[oostevo]

I think you may have just re-discovered Disruptive Innovation (sometimes also called Disruption Theory): incumbents over-serve their customers by adding lots of features, complexity, and cost. Upstarts can attack them by focusing on only a few core features and/or low price. The incumbents can't respond without annoying their existing customers who have grown accustomed to all the features the incumbent provides.

https://hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation

[tachyonbeam]

YouTube seems to be playing the boiling frog experiment with people. I started YouTubing in 2006 and there were no ads. Then, eventually they added monetization and you could place a single ad at the beginning of your videos. Now I see video with 10x two ads interspersed. You have to constantly click to bypass them. It's getting incredibly annoying, and it just seems greedy, especially coming from Google.

That, combined with generally treating their content creators like they are completely disposable. I hope someday someone disrupts YouTube. It seems to me, besides the "network effect", the main difficulty here is unfortunately the cost of bandwidth. I could host a reddit clone from my home machine or some cheap VPS if I wanted and scale up to several thousand users, but video content at 5 megabits per second... How do you get bandwidth cheap enough to host that? Are there hosting providers that will just serve files over HTTP for super cheap?

[nathanyz]

Up front disclosure, I am the founder of a video hosting company.

I think you have very quickly found the reason for YouTube boiling the frog. Bandwidth, encoding, and storage all have costs associated with them. They are not simply free and so YouTube has to pay for these costs somehow.

There has been a mindset shift in the Internet at some point where originally people paid for premium services, and then it swung to everything for FREE. But nothing is actually free, what happened is a tradeoff in who pays from the end consumer/producer, you, to advertising companies.

So it's now up to all of us as users of the Internet whether we are happy with that deal. I personally am not, as allowing someone else to shape my thoughts in exchange for free services is not something I believe is beneficial to humanity. I'm doing my part, but it's up to each and everyone else to make their choice and do their's. Or don't if you are satisfied with the current deal.

[tachyonbeam]

On the storage front, it seems to me like you could get around that a bit by not keeping content forever. You could make a more ephemeral video hosting site.

As for paying for content, I think there's an opportunity to combine ideas from YouTube with Patreon. Tipping or supporting specific content creators you like. You move away from an ad-driven model towards a model where you get some basic content for free, but you can pay extra for more content.

[nathanyz]

These are good ideas. Our theory is that by simplifying the complexity of video hosting, it makes it viable for more people to test against various business models without having to do the heavy lifting of figuring out video encoding, delivery, and storage just to start. Basically similar to the role that WordPress, et al provided for websites themselves.

There is likely some new model that doesn't require fully ad-based or fully premium paid. We work with customers every day who are iterating on a variety of business models. I think in the end we will see a disaggregation of YouTube just like we have seen in many other once complex and costly spaces in tech.

[tinus_hn]

Also manual moderation is pretty expensive, as is dealing with the copyright lawsuits and to top it off the patent licenses for streaming video in the first place.

[coldpie]

The disconnect between your first and second paragraphs is pretty hilarious. The ads are there to pay for the bandwidth, man.

[dredmorbius]

Content, advertising, and bandwidth (along with other technical services) operate as entirely different types of economic goods, in multiple senses, but especially in terms of elasticities, rivalousness, appeal, and excludability. There's also the role of attention and content and service ranking.

Content is a public good in the economic sense: zero marginal cost, high fixed costs, nonrivalous, and poorly excludable.

Advertising is a rent (to advertisers) and an imposition (to its audience). There's an active aversion to it, the content is very often deceptive, manipulating, and against the recipients' true interests. At the same time, as more attractive audiences are driven away (and they will be) those who remain are subject to ever more, ever lower quality ads for ever more manipulative or harmful products and services.

Bandwidth and availability must meet or address peak demands which are infrequent though often predictable. Users' decision criteria, as with highway traffic, externalise most costs, whilst benefit is privatised, incentivising overuse. Provisioning must be based not on some average utilisation, but on probability of availability and service quality, with additional nines costing orders of magnitude more to provide. That risk environment may itself be quite variable.

The consequence is that demand, revenue, and cost components follow vastly dissimmilar dynamics, making the business exceedingly difficult on market terms, and incentivising numerous pathological behaviours.

[tachyonbeam]

Yeah but I don't think YouTube is aiming for breakeven or small profit, they are squeezing as much as they can. That opens them up for disruption.

[icebraining]

It's very likely that YouTube still loses money.

[Reedx]

Well, hosting videos is an expensive operation. You have 2 options to pay for the resources you're consuming: Trade your time (ads) or trade your money (subscribe). The latter is worth it if you're using YouTube a lot.

[lrem]

> it just seems greedy, especially coming from Google.

Except it doesn't come from Google, does it? The amount of monetisation is entirely in the creator's discretion.

Disclaimer: I do work for Google, but that's public information.

[unnouinceput]

it's called uBlock Origins, available for all major browsers, try it, you'll be amazed. Haven't seen an ad on youtube since last decade (preemptive snark comment - current decade started on 1st Jan 2011 and will end on 31st Dec 2020).

[TheRealDunkirk]

I've been running ad blockers for... well, since they were created. I have no idea how anyone lives without them. But YT in particular has started bypassing all of them. I'm down to using just Firefox with the YT enhancer plugin, because it's the only thing that manages to skip the ads for me now. And I'll quit using it if that breaks.

[fuzxi]

I have personally not seen an ad on youtube in years, bar the video recommendations on the home page and the 'sponsored content' some channels bake into their videos. On desktop, I use uMatrix for more granular blocking + uBlock Origin for hiding empty frames, and I use Youtube Vanced on Android.

[wruza]

I'm using ubo on desktop and adguard on ios/android. No ads on YT ever, and very rarely I see ads on sites. Do you have your lists well-updated? What blocker did you use before?

[lozaning]

Reactive snarky comment:

No it didn't : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

Specifically 4.3.11 defines the start of a decade as any year where [year]%10==0.

[unnouinceput]

there is no year zero. Let that sink it

[ac29]

There is in ISO 8601: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero

[unnouinceput]

And how many calendars use it? Lemme give you a hint, it's the same number as the the year in question

Also there is no day 0 of the month, no month zero of the year. It's how calendars work.

[stevoski]

I got sick of the YT ads, I bought a YT premium subscription. Now I don't get ads.

[ip26]

Is that really "innovation"? I thought that was pretty darn standard "business".

[neuronic]

Everything is innovation today. It's why every single tech presenter has to creepily emulate Steve Jobs in some way. To give you the innovation vibe.