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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?

#151

Post by rescbr »

judge2020 wrote: post #133
tshaddox wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Would the massive subsidization of YouTube’s costs not count? There’s nothing physically preventing a competitor from buying storage and compute, but it’s pretty clear that it would be extremely…

> but it’s pretty clear that it would be extremely difficult to compete with YouTube if every user has to pay the actual unit costs to upload, convert, and play videos. That's on the user side, though. Like AWS and Azure, chances are GCP/Google's internal hardware division bills internal teams similarly to external customers (especially as Sundar continues to demand cost cuts). Of course users themselves can't go and…

> Like AWS and Azure, chances are GCP/Google's internal hardware division bills internal teams similarly to external customers (especially as Sundar continues to demand cost cuts)

Having worked on such large conglomerates it’s closer to friends & family discount than from large external company discount.

There’s also transfer pricing and other accounting ways to improve numbers.

This is so widespread that one such company had dollars (internal purchases) and green dollars (external customers) pricing.

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

#152

Post by Y_Y »

crazygringo wrote: post #99
dghughes wrote: post #63

YouTube has become horrible experience practically unwatchable unless you pay for the monthly Premium service. And this is coming from me a person who grew up watching TV stuffed with ads. I can't imagine with young people who never watched TV think of bare non-premium YouTube. Non-premium YouTube is just an ad machine that happens to show some video content between ads. It used to be the opposite of that.

I don't know what you mean. If I watch a 9-minute clip, I get 2 ads at the top but can skip them after the first 5 seconds of the first ad. And then there's often a 15-second unskippable commercial in the middle. So about 4% ads. Sometimes there's a single first unskippable 15-second ad instead, so about 5% ads. (And the ratio seems roughly the same with shorter videos, as they don't have the ad in the middle and som…

That 27% rate would be illegally high in most countries. Not to mention the many places which have high-quality public broadcasters with few or no ads.

That said network TV isn't necessarily a great comparison. For me I'm most likely to compare with YouTube of the past, very similar content, but no ads. Or YouTube with adblock or third-party android apps.

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

#153

Post by PixelForg »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #126
pier25 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And so the creators don't get paid when you watch their content. I pay for YouTube Premium. Creators get paid and I don't watch ads. We have a family plan so this applies to the whole family. We spend way more time watching YouTube than Netflix but pay for both.

> And so the creators don't get paid when you watch their content. They could ask the users to pay for the content they produce and measure how many microseconds would pass before they switch to someone else's videos. It's an option. I don't want to watch ads, I skip sponsored sections, I feel no guilt about it, if they can't monetize enough and have to shutdown operations, I can survive without that content. What wo…

Your analogy is only correct if you watch content that's recommended to you, but many of us actively watch YouTubers we have subscribed to, in that case it makes sense for the creators to get paid then. Edit - Edited the comment a bit

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

#154

Post by ARandomerDude »

> It [YouTube] is an advertising juggernaut to boot.

> Messrs Page and Brin control more than half of Alphabet’s voting rights, and would not like to be the first titans of tech to start selling off the family silver.

Many commenters here have correctly pointed out that the business case presented in the article makes approximately zero sense. That's because the article is actually an antitrust argument disguised as a business analysis.

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

#155

Post by echelon »

jeffwask wrote: post #150
dageshi wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Full video automation is not going to take long. I'm working on systems to automate 100% of video workflows (in a good way).

We recently launched a 24/7 news channel:

https://fakeyou.com/news

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

#156

Post by lumb63 »

crazygringo wrote: post #82

I can't agree. Ultimately, the article argues for spinoff because of 1) focus, 2) more subscription experimentation, and 3) regulators. But there's zero evidence YouTube is a distraction, it's already done lots of experimenation with subscriptions, and YouTube seems like the last of regulators' concerns with Alphabet. I do think it's true there isn't a whole lot of strategic synergy between YouTube and Google or the…

Not saying I disagree with you, but couldn’t the “economies of scale” argument be used to justify e.g. all cloud providers forming a monopoly, all hardware manufacturers doing the same, etc.? The only reason all tech companies shouldn’t aspire to monopoly status is to avoid regulators stepping in; they should aim as close as possible.

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

#157

Post by HDThoreaun »

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…

You don't need to be a monopoly to get anti-trusted. You just need to use your market power to stifle competition to consumers detriment.

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

#158

Post by HDThoreaun »

osigurdson wrote: post #146
taco_emoji wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can thank the MTA for knowing that monday.com exists

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

#159

Post by alldayeveryday »

crazygringo wrote: post #82

I can't agree. Ultimately, the article argues for spinoff because of 1) focus, 2) more subscription experimentation, and 3) regulators. But there's zero evidence YouTube is a distraction, it's already done lots of experimenation with subscriptions, and YouTube seems like the last of regulators' concerns with Alphabet. I do think it's true there isn't a whole lot of strategic synergy between YouTube and Google or the…

[dead]

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

#160

Post by xhkkffbf »

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.

Ah, I've been seeing more and more videos that were clearly tossed together by some algorithm using a synthetic voice. The text may even be largely written by an AI and then proofed by a human. They use the same clips again and again, almost in rotation.

I think they're slowly going to drown out the good producers.

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