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

291–300 of 348 posts

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

#291

Post by JohnFen »

Panzer04 wrote: post #287
JohnFen wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And so the creators don't get paid when you watch their content. Let's be honest here -- creators aren't really getting paid any meaningful amount of money from those ads anymore. Those days are long gone. That's why all YouTubers who care about revenue do their own ads as part of their own content, and/or use things like Patreon. There's only one reason why YouTubers even bother to allow YouTube to "monetize" them…

This is untrue afaik. Even big channels with big self-sponsorship (eg Linus Tech Tips) still make (pulling out of thin air here) something like 20-30%+ of their revenue from native google ads.

As I understand it, the big channels do make decent money from their cut of Google's ads. But the vast majority of YouTubers aren't big. I think it's a percentage game.

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

#292

Post by JohnFen »

devmunchies wrote: post #257
JohnFen wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Maybe Google needs a way to "recommend" reviews

I would say "please don't give them any ideas", but I already ignore YouTube recommendations anyway, so that wouldn't actually bother me.

However, if YouTube found a sneaky way to get ads in front of me regardless of my premium membership, that would eliminate the entire value of the premium membership. And, for me, it would reduce the value of YouTube enough to get me to finally ditch YouTube once and for all.

Which might not be a bad thing, really.

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

#293

Post by jldugger »

fisf wrote: post #68
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…

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".

What OP basically described is use case for cloud computing and spot markets. Even if only internally.

While it could be made open, I don't see any regulatory reason to. We want companies to reduce waste, and it doesn't make sense to require all companies to build public facing cloud, and integrate their flagships into it, just to open it up to their competitors. It would be like telling Apple that its factories reusing scrap aluminum to make iPhone cases is an unfair competitive practice.

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

#294

Post by noizejoy »

duxup wrote: post #233
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…

This reminds me of what I see happen in sports sometimes. Fans decide it is time to trade Player X. Next move is to find someone to replace them ... they then describe someone just like Player X. A YouTube and Google split would setup a situation where they both seem to be a pretty good fit for each other.

In sports, you need to replace players, because they age out of their prime.

It might be interesting to apply similar thinking to technology.

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

#295

Post by echelon »

barneygale wrote: post #258
echelon wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I'm a filmmaker and love the arts more than you'll know. You're being incredibly sour, and I guarantee you that acting the way you do toward other humans (and yourself) subtracts way more from the universe.

I feel sorry for you.

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

#296

Post by tehlike »

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…

Spin off doesn't always imply spinning of infra or codebase.

They could license each other their infra and libraries.

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

#297

Post by echelon »

qwytw wrote: post #272
echelon wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Your future sounds pretty dystopian and very lonely though....

I imagine factory workers and butter churners said the same.

You know what really sucks? How labor intensive and capital intensive filmmaking is. How hard it is to make it into the field. How almost impossible it is to lead a production.

Think about all of the great ideas that wither on the vine because the Hollywood studio system only has so much capital and can only back so many projects.

Think about how many months and years go into a single film, and how few of them succeed.

Think about the opportunity cost of learning a creative skill - locking you out of all the other skills you could use to build your vision.

When the cost structures drop, people will be more creative and more cooperative. The long tail will be all of us.

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

#298

Post by Barrin92 »

crazygringo wrote: post #180
CydeWeys wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two companies would likely have more total value separate than together. The stock market doesn't price conglomerates correctly.

Citation needed. When companies are split, sometimes they gain value and sometimes they lose it. There's no hard and fast rule, and I'm not aware of evidence of systematic downwards mispricing of conglomerates.

>When companies are split, sometimes they gain value and sometimes they lose it

Evidence suggests that spinoffs produce quite significant gains in shareholder value, here is one such study[1]. This isn't really that surprising as large conglomerates are slow, have managerial issues and are difficult to price and generally hold their best performers down.

[1]https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1875857

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

#299

Post by echelon »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #265
echelon wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Full video automation has been done for years. There is one infamous channel that automatically scrapes stack overflow posts and makes video versions of the questions.

Yeah, well, now we need to make it good.

I want to put mocap and editing into this. Humans can tweak high level knobs, then dive into specifics.

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

#300

Post by ryandrake »

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.

I like this vision of the future of entertainment, honestly.

I like Star Trek the Next Generation... a lot! It was on when I was a teenager, and I like it because it's nostalgic and actually a pretty wholesome show compared to a lot of the shit that gets produced today. I'd love to see more than the existing 7 seasons, but they'll never make any more of them. It would be incredible if I could just ask my PC "Generate a new Star Trek TNG episode with the original actors and a believable, good story". I could watch a new one every week forever if I wanted! At the speed technology is moving, I expect we might see that in my lifetime.

We all saw the cheesy "infinite Seinfeld generator" a few weeks ago. That's v0.1. The technology will inevitably get better--in fact the only thing that could torpedo a realistic "infinite nostalgic TV show generator" are the copyright goons trying to hold it back.

Post reply on HN