I’m no fan of ad supported businesses. But if you don’t like Google’s business model, don’t use Google. You don’t need big daddy government to make your choices for you.
> But if you don’t like Google’s business model, don’t use Google.
> And where are people going to go to host their videos for free at scale? It’s not like any little startup can come along and profitably host videos.
If I could get off of Youtube, I would. Like you say, there's not an alternative. It's not even about where I host my videos, that's easy to solve. It's about where everybody else hosts their videos, whether or not I can view a video that gets linked to me, whether or not I can view documentation that companies and events are hosting on Youtube. And it's about where it's possible to put videos where anyone at all will see them.
It is not possible for people to avoid Youtube. Which, it seems like you know given that you're arguing that this impossibility is precisely the reason why a Youtube competitor won't steal their lunch. It's laughable to call consumer relationships with Youtube consensual. And again, you know that, or you wouldn't be so dismissive of people suggesting that bad policy could impact Youtube's network effects.
You can't both have your cake and eat it; if you're going to argue bad Youtube policy won't impact Youtube's bottom line and that there isn't an alternative for people to jump ship to, you can't then turn around and argue that everyone who's using Youtube is there by choice. The fact that there largely isn't a policy Youtube could implement that would cause a mass-migration is exactly the reason why it makes sense to get the government involved in antitrust. The fact that mass-subsidy below-market offerings for hosting make it impossible for a market to compete with Youtube's hosting is exactly why the government should be looking into this business model.
There's a fun trick companies like to play where they offer a service that is massively subsidized by investors or another part of the business, use that to drive any meaningful competition out of the market, and then argue that their unsustainable business is now essential and that this excuses anything they do. And it's mostly bullcrap. We know that Youtube is not playing fair; you know that Youtube is not playing fair or you wouldn't be so confident about its market position.
When was the last time you signed up for a conference or purchased a product and the business/organization linked you to an instructional Pornhub video? When was the last time your parents or your kids sent you a Pornhub video to watch? When was the last time that you went to a news site and there was a Pornhub video embedded into the middle of the article?
Come on, be serious. You know why that comparison is nonsense.
But by all means, if you think that Pornhub is the same as Youtube then tell me more about how a bad Youtube policy and a reduction of network effects on Youtube could feasibly result in a mass-migration of Youtube content producers to Pornhub. I personally don't think that's possible, but maybe I'm massively underestimating Pornhub's potential as a host for lets plays, indie music, general tutorials, and video essays.
I actually watch YouTube videos of AWS Reinvent all of the time on YouTube and there are no ads.
I pay for tutorials from places like ACloudGuru and PluralSight. Well I get reimbursed for them. But I did pay myself before I started working at my current company.
And this gets back to if you value Youtube enough and don’t want to see ads - pay for YouTube premium.
I'm not completely sure what you're getting at with that; none of this is a rebuttle to my point that Youtube is not an optional service. People can't opt out of Youtube without also opting out of a huge part of culture and a huge number of everyday resources, and without severely inconveniencing not only themselves but also the people around them who will reasonably resent them for making that choice.
That's what a network effect is. It punishes people who try to move away from a service by forceably separating them from a shared community and separating them from unrelated services and resources. Understand that Youtube is not primarily a service for hosting videos, it is a middleware that sits between viewers and content producers, and it hosts videos on the side because doing so allows it to control that relationship between creators and viewers.
So it's cool that PluralSight exists, but PluralSight is not a replacement for Youtube. Again, I kind of think you know that, given how confident you were further up the thread about how there was nowhere for a mass exodus from Youtube to go. You're not jumping into conversations about network effects saying that PluralSight is going to take over. You're pointing out (correctly) that there is no alternative to Youtube.
I have to keep saying, I really honestly think you should be able to understand what network effects are, because you seem to be demonstrating an understanding of them elsewhere.
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This also really misses the point of what people are talking about above in regards to why Youtube's business model is problematic. Ads are part of the problem, but another part is privacy, and the other part is predatory market pricing and monopolization. Paying for Youtube premium does nothing to fix privacy issues that most Google critics have; in fact it makes data collection even easier. I did pay for Youtube Premium back in the day, and while I was paying I watched videos signed out with an adblocker and through 3rd-party clients, because that's obviously the more private option even if you want to support Youtube. Paying for Youtube Premium doesn't get rid of the need to block ads/tracking on Youtube.
It also does nothing to address concerns with Youtube as an advertising business. Paying for Youtube Premium does nothing to opt you out of the advertising economy even within Google properties, and it does nothing to encourage the company away from advertising as a business model. That data will still be harvested and used to show you ads in every other place where Google can show them to you.
Nor does it do anything to strengthen artist support networks off of Youtube, as opposed to paying for content directly and donating directly to artists (which I heavily encourage). Youtube Premium increases artist dependencies on Youtube as the primary funding source for content. This is (imo) an obviously negative outcome for pretty much everyone, there are very few artists and content producers who are happy with the direction that Youtube's algorithms are going and with the hoops they're forced to jump through to keep those algorithms happy. Creator moral on Youtube is pretty low right now, and it might be helpful to start supporting those artists more directly so they don't feel like Google owns their entire livelihood.
"If you value YouTube enough" misses the point that I don't value Youtube. I don't want to support Youtube, I resent that I'm forced to use Youtube, if it was possible for me to drop the service without the punishment of the network effects I'd do it in an instant. The only reason I use Youtube at all is because I don't have a choice. And I'd be happy to see the product fail and for a better general video hosting market to emerge from its corpse, I think that would be a great outcome for everyone including artists/makers.
Not disagreeing with anything you said, just decorating: for myself, I think paying for Premium or watching ads is a perfectly valid set of choices, with all the other things you have clearly delineated removed from the equation. Had people been offered the pay option from the get go, arguably some of the nastier expressions of Bridge Troll Capitalism might never have come to fruition.
To deliver content that requires bandwidth beyond dialup, it's gonna take some resources; one way or another, those resources must be paid for, and children aside, I am not aware of many people who actually think they deserve anything completely gratis; at this point we all need to be on the same page that it must be paid for, one way or another.
If we could get absolutely everyone to agree to that proposition and use that as the starting point for further discussion, I'm pretty sure we could come up with a lot of creative ways to make that happen without literally going full 1984. Really does feel like I'm living out the Tower Of Babel parable in real life some days.
