YouTube’s algorithm routinely drives people to more and more extreme content and is designed to be as addictive as possible so that users don’t leave. A lot of this is the result of Google’s acquiring them. I’m curious how you think it’s better.
Let me also be clear that it’s not like it was squeaky clean and friendly prior. But to say it has improved since the acquisition…I’m having a hard time seeing that.
The acquisition by Google happened 18 months into YouTubes existence. It's been 18 years since then. I don't know if you really recall what a site was like 18 years ago.
Besides that, what Google provided was hosting infrastructure and legal protection. Otherwise they would have been sued into nothing and couldn't have afforded to serve video.
It's understandable. It was originally allowed to be its own thing. There were several iterations of it being brought into the Google fold, and it would be easy to mistake any of those for the acquisition event.
The comment I'm responding to asked if either the customer or the company were better after the merger.
Google's (and YouTube's) customers are advertisers. Advertisers are certainly better off with the scale and reach that Google juiced YouTube with, and Google earns about $15B annually in revenue from it.
In no world would Youtube be even remotely profitable without advertising. Google ran it as a $B+/year loss for years before managing to making it profitable.
Tell me now a believable alternative growth story for Youtube where Google didn't buy it and the service isn't "corporatized" and not losing money.
You can't compare an unprofitable small-scale startup product to what the same product needs to be to make it 1) planet-scale and 2) profitable.
Yeah, without an acquisition, YouTube doesn't exist today. And most acquisitions would have turned out far worse than the Google one did. (See Evernote...)
Let me also be clear that it’s not like it was squeaky clean and friendly prior. But to say it has improved since the acquisition…I’m having a hard time seeing that.