Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 348 posts

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

#251

Post by giantrobot »

Retric wrote: post #235
giantrobot wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aka YouTube isn’t paying market prices on unused compute therefore Google is leverage its search monopoly to expand into another business. What in the hell is "market rate" for compute? Google bought a zillion CPUs and hard drives and put them in data centers that they pay for. There's no "market rate", they own the infrastructure. They can do whatever they want with the equipment they own. A division using another…

Google cloud exists... Anyway, monopolies have specific legal restrictions on what they can do with their infrastructure be that railroads, cables, or data centers. “Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices.” https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/ As a monopoly Google could sell the same capaci…

So companies can't leverage their own infrastructures between divisions? They should have to offer every bit of their infrastructure at "market rates"? What's the market rate for me shipping boxes using Walmart's trucks? Should McDonalds be forced to charge "market rate" rent to Subway for counter and kitchen space?

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

#252

Post by jimnotgym »

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 have no idea about the utility of divesting YouTube but on this point...

>YouTube clearly shares a lot of infrastructure with the rest of Google, especially datacenters and ads.

I don't see this as a particularly thorny problem. Normally in a divestiture. Newcorp would just sign a 5 year infrastructure deal with Alphabet, and a 5 year deal for it's ad space. That is plenty of time to resolve any lingering issues.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Alphabet divest some business, however I think it is unlikely to be for tech reasons. It is more likely to be financial engineering, as growth stalls and share prices need protecting.

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

#253

Post by Retric »

giantrobot wrote: post #251
Retric wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google cloud exists... Anyway, monopolies have specific legal restrictions on what they can do with their infrastructure be that railroads, cables, or data centers. “Amazon EC2 Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices.” https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/ As a monopoly Google could sell the same capaci…

So companies can't leverage their own infrastructures between divisions? They should have to offer every bit of their infrastructure at "market rates"? What's the market rate for me shipping boxes using Walmart's trucks? Should McDonalds be forced to charge "market rate" rent to Subway for counter and kitchen space?

Monopolies not random companies. Also, what’s legal isn’t particularly relevant only what’s enforced as nobody actually cares as about what infrastructure YouTube is using.

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

#254

Post by make3 »

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 feel like one of the only ways Youtube can be profitable is by having integration and being a first class citizen Google cloud's infrastructure & tech.

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

#255

Post by scarface_74 »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #245
scarface_74 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's main business was selling computers. Should they not have been allowed to branch out to sell phones or before that music players? Netflix had a dominant business in shipping DVDs to customers. Should they have not branched out to streaming? It's silly to say that companies should never be allowed to branch out to other businesses.

When did Apple ever had a dominant position in the computer market? Ah, yes, never, I was scared that you may have had a point there for moment. Care to highlight exactly how Netflix used its dominant position in film renting in favour of its streaming business? It would indeed be silly to say companies can’t branch out. Thankfully no one is so that’s fine.

Netflix very much had a dominant position in DVD rentals at its height.

Apple had a dominant position in selling music and in music players by 2006. It was the number one music retailer in the US. It very much used that to get into the phone market and part of its early success in the App Store was that it was built on top of iTunes and it already had more credit cards on file than any other company in the US besides Amazon.

If you're not arguing that a company shouldn't branch out, are you arguing that once a company gets a certain size, it shouldn't be allowed to invest those profits and resources into another industry?

By 2011, Apple was the most valuable company in the US. Should it not have been allowed to start selling watches, home stereo equipment and AirPods?

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

#256

Post by scarface_74 »

Retric wrote: post #249
scarface_74 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ever install Navigator back in the day? It was not difficult to install another browser.

Yes. It wasn’t always difficult, but at various points there were extra hoops you needed to jump through. Again I will point out Microsoft editing a video to skip steps they clearly wouldn’t have done so if the process was reasonable. They have even swapped peoples browsers with security updates before. Though more recent examples like KB 3135173 seem like a simple mistake, it’s more provocative when such things were…

There were never any extra hoops. You downloaded Netscape and you clicked on install like you did any other application.

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

#257

Post by devmunchies »

JohnFen wrote: post #190
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.

> Users are forced to watch at least 5 seconds of ads before watching any content. Not all users. I pay Google in order to not have to watch those ads, and they aren't served to me.

Same. Which is a tough spot for YouTube. The user's with the most disposable income and possibly niche targets for high value products are inaccessible.

I only pay $9-10 per month, whereas there are some companies who would pay way more for me (eng leadership/founder) to learn about their product. It would be very expensive CAC (cust. acquisition cost) but maybe worth it for a some niche products.

Maybe Google needs a way to "recommend" reviews for products in the video recommendations so that businesses can pay for placement (like Google Ads).

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

#258

Post by barneygale »

echelon wrote: post #218
91bananas wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the rest of us don't.

"ought to be enough for anybody" If things stay the same as ever, this life will have been boring. I'm not cut out for another twenty years of smartphone incrementalism. Fuck the status quo. I don't live for "same". Everything in the world as it exists isn't enough. The future could be the most exciting thing if we dream and build it.

Have you considered a career in subsistence farming? You're likely to be less damaging to the world.

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

#259

Post by anigbrowl »

scarface_74 wrote: post #217
anigbrowl wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is big business pretending to be small to distract attention from market dominance, and pretending to be creative to distract attention from a strategy of acquisition rather than origination. Your argument is valid, but scale matters. Think of a game of Monopoly ; you can usually tell who's going to win well before the game concludes, and you can guess which players will lose well before that.

And if Google hadn't acquired YouTube it wouldn't exist today. It would have either been sued out of existence or the infrastructure costs wouldn't be sustainable. But let's not pretend that the little guy wants to go public. If they do, they are naive. Out of all of the companies, that YC has invested in, maybe 5 have actually gone public. Every startup knows the game is to get acquired. The fact is that some things…

But how did YouTube get founded in the first place, and become successful as a video-sharing platform for original content? Or how did Google come to exist, when the market was dominated by (then-) huge firms like Yahoo, Lycos, and Altavista?

Both companies had a first mover advantage by deploying a more scaleable technical innovation in a somewhat stealthy way. OpenAI is subsidized as you say, but StabilityAI promptly ate their lunch int he image production field and is hoping to do the same with LLMs.

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

#260

Post by hackernewds »

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…

YouTube Premium is a large part of Google One. Which also includes Google Photos, Google Fi, Google Drive etc benefits.
Post reply on HN