I was fine with even having a couple very short unskippable ads every other video. Now it is all of them with one in the middle of videos longer than 5 minutes. And then of course the content creator has to put in an ad because YouTube does not pay shit for views.
I mean, they didn’t get greedy, as far as everyone knows they are losing a ton of money (at least if you can extrapolate anytbing from the fact that twitch is massively unprofitable)
Pretty sure YouTube has already been declared to be profitable. But frankly I’m pretty suspicious of claims of unprofitability for services being run for over a decade. Why would any for-profit company bankroll them if it wasn’t worth it? There has to be some creative accounting going on.
Doubt it, if it was profitable, they would be announcing that to everyone as loud as they could. Besides, if twitch is unprofitable, I doubt that google is in a much better situation
I wouldn’t apply Twitch’s situation to YouTube, IF it’s even true, because YouTube got a much wider reach and more advertising possibilities than gaming and somewhat related audiences.
It doesn’t seem to me a given that they’d boast about their success either. Because if they hide the situation the way they do, they can do this, turn to the customers saying “Welp, I guess this much is not enough. Gotta put more ads on it and raise prices 🤷”. It’s easier to placate the users if they are convinced it is inevitable. I imagine you are considering of what investors might think if products are said to be unprofitable, but overall Google/Alphabet still gets tens of billions in clean profits every year.
Most of all, again, if this is such a money sink that in over a decade they couldn’t figure out how to make money of it, why would they still keep at it? Why wouldn’t they sell it off or close it? If I assume they are honest about unprofitability, as much as I doubt it, then they must be getting something else from it that is equally valuable as raw money. Maybe it’s user data. Maybe it’s the social clout of controlling a major media platform. But it has to be worth it to them or they wouldn’t be hosting it. It wouldn’t make sense.
But personally I just think they are lying about unprofitability, including Twitch. It’s just a convenient excuse for layoffs and price hikes. It’s not like they are going to show everyone their full balance sheets.
I never had an issue with YT’s 1-2 skipable ads at the beginning, or even the banner ad. But they got greedy.
The midrolls and the unskipable ads was the trigger point for me.
I was fine with even having a couple very short unskippable ads every other video. Now it is all of them with one in the middle of videos longer than 5 minutes. And then of course the content creator has to put in an ad because YouTube does not pay shit for views.
Yeah and I wouldn’t even mind like 5 minutes of ads at the beginning compared to randomly dispersed in the middle
I mean, they didn’t get greedy, as far as everyone knows they are losing a ton of money (at least if you can extrapolate anytbing from the fact that twitch is massively unprofitable)
Pretty sure YouTube has already been declared to be profitable. But frankly I’m pretty suspicious of claims of unprofitability for services being run for over a decade. Why would any for-profit company bankroll them if it wasn’t worth it? There has to be some creative accounting going on.
Doubt it, if it was profitable, they would be announcing that to everyone as loud as they could. Besides, if twitch is unprofitable, I doubt that google is in a much better situation
I wouldn’t apply Twitch’s situation to YouTube, IF it’s even true, because YouTube got a much wider reach and more advertising possibilities than gaming and somewhat related audiences.
It doesn’t seem to me a given that they’d boast about their success either. Because if they hide the situation the way they do, they can do this, turn to the customers saying “Welp, I guess this much is not enough. Gotta put more ads on it and raise prices 🤷”. It’s easier to placate the users if they are convinced it is inevitable. I imagine you are considering of what investors might think if products are said to be unprofitable, but overall Google/Alphabet still gets tens of billions in clean profits every year.
Most of all, again, if this is such a money sink that in over a decade they couldn’t figure out how to make money of it, why would they still keep at it? Why wouldn’t they sell it off or close it? If I assume they are honest about unprofitability, as much as I doubt it, then they must be getting something else from it that is equally valuable as raw money. Maybe it’s user data. Maybe it’s the social clout of controlling a major media platform. But it has to be worth it to them or they wouldn’t be hosting it. It wouldn’t make sense.
But personally I just think they are lying about unprofitability, including Twitch. It’s just a convenient excuse for layoffs and price hikes. It’s not like they are going to show everyone their full balance sheets.
That was the initially when YouTube was created. Everyone knows that Google has no problem cancelling anything that’s not profitable.
If it was profitable, then why did google stop posting the financial statistics for YouTube
to get the benefit of the doubt on unpopular decisions. Same thing with hiding thumbs down counter from videos.
If they want to, they can go 100% paywalled. But I guess people like to conveniently forget that YouTube wants to double-dip.