[dragonwriter]

So, you’d only need an average of 18,000 people on duty around the clock to do review of everything uploaded to YouTube.

At $15/hour pay, that's only about $2.4 billion/year for reviewers; all told, with supervision and other overhead, maybe on the order of $7.5 billion/yr.

It's probably not impossible for Google, and it wouldn't even make Google unprofitable. But it would make YouTube unprofitable.

[packetslave]

It's also (probably) not a scalable solution. Consider two additional points:

1) 400/minute is only the most recent public number I could find a source for. It appears to be from 2015.

2) In 2013 that number was 100/hour and in 2011 it was 48/hour. The growth of user-created video content isn't exactly slowing down (vlogs, etc.)

[gwern]

Don't forget: Google etc already gets a ton of criticism for their use of manual screening as it is - it burns people out, gives them 'PTSD', is exploitative, etc. So to account for turnover, psychiatric healthcare benefits, extra salary (remember overhead is as much as salary), and figure you would have to double that cost to eliminate criticism (not that it would but let's say it did). That actually would be larger than Google's total profits.

[zaphar]

Don't forget that your 15/hr employee is going to have to detect fake news despite their own personal biases. These are the same people that reshare fake news when on Facebook. You probably need some specialized training and more than one person to vet that news.

[wolco]

15 dollars an hour? Those jobs would go to a place where the wage was 1.50 an hour or worse .15 an hour.

[kuschku]

You probably wouldn’t need to review every video – videos from YouTube partners such as Disney or VEVO partners could probably be exempt in the first place.

Then you probably could let an AI pre-sort most of the videos, and have humans only skip through those videos to verify the AIs decision, instead of having to analyze them all at 1x speed.

You’d probably only need a tenth of the manpower in that situation. And YouTube might even still be profitable with that.

[spacemanmatt]

TIL there are still people who think Google brute-forces anything.

[dragonwriter]

The post you are responding to does not indicate anything about my belief in what Google currently does (well, except that it makes the amount of money it's financial reports say it makes.)