this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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That's my whole point! Google can afford it. Even if YouTube showed zero ads and earned zero revenue Google could afford it.
If I want to support a small creator, I donate. I don't feel bad about hurting the bottom line of one of the highest-earning companies in the world.
Even if YouTube runs at a deficit, it's probably worthwhile for Google to control the main video hosting hub on the internet and keep competition out of the game.
Spending on shipping or manufacturing is a lot less discretionary than spending on advertising. You have broad leeway to advertise less or more, and past a certain point the main requirement is that you advertise as well as your competition. If Google shows fewer ads across the board, even half as many ads, you're still in business.
If you want to talk real life, they're already raking in $60 billion a year in profit so I see no need for an alternative. If you want to talk hypotheticals, I think central back-end infrastructure like Google's servers — and the data we put on them — should be publicly owned, with an open-source marketplace of front-end services we can use to access it. We should be able to browse YouTube with whatever site interfaces and suggestion algorithms we find most useful, not the ones most profitable to Google.
Blackrock's clients own 5% of Tesla.
Blackrock dies tomorrow if they do anything other than what their clients expect of them. The sole purpose of Blackrock is to invest rich people's money and maximize returns for them while managing risk. They have some leeway in how they do this, but only up to a point. They're very good at what they do but they are ultimately replaceable.
Yes but if you had a store in a chain that wasn't turning a profit and constantly kept costing you money with no solutions in sight, you'd eventually shut it down and call it a day without some other reason. I think right now the only thing keeping YouTube alive is the level of unmitigated backlash they'd get for dumping it. Sure, they control the main video hosting platform on the internet but what are they able to do with that? Hold onto it and talk about it at parties? Not every small creator has extra ways to donate to them, not every creator rises to the level of whipping your wallet out, but should still support them no matter how miniscule it is.
My brother, that is not an answer. Services have costs, costs need to be mitigated with revenue, things worth doing usually turn a profit. I'm asking you for an alternative knowing one doesn't exist or the multi-billion dollar company would have already tried it. They're limited to advertisements, selling your data to brokers, or asking for a subscription. We've got adblockers, tracker blockers, and the content is still free to access without a subscription (for now). Freely using a service that isn't free is not now nor will ever be sustainable,
Hahaha.. to own them we'd have to pay for them. Things like Lemmy exist because people volunteer to accept the cost of hosting the instances. A company built to earn money is not going to do that. The broader problem is capitalism, sure, but that's a different topic. Youtube does, and in my opinion (without societal changes), should try to make a profit on what they bought, developed, and now host. Their splits with creators are fair and I worry they'll become less so as their options become fewer.
Yes but those investments are in Blackrock's name, giving them legal control. Yes, they can lose their clients if they fuck up and depending on how, be liable for returning some or all of that money, but no matter how you look at it they still have that control. There are very few of us who are truly beyond being replaced.
If someone else has the main video site on the internet, that is a beachhead for building a larger platform and challenging Google as a whole.
We're already fucking paying for them! I've made this point twice now.
I'm out of patience