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by ylere 1895 days ago
Is it though? Let's do a very rough estimate: 500 hours of content per minute in 2019, lets say 1 reviewer can review 3 hours of video each hour (by increasing play speed/skipping etc.) and we have a global workforce in lower income countries working 3x 8 hour shifts + weekends. That's 50060/33 = 30000 reviewers, at a monthly cost of $1000 that's 30000100012*7/5 = $504m/year. Youtube had $15b in revenues in 2019, so this represents around 3.5% of revenue. Now this is assuming that we actually need to 100% review every video before releasing it (which is not the case) and one reviewer can probably review more than 3 hours of content per hour with the right AI assistance so the real cost would be quite a bit lower. Even then, spending less than 5% of revenues on content review, moderation and support sounds very reasonable to me.
2 comments
Thaxll 1895 days ago
The flaw is that you think humans would do a better job than AI which def not the case. Especially hiring 30k people in a low income country, what could go wrong... This is the kind of scale problems that can't be fixed by humans review.
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qayxc 1894 days ago
> Is it though?

Yes, it is - because it's actually 2500 videos per MINUTE, not per hour, mea culpa. So your 30,000 reviewers would actually have to be at least 1.8 MILLION.

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a1369209993 1894 days ago
They didn't use your videos per hour/minute figure; they used hours of content per minute, so it still comes out 30'000 reviewers.
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qayxc 1894 days ago
It's not about the viewing time, though, it's about the videos.

The misconception is that it's the review process that's the problem - it isn't. That can be automated just fine.

The problem arises as soon as there are complaints or issues with the content and that depends on the number of videos, not the duration.

So if there's a problem with a video it can get flagged, de-monetised or even taken down automatically by software (as is the case now). This is a non-issue. It gets complicated as soon as one party has a dispute over this and that scales with the number of videos, not their length.

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a1369209993 1894 days ago
> that scales with the number of videos, not their length.

That seems pausible, but if so, the entire calculation would have to be redone from scratch, with qualitatively (not quantitatively; different units, not just different values) different numbers, so bringing "1.6 million" into it is still a misleading non sequitor.

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