Good point. I furiously block ads, but not all do.
It’s based on algorithms which are sort of super-secret within YouTube (I had a meeting with an account manager at YouTube Space London earlier this week and he said a lot about ‘the algorithm’, including that nobody really knows how it works).
It’s going to be a bit like Google Page Rank though, I expect (which is also sort of super-secret in the precise detail of its operation), but known to be based on metadata plus inbound links plus where people actually arrived from etc - which will give YouTube a rough classification of the content and channel - they’ll then probably pair it with experimentally-relevant ads, and refine based on the performance of those ads.
I thought there’s be more pushback on my belief that YT as we know it is doomed. No one disagree with that?
Probably not. I’ve been on the internet for 20+ years, and the only thing that stays the same is the fact that nothing ever stays the same. Things come, everything eventually goes*. So far, anyway. It’s hard to see something with apparent critical mass like Facebook or Google withering away, but they very well might. YouTube, as a small piece of the whole Google empire, is certainly not safe from the same chopping block that has claimed other beloved Google services and products, though I suspect they get enough valuable advertising info from monitoring people’s habits that even losing money on YouTube itself is fine as they can use the data to enhance their other ad products and make it up somewhere else.
*Except this board. It’s been the one (mostly) constant thing since the dawn of time.
And now comes the YouTube Heroes program, where you can earn points, and thereby some sort of YouTube fame, by reporting other posters for your personal bugaboos.
LOL! More panic paddling. Très incompetent!
I highly doubt they will be gone 5 years from now. I highly doubt they will be here in anything close to the same form 20 years from now. Well, I could see Google’s search engine biz lasting that long.
Right. And shutting it down would be a big loss of prestige. It’s not something they are going to trash like Wave (remember that?). They will keep it alive in some form or another for, oh, the next 10 years or so at least. It might be a very faint shadow of its former self, but it will be there.
I predicted this board’s demise at one point (2003? 2004?) when there was a struggle over making it subscription, this or that. Then I basically left for a couple years. I never really learned how it did survive and continues to do so. Would anyone care to catch me up?
Eh. There are dozens of competing video hosting sites, and buying your own server to throw some video files on is cheap and easy.
It’s not like the old days where there were actual media gatekeepers who could keep you from getting your message out.
My point is *not *that YouTube is trying to prevent some message getting out.
It’s that YouTube is trying to avoid being itself associated with, and blamed for, and punished for, some messages it thinks will arouse public ire. While also not triggering a firestorm of protest from the cyber-libertarians as they act to limit their exposure.
Personally I side more with the cyber-libertarians. But I also understand how suits see their corporate imperatives.
Dunno. I was a producer on MetaCafe when their Producer Rewards program went to shit (at around about the same time as the YouTube Partner program was opening up to more than just the select few). This doesn’t feel like that.
Of course there’s no reason that this should feel like that, even if this is the beginning of the end for YouTube. My impression though, is that YouTube does not perceive itself as floundering or having problems - they seem to be pouring a lot of effort into new creative ventures - I think if they were really in trouble, they would be withdrawing on all fronts into a profitable core.
Yeah, they are not bleeding cash either and I am not predicting their shutdown any time soon. In fact, I think Google will keep YouTube alive in some form for the foreseeable future, as it’s such a prestige business for them. They don’t want to admit failure. But YT is as much “in trouble” at any given time as Google feels they are, since the biz model isn’t making money.
When you’re breaking even on $4 billion, there’s a LOT of slush in the system. You can try this, try that, still break even or maybe even go into the red a bit, and relative success can be hard to judge.
Yeah, we’re getting a bit off-topic, but I’m wondering this as well. I’ve also posted on-and-off really since the AOL days but distinctly remember lots of worry in the past as The Straight Dope was passed from company to company whether the SDMB was part of their future. I remember the future looking quite dim more than once.
IMO, one of the threats to YouTube is the rise of clickbait type videos - essentially, videos titled ‘Ten photos you won’t believe exist’ that contain no creative content at all - little more than a slideshow of someone else’s pictures, spun out into a 7 minute video with shifty voiceover.
They’re a threat because they are easy to churn out, and although they generate views in the short term, I don’t believe they contribute to the health of YouTube as a broadcasting medium.
YT is also serving a blocking role. As long as Google has it out there, Brand X has a hard time replacing it as the go-to source for amateur video. So Google retains control of the flow of eyeballs.
Even if Google hasn’t quite figured out how to make it a money-spinner, the fact it’s breaking even means their true “cost” is their invested capital volume times their capital cost rate. Given that they’re drowning in unused capital (read as “cash”), the cost of YT is more or less zero.
When you’re that capital heavy you can afford to play a long game.
Late add:
Take a look at the history of the chaebol, [Chaebol - Wikipedia] the post-war Korean conglomerates. Or their Japanese counterparts. They just kept buying up more and more businesses and expanding into new areas apparently willy-nilly until they developed a monopoly across large swaths of the economy. Then they started to squeeze.
A little like playing the Monopoly board game, there’s a period where you’re just trying to occupy more and more board space even though you’re losing money doing it.
The difference in the real world is that nobody knows how the game board will change and grow over time. But for sure, the more you own and the more what you own is positioned near the frontier, the better positioned you’ll be to eventually make a killing with your properties. While preventing Brand X from doing so instead.
Google (not used to “Alphabet” yet) is acting strangely here.
Lots of advertisers don’t care if there are dirty words and/or violence in videos. Look at TV. Conan can get away with saying stuff that you can’t say on SpongeBob SquarePants.
Google could rate videos in a sort of TV-MA VSL way and map advertisers accordingly. Note that Google already uses this system for its Play Store. They don’t just ban stuff wily-nilly.
Note that they already a sign-in to access mature videos.
So, what is going on? It appears that this is hurting their income stream. It smacks more of censorship than anything.
I’m not clear either but hardware and storage is cheaper than ever and a text based board is (I’m guessing) not going to be chewing up a lot of bandwidth. I get that the cost of the board hardware and BBS software updates is probably a few thousand a year to maintain and the moderation labor is effectively free. What is unclear is the cost of the net connection to service this.
Against this is the income from the header ads (probably meager) and those who still maintain subscriptions, but I doubt that’s a huge cash cow. I think in the end it’s basically an act of good faith by Cecil and the moderators that keep it going. The value of the free labor by (generally) well educated people that goes into keeping this thing going is incalculable.
And there is a political component to this so it isn’t going to change unless it’s bleeding money in an unsustainable manner.
Seems to me like this would be one of the worst problems. If they are using algos to keep advertising off, then it’s going to have to keep getting more sensitive in order to keep up with workarounds.
So the rate of growth of ads will be less than the rate of growth of shit people fling up there, and the spread will increase over time.
Not that it’s important, but I laughed when I read the bit about “appealing” demonetization. Everybody knows 99.99% of the appeals never get looked at.
If the content producers went on for years after their videos were demonetized, and they never previously noticed the effects of the demonetization, it’s pretty hard to see how they’re suddenly all going to go out of business and stop being content creators now that they’re receiving demonetization notices.
But no - as long as there are teenagers getting their first iphones, there will always be a new crop of content creators coming up. YouTube is not doomed financially (although, eventually it will fall out of fashion, in the normal way of these things).