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It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

economist.com

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Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#31

Post by osigurdson »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #17
osigurdson wrote: post #14

For 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.

I don't bother with that stuff. I just wish the ads were more relevant.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#32

Post by pclmulqdq »

jeffbee wrote: post #29
kyrra wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Yeah I'd love to know how this "spinoff" would work. YouTube is an arms-length independent company but Google happens to have deployed dedicated, co-designed accelerators around the world to support their use case?

AWS sells video accelerator machines. GCP could sell access to Argos.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#33

Post by JustLurking2022 »

kryptiskt wrote: post #15
pclmulqdq wrote: post #2

It'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.

You should read up about DMA coming out of the EU. Privacy is possible even in a conglomerate.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#34

Post by swarnie »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #2

It'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…

? Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either way. Spinning off the loser (Facebook), and the non-social networking product (WhatsApp) would let Instagram grow wings against TikTok.

Three products which share data. I don't care what the law says, or what they tell a select/congress committee, nothing will convince me otherwise.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#35

Post by rvz »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #2

It'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…

and Microsoft.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#36

Post by jasode »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #12
capitalsigma wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Are you sure that they will dramatically increase infrastructure costs? [...] Their infrastructure costs might actually decrease because the clouds will have to compete for their business.

Maybe theoretically possible but I have doubts.

As Youtube's founding was February 2005, they now have 18 years (i.e. exabytes) of videos stored on Google's datacenters. Exporting all that to a competitor like AWS (even with mass Snowmobile transfer service) probably wouldn't make financial sense.

I worked on a corporate spin-out from a petroleum company and there was months of back & forth negotiation for "IT infrastructure services pricing" from the ex-parent company. The new spin out company was definitely not getting a deal from the ex-parent company and switching to other datacenter competitors wasn't realistic because the ex-parent already had all the data and the existing IT staff expertise to run-&-maintain the spin-off's proprietary systems. (E.g. think Lotus Notes custom programming workflows).

Google could realistically raise their infrastructure prices to an independent Youtube spinoff but that higher cost is still less than switching to Azure or AWS.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#37

Post by vidarh »

runako wrote: post #30
pclmulqdq wrote: post #2

It'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…

These hypothetical splits show the perils of having outsiders (including regulators) make decisions like these. Just some quick notes: > You don't need the retail arm any more [...] spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor The whole point of the conglomerate model they use (following Costco) is that the membership fee grants consumers access to a bevy of services. Th…

> The services may not work a la carte

They don't need to. Prime could still offer Prime Video / Music as a membership perk. But if the media services are independent, maybe it'd turn out offering one or more of the others, or letting customer pick and choose, would end up making more financial sense (FireTV can already be used to subscribe to competing services in addition)

I'm not saying it's necessarily a good idea - I don't have an opinion on that - but the bundling of services does not depend on them being part of the same company.

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#38

Post by madeofpalk »

runako wrote: post #30
pclmulqdq wrote: post #2

It'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…

These hypothetical splits show the perils of having outsiders (including regulators) make decisions like these. Just some quick notes: > You don't need the retail arm any more [...] spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor The whole point of the conglomerate model they use (following Costco) is that the membership fee grants consumers access to a bevy of services. Th…

> The services may not work a la carte

If the service cannot compete on it's own merits, and is being propped up by an unrelated business, how competetive is it actually?

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#39

Post by [deleted] »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #2

It'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…

[deleted]

Re: It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

#40

Post by [deleted] »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #17
osigurdson wrote: post #14

For 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.

[deleted]
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