazz and this sounds like something I need to know how to do
Aoyagi 12y ago
Maybe if the site wasn't a bloated mess of useless or barely working features, people would be willing to turn off their adblocks. Plus I bet they do get their money through some tax loops or some other form light money launder. If not the money, they do get gigantic userbase they can harvest for data, unlike G+.
iagooar 12y ago
Actually making no profit, but at the same time not losing money is "good enough" for a company like Google. The massive amount of users allows for analyzing behavior patterns and increasing the profile information that later on is used to improve targeted ads like adwords. Not only this, but being able to have a larger pool of employees without losing money has its own benefits, like easily reallocating the best performing or fitting people on other, more profitable projects or urgent problems.
- fpgeek 12y ago
  It's not that simple. Breaking even may be "good enough" strategically for Google, but, tactically, it is a problem for YouTube and everyone that works on it. The harder it is to concretely demonstrate YouTube's value to Google, the harder it is to make the case for investing in YouTube, rewarding employees competitively, against unwise cost-cutting and so on. Things don't fall apart overnight, but over time...
Joona 12y ago
Why does Youtube not have pay-to-watch channels, or just the ability to "donate" to channels? This is a huge deal on Twitch (channels have thousands of paying "subscribers").
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
  It does have them actually, but (somewhat understandably) nobody uses them. Off-site schemes like Patreon are far more popular. That allows people to donate a small amount monthly, or a small amount per piece of new content. They get incentives (à la Kickstarter) to donate extra. Patreon has addition appeal possibly because it doesn't make you entirely reliant on Google for your income. Even those making millions of YouTube get shitty support and could have their channel kicked off YouTube (or pulled out of the Partner Program) at a moment's notice for no good reason, with nobody to complain to if that happens.
  - Joona 12y ago
    Patreon-style payments are what I meant by donations, but I guess people just won't trust Google enough for that.
fpgeek 12y ago
This really puts the whole Music Key controversy in perspective. If YouTube isn't making money, then of course they're going try to alter their deals, no matter how many indie musicians it pisses off.
arfliw 12y ago
It's not that there is a lot of junk on YouTube. There is a lot of junk on my 900 channels of TV, too. But I have a handful of go-to channels, DVR and a huge schedule showing me what's happening across all of those channels. Problem solved. YouTube has none of those. That's why I use YouTube exactly like they said, I'm linked to it elsewhere. Or I go and search for something specific. Discovery is the problem. Not a lack of quality content.
unicornporn 12y ago
So, how can I read this article? I get "To Read the Full Story, Subscribe or Log In" even when viewing the page in a clean session.

53 points by msoad 12y ago

msoad 12y ago

To get around the pay wall, do a google search for title or follow this link: https://www.google.com/search?q=YouTube%3A+1+Billion+Viewers%2C+No+Profit https://www.google.com/search?q=YouTube%3A+1+Billion+Viewers...

heinrich5991 12y ago
This does not seem to work for me.
- scrollaway 12y ago
  It relies on the Referer [sic] header, so if you are blocking it or copying the link and opening in a new tab, that won't work. Either way, this is a lousy 2-paragraph article that says YouTube isn't making a profit and Google hopes the Music Key program fares better.
jsprogrammer 12y ago
Would be nice if posts were tagged [Paywall] so we could avoid them, or just link to the Google search.

davidiach 12y ago

I would add that part of the reason YouTube is struggling is because it has become a pretty lousy product for today's standards. - comments are completely broken - finding stuff is a process of trial and error - too many invasive ads - no pleasant surprises; every time I open Facebook or Twitter I find something new that interests me, which makes me wanna come back, not so with YouTube. In fact I might find better pleasant surprises opening the homepage of Amazon.

baby 12y ago
I would also add that finding stuff is hard because there is no way to see the ranking from the search results (and it sometimes yields to videos having more downvotes than upvotes)
onion2k 12y ago
Those reasons would explain why the product is failing but the product isn't failing. It has 1bn viewers and $4bn revenue. By any measure those are signs of a very successful product offering. Youtube's problems are that their costs are too high. If you have $4bn coming in, but providing the service to generate that $4bn costs $4bn, then you need to do things to make your business more efficient. It really is that simple. Making a "better" product won't change anything if every dollar you bring in still costs a dollar to service. You'd just push the revenue up and still make no profit.
- xyzzyz 12y ago
  For comparison, note that YouTube has ~3x as much revenue as Netflix, and ~20x as many viewers. http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/NFLX/4026650765x0x804108/043A3015-36EC-49B9-907C-27960F1A7E57/Q4_14_Letter_to_shareholders.pdf http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/NFLX/4026650765x0x804...
- gearhart 12y ago
  > Youtube's problems are that their costs are too high. Is that true? I'm definitely not saying it's not, but it's not self-evidently true. Is $4 per user per year a lot to pay for being the platform they watch video on? I agree with your point that their challenge is not about making their product more attractive to new users, but an equally valid conclusion would be that their problem is that their product isn't generating enough value per user, so they can't ask enough value in return - which would be a product design problem, or that their product is generating significantly more value for its users than it's managing to demand in return, which would be a "monetisation" / revenue stream issue.
  - onion2k 12y ago

chinathrow 12y ago

No profit? A shitload of interlinked meta-data about what and how we consume media. Of course that isn't laid out in $$$...

venomsnake 12y ago

Remove Content ID and require manually filed DMCA notices. You tube will surge to the top in no time.

misnome 12y ago
Beyond the tech circles, I bet nobody really cares about this at all.
- venomsnake 12y ago
  Make mass takedowns harder and you will have a lot of increased traffic in youtube. And more popular too. Google also have the legal funds to win cases now.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  Oh, they care. It's a huge problem. Spend a ton of effort putting up a let's play video or a review of, say, a video game only to have it taken down or the revenue snatched away. Or, have someone abuse the system against you, which happens, and be forced to struggle through the kafkaesque bureacratic nightmare to get things fixed. Dealing with the broken aspects of content-id and the particular way youtube has implemented DMCA compliance adds a significant amount of hassle and overhead to a great number of folks who make content on the site.
- fpgeek 12y ago
  I'd make a stronger statement: Outside tech circles I'd bet that, in practice, the vast majority of YouTube viewers would abandon it in droves if YouTube removed Content ID. I'm sure they don't like Content ID in the abstract (and plenty may be frustrated by personal encounters with it), but I bet most of them care far more about the first-party content on YouTube from the entertainment industry that the Content ID "treaty" has made possible.
  - venomsnake 12y ago
    Yeah. I love the gray screen with a smiley face - this is not allowed in your country. I have spend so much time enjoying the content. Also content ID take a lot of parodies and analyzes and gaming reviews.

mapt 12y ago

"The results reflect YouTube’s struggles to expand its core audience beyond teens and tweens. Most YouTube users treat the site as a video repository to be accessed from links or embedded video players posted elsewhere, rather than visiting YouTube.com daily. Google executives want them to turn on YouTube the way they turn on television, as a habit, where they can expect to find different “channels” of entertainment." If they want me to sit in front of this as passive entertainment, why not start by giving me an interface to view my subscribed content, in order, as an RSS-reader-like experience? I should be able to hit 'play' and have it scan through all the new videos on the channels I am subscribed to, without hitting 'click to skip' length ads, going into a mysterious related videos algorithm, or manually navigating through a list and clicking on each one. For that matter, I should be able to interface with a channel in that way regardless of whether they have created a playlist or not, using 'autoplay in order of upload'. If you wanna get complicated, give me a search functionality that will do the same. 'Autoplay feed of anything mentioning Minecraft mod XYZ in the title/description' Right now, Youtube has a nominal subscription function that actively deters you from using it smoothly. Fix that before you assume you can't turn it into a 'habit'.

JonnieCache 12y ago
>why not start by giving me an interface to view my subscribed content, in order, as an RSS-reader-like experience? Can you really not do that? I've never had a youtube account. The plan at the back of my head to build a hideously boring looking "advanced" interface for youtube is creeping forward...
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Yep, you can't. It will give you a list of videos uploaded, but there is no easy way to just hit play and sit through them as if they were a long playlist.
  - unicornporn 12y ago
    I get a single RSS feed of all my YouTube subscriptions. Then I sift through them directly in my feed reader. Granted, it's not via the YouTube site, but it works perfectly. http://scottnelle.com/466/youtube-subscriptions-rss-feed/ http://scottnelle.com/466/youtube-subscriptions-rss-feed/

InclinedPlane 12y ago

YouTube is an astounding platform with a remarkable social relevancy that many people over ... 25? or so probably don't appreciate. Even more astounding is the degree to which google consistently drops the ball in regard to its development. Much of its success has come in spite of, rather than because of, major changes and "features" google has made to the site. Partly that's because of google's almost pathological inability to develop a real product or to manage a serious customer relationship (where the end-users are also the customers, rather than the merchandise). At this point I hope merely that google doesn't do anything that inadvertently destroys whatever magic is happening at youtube before a diversified field of real competition exists elsewhere.

hurin 12y ago

By comparison, Facebook Inc. generated more than $12 billion in revenue, and nearly $3 billion in profit, from its 1.3 billion users last year. I didn't realize Facebook had such a small revenue figure - could anyone explain their market cap in that regard? It's highly unusual.

InclinedPlane 12y ago
Their market cap is based on fantasy (but which growing tech company's isn't?) Facebook's valuation is founded on the nebulous idea that somehow facebook's combination of tech talent and userbase will result in massive profits in the future. Meanwhile, facebook managed to game the IPO system deftly and extract a huge wad of cash from investors (and win a massive payoff to its early stage investors), it took almost a full year for the market valuation of facebook to get back to a state where the folks who bought in early to the IPO could finally pass their stock off to other suckers without taking a loss.
onion2k 12y ago
Market cap is an estimate of future value. Investors believe that Facebook will continue to grow and provide services that generate more money than it makes now. Should they stop thinking that the value of the stock will fall, and, obviously, the market cap will contract. A company could have $0 in revenue and a $100bn market cap if people were convinced that in the future that stock will be hugely valuable.

ZeroGravitas 12y ago

Isn't a bit magical to grow a $4Billion a year business and end up spending exactly that amount to run it? I know this gets talked about a lot with regards to Amazon, but do the people running Youtube actually get any extra benefit from being profitable?

InclinedPlane 12y ago
Precisely. Amazon and Youtube are both in the same position with regards to profitability. If it were desired they could make it happen, if it's not seen as necessary then they can simply plow all of what would have been their profit margins back into growth and development.
shubb 12y ago
So magical it might even be a tax dodge... a lot of companies have a complex structure where some business units are optimized for tax, and other deliver services. They take the profit in the tax optimized units. That might be part of what is going on here...

Coding_Cat 12y ago

It should be noted that all of this is based upon "a person with knowledge of the figure". It's easy to manipulate these kind of numbers, and Google might very well have an interest in doing so. For example, they might attribute the costs of building a new data-center to their YouTube branch, but actually use it for all their services. And they're probably not making their collected data on you into account. Why might they do this? To make their main business seem stronger at the expanse of YouTube for whatever reason, to help justify lower CPM on YouTube content, because admitting that data-mining your customers is your long-term plan is generally not a smart idea (even if you're Google and people should know by now).

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
I don't think they do this or are allowed to do this. They can of course, not break out earnings by division if they want, but if they do, I don't think Hollywood accounting is permitted or useful. There are other ways to play this; e.g. microsoft once included MacBU (very profitable Mac office) in E&D (xbox...). But at the end of the day, it doesn't really help anyone.

Morphling 12y ago

"to read a full story" and I didn't actually even care...

izietto 12y ago
Log-in in order to read the full article is really bad to me

MrBuddyCasino 12y ago

I suspect Youtubes main opex is bandwidth. So it all depends on how traffic costs develop over time in relation to advertising revenue. Could this be a motivator for Google Fiber? By cutting out the middlemen, they can lower running costs for their own services.

Joona 12y ago
Definitely. They try to compress the videos as much as they can, load comments only if you scroll down etc.
- icebraining 12y ago
  I doubt lazy loaded comments have anything to do with bandwidth concerns - a page full takes less than a single frame of video. Most likely, it's to avoid internal IO, especially now that they're pulling comments from Google+ as well.
unicornporn 12y ago
I believe storage won't be a cheap thing either for this type of business. 300 hours of new video every minute[1] is a lot. [1] https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

gokhan 12y ago

We don't have a TV unit in our home. People in their 30's or older find it awkward. Kids under 15 absolutely don't care about it, they always have something waiting to watch on YouTube and they consume it using whatever device they have access to. My 2.5yo can open YouTube app on whatever device she finds on the coffee table and usually find content through suggestions. 8yo already got banned from YouTube by watching excessive amounts of Minecraft videos, until summer. We hosted a reunion event for kids of close and distant relatives during the semester and 1/4 of the day spent on YouTube, a stat based on 5 kids ranging from 2.5 to 11. I don't see any other platform reaching every kid in the world other than YouTube. Are there any? Google will sure monetize it better than today, all TV entertainment in the future will be consumed through companies like YouTube, Twitch etc. It's easier to see it if you live with younger people.

duiker101 12y ago
> 8yo already got banned from YouTube by watching excessive amounts of Minecraft videos, until summer How? I keep youtube in the background for music almost all day and didn't know you could get banned for "watching too much"
- JonnieCache 12y ago
  I think he means he banned his child.
- rrrhys 12y ago
  By the parents!
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  I don't think that is what parent meant, YouTube is not doing the banning.
- skc 12y ago
  I'm interested in knowing what trick you use to keep youtube on in the background for music. I listen to Jazz and this sounds like something I need to know how to do

Aoyagi 12y ago

Maybe if the site wasn't a bloated mess of useless or barely working features, people would be willing to turn off their adblocks. Plus I bet they do get their money through some tax loops or some other form light money launder. If not the money, they do get gigantic userbase they can harvest for data, unlike G+.

iagooar 12y ago

Actually making no profit, but at the same time not losing money is "good enough" for a company like Google. The massive amount of users allows for analyzing behavior patterns and increasing the profile information that later on is used to improve targeted ads like adwords. Not only this, but being able to have a larger pool of employees without losing money has its own benefits, like easily reallocating the best performing or fitting people on other, more profitable projects or urgent problems.

fpgeek 12y ago
It's not that simple. Breaking even may be "good enough" strategically for Google, but, tactically, it is a problem for YouTube and everyone that works on it. The harder it is to concretely demonstrate YouTube's value to Google, the harder it is to make the case for investing in YouTube, rewarding employees competitively, against unwise cost-cutting and so on. Things don't fall apart overnight, but over time...

Joona 12y ago

Why does Youtube not have pay-to-watch channels, or just the ability to "donate" to channels? This is a huge deal on Twitch (channels have thousands of paying "subscribers").

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
It does have them actually, but (somewhat understandably) nobody uses them. Off-site schemes like Patreon are far more popular. That allows people to donate a small amount monthly, or a small amount per piece of new content. They get incentives (à la Kickstarter) to donate extra. Patreon has addition appeal possibly because it doesn't make you entirely reliant on Google for your income. Even those making millions of YouTube get shitty support and could have their channel kicked off YouTube (or pulled out of the Partner Program) at a moment's notice for no good reason, with nobody to complain to if that happens.
- Joona 12y ago
  Patreon-style payments are what I meant by donations, but I guess people just won't trust Google enough for that.

fpgeek 12y ago

This really puts the whole Music Key controversy in perspective. If YouTube isn't making money, then of course they're going try to alter their deals, no matter how many indie musicians it pisses off.

arfliw 12y ago

It's not that there is a lot of junk on YouTube. There is a lot of junk on my 900 channels of TV, too. But I have a handful of go-to channels, DVR and a huge schedule showing me what's happening across all of those channels. Problem solved. YouTube has none of those. That's why I use YouTube exactly like they said, I'm linked to it elsewhere. Or I go and search for something specific. Discovery is the problem. Not a lack of quality content.

unicornporn 12y ago

So, how can I read this article? I get "To Read the Full Story, Subscribe or Log In" even when viewing the page in a clean session.