[londons_explore]

They'd prefer you stop watching. Bandwidth costs them a lot, and they have pretty much the cheapest bandwidth of any tech player. If 1% of users are freeloading like you and I, and they can block us and save 1% on their infrastructure bill, that's still a huge amount of money saved, and could easily turn the whole effort from a loss to a profit.

[dskrepps]

I think our best bet to make a difference is to cause network effects to drive other users to take the same steps we do. In the long run that will help shrink their monopoly, and/or bring a tipping point closer to reality.

Similar to voting. Yeah, I could vote for a third party candidate, but the real power I have is in how many other people I can convince to vote for someone.

[rtpg]

I don't understand this. What is your principled stand? Don't charge me money and also don't put in ads?

Youtube is one of the few platforms where people making content can actually survive off of it. It's not everything but it's more than ~anything else.

It would be nice for there to be more platforms but personally I'm exhausted of platforms trying to race to the bottom and ultimiately squeezing people who are actually doing the "hard work".

(My one big complaint is that youtube doesn't charge people for bandwidth, meaning that services like Vimeo are ... kind of DOA. I don't know how you do that and have viral stuff for normal people, but it does feel like something should be in place)

[wcarss]

YouTube could play ads and let me play videos while my phone screen is locked. They could play ads like they used to: a small popup. They could play ads like they did after that: one 5 second pre-roll. Or like after that, a pre-roll with a skip call to action.

But at some point it got into the ballpark of two 10-15 second ads every 5 minutes even on the channels of people who explicitly asked not to turn on monetization because they're making educational content, often for kids and schools. The mobile app nags me with a "try premium" / "skip trial" popup 5 times per week. There are consistently small bugs in the user experience of the app.

Oh, and they're rich as God because they're also the people who own the operating system, browser, app store, and search engine I used to find all this stuff -- plus my email and my productivity software, all of which they will leverage to _squeeze_ every last bit the juice out of me as a user. They own all my data already. They own everything.

So, what is the "principled stand"? Enough is a goddamned enough! If they were just going to show some ads, it would be fine, but like every single parasitic horror show out there, they promised they'd be good and they cannot stop getting worse.

At the very least, I can choose not to pay them $12/month for the privilege.

[rtpg]

Yeah I agree that you can totally just be like "not for me". I just think the using of language of protesting and voting for "the video experience as a free user is not fun" adds a moral valence to something that honestly has a pretty good extant solution. Pay for the sub!

Pay money, get no ads. It's not that complicated. It's totally reasonable to whine about the increased ads and not wanting to pay ofc. But at least we can pay to not have ads!

[lumb63]

I see this ending with ads increasing ad infinitum. As more ads get added, the value of the free version will decrease and more users will be pushed to either stop using the site or pay for subscriptions. We should fast forward to that end game, where YouTube locks all the user-created content behind a paywall to monetize it for their own benefit like all internet platforms seem to be aiming to do.

I understand that YouTube costs money to run, but the monetization situation does not reflect that, and is thus totally backwards. The current model is that users pay for a “service” (YouTube) which has an expense for “content” (video creators). The content is what the users actually want; the situation should be that users pay the content creators, who pay YouTube something akin to rent. It is not fair that YouTube profits off of the value that content creators bring rather than just their infrastructure. It is akin to paying the owner of a building for access to the store.

[londons_explore]

Vimeo has exactly the business model you propose. Total data delivered to viewers is limited in all Vimeo plans, and you need to pay them extra if you want a viral video.

It's been about a while, and so far hasn't gained a large userbase of viewers - at least in part because content creators don't want to pay for random non-paying people to watch their videos.

[acover]

YouTube is a monopoly. They'll increase ads till it maximizes profit. If you don't watch then they don't profit.

[gymbeaux]

It boggles my mind how technology has been advancing consistently through time until the last few years. Now we have feature flags in databases dictate whether we can use technology. There's no reason to block YouTube videos from playing when my screen is off, except to get more money out of people.

[londons_explore]

Video ads pay far more than audio-only ads. Brand advertisers want to get their logo in front of you.

I bet the economics don't add up for running a video hosting site, yet only getting revenue from audio ads.

Even spotify hasn't managed to survive on audio-only with ads - they have to put in other arbitrary restrictions like 'you can't play the song you want to play' to dissuade people from using the lossmaking plan.

[gymbeaux]

It's colloquial knowledge at this point that companies suck as much from consumers as possible, just look at the "inflation" narrative. Company had to raise prices due to "supply chain constraints/inflation" but then goes on to report record revenue. To an extent it's just supply and demand, and I want to respect that, but most of these same companies got government handouts from PPP while the everyday consumer has to choose between one $10/month subscription service or another. Fuck. How about charge me money, don't put in ads, but charge enough that you make money, it's just not hand-over-fist because you've created a monopoly?

[wpietri]

Do we know that bandwidth costs YouTube a lot?

[londons_explore]

Bandwidth costs all video sites a lot.

Thats why cloudflare won't host sites with lots of video. It's why twitter doesn't do HD video. Thats why there are no startups trying to make video hosting sites.

If you hosted a youtube clone on AWS with their cloudfront CDN, you'd be paying $0.085 per GB out to the internet. A youtube ad view earns perhaps $0.004. HD video is ~6GB/hour, so a 3 minute video costs $0.0255 to host (before compute and storage costs, profit and engineer time).

Earning $0.004 for something that costs you $0.025 is never going to work out...

[dijit]

I don't like this reasoning because I've seen the inside of google. Their bandwidth is very cheap.

What costs is having a CDN, a bunch of very fast servers that exist in every point-of-presence, given the load they endure CDN cache servers fail quickly when compared to others. -- along with the upkeep of their networking equipment, which is cheap but not free.

But Google itself has invested wisely in how it connects to the internet, they are dark fibre all the way with many hundreds of gigabits between sites and pops. It's a huge upfront investment (the kind SV startups seem to hate) but the long tail makes bandwidth essentially free.

The only cost they have is hardware and peering, and given their size I can't convince myself if they are or are not being shafted financially by big ISPs for peering - even if they are though, it's marginal compared to what GCP/AWS/etc; charge us, even Colo datacenters will charge significantly more than what it costs Google.

[wpietri]

Thanks, this is exactly what I was wondering about. I would expect Google's marginal cost of bandwidth to be approximately zero. What are networks going to do, not connect to Google?

[michaelt]

> What are networks going to do, not connect to Google?

Throttle the connection so its slow enough users get 480p video at peak viewing times. Ask google for $$$$ to stop doing that.

[gymbeaux]

And to be clear this is literally what happened to Netflix and I think YouTube and a few other sites in the pre-Net Neutrality days. Of course we don't have Net Neutrality anymore either, so presumably Google is paying ISPs not to throttle, or ISPs are content with the 1TB/month cap they tend to have.

Also, that 1TB/month cap is just foot-in-the-door technique. It will stay 1TB or so as videos, games, websites, etc. continue to get larger and larger and then they will lean on Appeal to Tradition (logical fallacy) when people complain that 1TB/month isn't adequate.

[tinus_hn]

Google can just say ‘if you’re on this network, you only get poor quality video. Come to one of the networks that support YouTube properly!’.

Remember that for a while they were just about the only site that could load Flash. YouTube is that important.

[wpietri]

That kind of reminds me of the Monty Python skit where two mafiosi try to shake down the army. Why in the world would Google pay up? Your average ISP needs YouTube to work well far more than Google needs one ISP.

[MaKey]

German ISP Telekom is notorious for shenanigans like this, which is why I boycott them.

[ddorian43]

What is google's cost for PB of bandwidth in EU/USA?

[dijit]

Google to Google? Next to €0.

I should also note that Google will send data from their DCs over dark fibre to their PoPs near you, so they only transit onto the internet locally.

[jamespo]

Even despite that, they still have no interest in encouraging "freeloading"

[kbutler]

Key words are "would cost _you_". The providers get much better cost per GB at scale, then sell to you at a profit.

For example, transfer out from S3 gets down to $0.05 at just 150TB, including the AWS markup.

(Note that CloudFront data out is not directly comparable to S3 data out!)

[bsder]

> Thats why there are no startups trying to make video hosting sites.

No, there are no startups in video for the same reason there were no startups in office apps or operating systems in the 2000s, a subsidized 500lb gorilla in the space.

The problem with a video startup is that you have to charge for your content. And some jerk will download your video, post it to YouTube, and distribute it for free.

If YouTube were forced to stand on its own instead of being subsidized by the Google advertising maw, we'd see innovation in the space.

Until YouTube gets broken out from Google by anti-trust action, the video startup space will continue to remain dead.

[Dylan16807]

The big cloud providers all charge ridiculous amounts for their bandwidth. It makes your numbers completely invalid for any bandwidth-focused operation.

Also youtube's bitrate usually far below that amount.

[vetinari]

Not to distract from your point, but

> It's why twitter doesn't do HD video.

Twitter does HD video. I don't know whether it is generally available or not, but for example, Tucker Carlson's videos are 1080p.

[fomine3]

Interesting description: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FpAOeoZWAAM-iHV?format=png&name=...

[no_wizard]

Though Cloudflare does have a separate product for streaming Video, it definitely doesn’t fall under the generic CDN serving files model

[wpietri]

Yes, I get that I have to pay a lot for bandwidth. And that you have to pay a lot for bandwidth.

My question is specifically about YouTube.

[psnehanshu]

This looks to me like a sane comment. No idea why this was downvoted.

[wpietri]

Because it doesn't answer the question. I was asking about YouTube, which, being part of Google, occupies a radically different position. They aren't using AWS to host their video, so the numbers are irrelevant.

[gymbeaux]

Then I don't want to hear about dwindling YouTube revenue on their next earnings call...