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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?

#141

Post by curiousllama »

Aromasin wrote: post #13
jl6 wrote: post #7

I 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 becau…

That stuff still comes with special privileges.

E.g., yes they'll "pay" for compute, but they'll do so at cost. And they're also allowed to deploy a monitoring widgets to other orgs' data centers to find when they're at low utilization, and then argue "at cost" is actually near 0, because the compute resources were just sitting around anyway. And then have the search team agree because YouTube promises to build the new data API search has been asking for forever.

If you ultimately report earnings on the same P&L, USD is just monopoly money you trade around to get things done.

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

#142

Post by hn_go_brrrrr »

mattpallissard wrote: post #122

> I always assumed YouTube’s technical foundations were significantly subsidized by the mothership, but I have no data to base that on I'd venture to guess that YouTube provided more value than just their customer base. I often wonder how much of their tech stack made it into the larger Google org. Example; for the longest time when you'd log into gsuite via a SAML IdP you'd notice a youtube url in the login flow.

> I often wonder how much of their tech stack made it into the larger Google org.

Very little, though that may be changing. Most of YouTube was written in Python, which is essentially unknown for a production system at Google.

> Example; for the longest time when you'd log into gsuite via a SAML IdP you'd notice a youtube url in the login flow.

This was just to set the YouTube "logged in" cookie.

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

#143

Post by kevincox »

BooneJS wrote: post #62
kevincox wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

“In our case, we developed a custom chip to transcode video, as well as software to coordinate these chips. And we put it all together to form our transcoding special brain – the Video (trans)Coding Unit (VCU). We’ve seen up to 20-33x improvements in compute efficiency compared to our previous optimized system, which was running software on traditional servers.” https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/new-era-video-infra…

If I had to guess these are used for urgent video transcodes. New uploads to popular channels and on-demand transcoding. I suspect that CPUs are still often used for background batch encoding. But maybe 20x is enough that the power cost of extra CPU usage isn't worth it and they will do it all in hardware.

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

#145

Post by osigurdson »

taco_emoji wrote: post #28
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.

As a consumer, this is 90% of the reason I avoid Youtube as much as possible. EDIT: Also just because people are forced to watch 5 seconds of an ad doesn't mean it's got any measurable positive effect (for the advertiser) whatsoever.

I think if the ads are relevant it is a really good system. I’m only annoyed when ads are not relevant. Unfortunately the ads are irrelevant 90% of the time. These days they are sometimes not even in the right language - not sure what is up with that.

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

#146

Post by osigurdson »

taco_emoji wrote: post #28
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.

As a consumer, this is 90% of the reason I avoid Youtube as much as possible. EDIT: Also just because people are forced to watch 5 seconds of an ad doesn't mean it's got any measurable positive effect (for the advertiser) whatsoever.

If you have any idea what Monday.com or Asana is then YouTube is probably working.

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

#147

Post by dageshi »

nindalf wrote: post #115

I respect the Economist’s business columnist (Schumpeter) and tech columnist (Babbage) but this seems to be a case of Schumpeter writing about tech. Leaving aside HN loving the idea of Big Tech being weakened by becoming Relatively Small Tech, I don’t see how this is in Alphabet’s or YouTube’s interest. The article assumes that such a divorce would be simple and it would allow YouTube to focus on taking on TikTok. It…

I think more fundamentally, youtube is far less vulnerable to the chatgpt garbagisation of the web. SEO crap is already bad, it will likely get much worse.

Youtube has actual good content from creators whose opinions I trust. Google would be moronic to give that up, they've spent long enough building it.

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

#148

Post by Retric »

judge2020 wrote: post #95
fisf wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are basically making the case for the anti-trust case here. i.e. it is very hard for another company to compete without "free compute".

No, they're making the case for them being a monopoly. Unless Google is preventing others from purchasing compute or hard drives by buying up all of the supply, they are not performing any anti-competitive actions, which would not make them liable under any anti-trust statutes. I don't think anyone's in doubt YT is a monopoly with how big and widely-used it is. It's just that they continue to survive because of how w…

The monopoly practice in this case is subsidizing a business with by leveraging a monopoly. Aka YouTube isn’t paying market prices on unused compute therefore Google is leverage its search monopoly to expand into another business.

Historically the concern was that railroads might get into say coal mining by charging competitors more to move coal than they charged themselves.

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

#150

Post by jeffwask »

dageshi wrote: post #147
nindalf wrote: post #115

I respect the Economist’s business columnist (Schumpeter) and tech columnist (Babbage) but this seems to be a case of Schumpeter writing about tech. Leaving aside HN loving the idea of Big Tech being weakened by becoming Relatively Small Tech, I don’t see how this is in Alphabet’s or YouTube’s interest. The article assumes that such a divorce would be simple and it would allow YouTube to focus on taking on TikTok. It…

I think more fundamentally, youtube is far less vulnerable to the chatgpt garbagisation of the web. SEO crap is already bad, it will likely get much worse. Youtube has actual good content from creators whose opinions I trust. Google would be moronic to give that up, they've spent long enough building it.

> the chatgpt garbagisation of the web

Eh... it's already started on YouTube. There's a whole new genre of movie content that has chatgpt summarize the movie while they play 15 minutes of clips. It's higher effort garbagisation because someone needs to at least do some low effort video editing.

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