this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Are you new to the internet? Every website, every single one of them, costs money to maintain and keep running. If you don't pay to keep it online, someone else has to. Ads are a way for everyone to contribute a super small amount to keep the thing you're on, online. When one or two people block them, it's not a big issue. When most people do, it becomes one.
How do you pay to keep the servers up when most users are free booting? What do you do about high traffic when most of it isn't paying for the servers you need to keep it running smoothly?
It's the fucking apex of entitlement to think you should be able to slink through every website without paying a cent either through your data, your attention, or your wallet. You're on lemmy, you should have a basic understanding of how this shit works and it baffles me you don't. The instance you're using is up because of volunteers, paying the electric bill and for the hardware so you can type shit this stupid. Maybe we're just finally getting normies with how big the site is growing. Maybe this is a good thing. I take it back, welcome to the internet.
In 2022 Google grossed around $280 billion, and only around 10% of that from Youtube. Before tax they profited around $73 billion, and after tax around $60 billion. They’re doing fine selling ads.
And we paid all of that $280 billion, even those of us with adblockers, because companies charge us more to cover their marketing costs. I pay for google every time I pull out my credit card.
I don’t feel like watching ads to convince even more companies to pay google to advertise to me and buy my data. They’re all making enough money already, and every year they spend less of it on wages or tax for society to function. Their money goes to stock buybacks, payouts to their major shareholders, executive bonuses, and think tanks to push policies and social trends that hurt all of us.
Revenue is not profit. Profit is what you have after expenses. So let's do a quick logic exercise. $13 billion after taxes, minus bandwidth costs worldwide, minus hundreds of server centers worldwide, minus tens of thousands of TB storage per server, minus redundant storage just in case a server blows, minus what they pay creators, minus what they pay employees.
Boy howdy, not so sure about this one. Especially when we know in 2015 they lost 470 million from operating the platform. They took losses from keeping Youtube alive. Hmmm. Seems like a narrow fuckin margin if that's possible. Haven't heard of Netflix losing money from a year of keeping their platform up.
"I don't feel like watching ads" so buy premium. "I pay for google every time I pull out my credit card" that.. what? "They're making enough money" 470 million in losses. "They own the entire fucking planet" They aren't even one of the five companies that own everything. You're thinking Blackrock. "Every year they pay lower wages" That's every corporation. Yes, eat the rich. This is not eating the rich. We do not get higher wages from you using adblocker.
I gave you both revenue and profit. Their revenue was $280 billion, not $73 billion. $73 billion was their profit before tax, and $60 billion was profit after tax. $13 billion, the difference, was their income tax.
According to the Credit Suisse report, which also massively contradicted Google’s own earnings reports, lowballing YouTube’s revenue by a factor of ten iirc.
Advertising costs money. To cover that cost, companies charge us more for their goods and services. I don’t know what is baffling to you about this.