It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?
11–20 of 348 posts
Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?
#12It's time for antitrust to hit Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon. At the very least. Amazon: AWS is one of the most valuable businesses ever created. You don't need the retail arm any more, now that it is enshitting itself. Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor. Amazon would absolutely be more valuable broken up. Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either…
It's unclear to me how making these divisions dramatically increase their infrastructure costs (by either pulling them in-house or paying a premium to the original parent company) will "help them compete"
Are you sure that they will dramatically increase infrastructure costs? Large companies get amazing deals from clouds, and this is no exception to that rule. Their infrastructure costs might actually decrease because the clouds will have to compete for their business.
Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?
#13I always assumed YouTube’s technical foundations were significantly subsidized by the mothership, but I have no data to base that on other than looking at the $29bn/year revenue figure and wondering whether that amount of money would be enough to provision the amount of compute, storage and bandwidth that YouTube needs, plus all other expenses (including revenue sharing with uploaders). Yes, $29bn is a lot of money,…
From what I'm aware, a lot of these larger companies basically treat other parts of the business the same they would customers; very important customers, but customers all the same. If YouTube wants more cloud budget, it comes out of their budget and goes into revenues of the Cloud business unit. Not quite that simplistic of course, but in essence it's meant to drive competitiveness. No special privilege's just because you're part of the same team. If an external company is paying more, for more compute, the business goes to them.
Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?
#14For me, YouTube is the most effective ad sponsored service by far. Users are forced to watch at least 5 seconds of ads before watching any content. This 5 second window is very focused as there is no time to context switch to anything else. Contrast this with Google search - sure there are some ads at the top but these are easy to mentally filter out.
Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?
#15It's time for antitrust to hit Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon. At the very least. Amazon: AWS is one of the most valuable businesses ever created. You don't need the retail arm any more, now that it is enshitting itself. Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor. Amazon would absolutely be more valuable broken up. Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either…
Privacy will be impossible as long as platform owners are in the ad business so the most important thing for me is to separate Android and Chrome from Google's ad business. For the same reason Apple and Microsoft should be forced to choose between being in the phone/computer or ad business.
I don't care too much about Facebook, no doubt they are capable of failing on their own.
Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?
#16I always assumed YouTube’s technical foundations were significantly subsidized by the mothership, but I have no data to base that on other than looking at the $29bn/year revenue figure and wondering whether that amount of money would be enough to provision the amount of compute, storage and bandwidth that YouTube needs, plus all other expenses (including revenue sharing with uploaders). Yes, $29bn is a lot of money,…
When I worked at Google I definitely noticed that YouTube was great at (ab)using untracked or very cheap resources. They definitely get huge benifits of otherwise idle data centers in sleeping regions. As the regular service traffic died off YouTube would put those idle cores to work transcoding video.
It is definitely the case that YouTube gets lots of really cheap compute by being part of Google. But that isn't a bad thing, they are making use of an otherwise wasted resource, effectively lowering the cost for products that need daytime capacity to serve humans.
Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?
#17For me, YouTube is the most effective ad sponsored service by far. Users are forced to watch at least 5 seconds of ads before watching any content. This 5 second window is very focused as there is no time to context switch to anything else. Contrast this with Google search - sure there are some ads at the top but these are easy to mentally filter out.
Cue uBlock origin - I don’t recall the last time I watched an injected ad on YouTube. Of course most content these days is peddling some product, or has a quick word from sponsors - but at least I don’t have to put up with unrelated ads in the middle of a stream.
Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?
#18It's time for antitrust to hit Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon. At the very least. Amazon: AWS is one of the most valuable businesses ever created. You don't need the retail arm any more, now that it is enshitting itself. Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor. Amazon would absolutely be more valuable broken up. Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either…
> Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video And twitch.
MGM too? Or are they owned by Amazon in a different way?
Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?
#19It's time for antitrust to hit Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon. At the very least. Amazon: AWS is one of the most valuable businesses ever created. You don't need the retail arm any more, now that it is enshitting itself. Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor. Amazon would absolutely be more valuable broken up. Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either…
Google side: from maybe a business idea, you could have it work. But from a technical perspective, it would be near impossible without years of engineering effort. Google has a ton of core internal infra that is shared between all the business units at Google. The only reason this is feasible is that the cost of running it is shared between the units.
(Googler opinions are my own).
Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?
#20It's time for antitrust to hit Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon. At the very least. Amazon: AWS is one of the most valuable businesses ever created. You don't need the retail arm any more, now that it is enshitting itself. Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor. Amazon would absolutely be more valuable broken up. Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either…
Not combatting the merits of those break-ups, of which I agree, just wanted to point out that WhatsApp is a social media product at this point, because all the relevant social group interactions have moved there from Facebook the website/the app.
What do you mean?
Just as anecdote, I don't have whatsapp groups for my fb groups. My whatsapp and fb worlds are entirely disconnected. People in groups from fb often promote Discord (which I don't like: real time chatting with strangers feels odd to me).
Facebook is aggressively promoting its own chat for groups, spamming it violently and so I'm forced to unsubscribe/ignore lots of chat groups now. Do people really need yet another chat platform?