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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?

#301

Post by mijamo »

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.

It is the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conglomerate_discount

It is not mispricing, but it is a discount. Big companies, even very healthy ones, often split to satisfy their investors based on this phenomenon.

It hasn't really played much in tech though which might be why you haven't heard of it, but is very very well known in industrial companies.

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

#302

Post by dragonwriter »

echelon wrote: post #297
qwytw wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 month…

> 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.

Very few; great ideas mostly happen outside of the Hollywood studio system, which is largely about expensive packaging of low-risk ideas, not great ones.

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

#303

Post by echelon »

dragonwriter wrote: post #302
echelon wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 month…

> 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. Very few; great ideas mostly happen outside of the Hollywood studio system, which is largely about expensive packaging of low-risk ideas, not great ones.

> Very few

Allow me to point to the thousands of creatives trying to cut it that cannot break in. I've met perhaps over a hundred of them personally. I, myself, am one of these people.

> which is largely about expensive packaging of low-risk ideas, not great ones.

The market serves different segments and there's a lot of intelligence built around vehicles of all types, shapes, and sizes. I don't think Hollywood is stupid at all. I think it's simply a small local optima when we're about to jump the peak to a new Mt. Everest.

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

#304

Post by anigbrowl »

scarface_74 wrote: post #266
anigbrowl wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scale able technical innovation in a somewhat stealthy way. OpenAI is subsidized as you say, but StabilityAI promp…

> But how did YouTube get founded in the first place, and become successful as a video-sharing platform for original content A "successful" business makes more than it spends so it can be an ongoing concern. Any company can sell a lot of dollars for 95 cents. Youtube was never a "successful" business with a meaningful revenue stream before being acquired by Google. > Or how did Google come to exist, when the market w…

Youtube got acquired before they monetized, but it was obvious that they would eventually do something like that. Running at a loss to gain market dominance with a distinctly different kind of service is not 'selling dollars for 95 cents'.

You realize you're arguing against the need for government regulation.

I'm looking at some gaps in your logic when you assert that anyone who ever wants to go public is naive; when Excite (not Yahoo) declined Google's $1m buyout ask, they were already running as a public service under their own brand and had a plan for text ad sales in place. Certainly it was worth trying to develop a technology product followed by an acquisition before the more challenging (but perhaps less interesting) business of raising capital directly, but there was a widespread view at the time (among both tech and VC people) that their product was good enough for them to go all the way.

I'm not trying to debate the need for government regulation and don't know why you think this is some sort of 'gotcha'.

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

#305

Post by dragonwriter »

echelon wrote: post #303
dragonwriter wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Very few; great ideas mostly happen outside of the Hollywood studio system, which is largely about expensive packaging of low-risk ideas, not great ones.

> Very few Allow me to point to the thousands of creatives trying to cut it that cannot break in. I've met perhaps over a hundred of them personally. I, myself, am one of these people. > which is largely about expensive packaging of low-risk ideas, not great ones. The market serves different segments and there's a lot of intelligence built around vehicles of all types, shapes, and sizes. I don't think Hollywood is st…

> Allow me to point to the thousands of creatives trying to cut it that cannot break in.

I'm not saying great ideas don't fail to get realized.

I’m saying that the Hollywood systen is actively hostile to great ideas, so that the reason greay ideas fail to get realized is not the limited resources within the Hollywood system, which is more inclined to crush great ideas than to realize them with whatever resources it has.

(Limited money outside the Hollywood system might be a problem, though.)

> I don't think Hollywood is stupid at all.

I didn't say anything about its intelligence, merely its function, it is far from stupid.

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

#306

Post by kqr2 »

valley_guy_12 wrote: post #289
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…

Just as a point of interest, AIUI the names "Schumpeter" and "Babbage" are "house names", not the real names of the people who write the columns. Any given column might be written by anyone, and it would still use the same house name. Shumpeter and Babbage are the last names of famous people in fields related to the columns topics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely is another interesting example, however in this case, Mark Stephens actually took over the pseudonym after he left InfoWorld:

After a financial disagreement in 1995, Stephens was dismissed from InfoWorld and was promptly sued by IDG to prevent him from continuing to use the Cringely trademark. A settlement was reached out of court that allowed him to use the name, so long as he did not contribute to competing technology magazines

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

#307

Post by hyperdimension »

maxbond wrote: post #282
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.

People who don't like your view of the future aren't "antiprogress" or "pro status quo," while you are imagining a little kid enabled to be creative and making lots of great stuff, others are imagining being inundated with targeted ads featuring their loved ones (and inevitably hurting people by showing them recently deceased loved ones, like when Facebook used to say, "you haven't spoken to this person in a while, w…

I like your analysis. I think you could generalize it to any (even more-hotly) debated topic. People can hear the same thing and imagine two (or more) very different things by virtue of life experience, upbringing, morals, or any number of factors that make us unique.

I don't think that's a bad thing. It's a good perspective to keep in mind when disagreeing with someone though.

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

#309

Post by giancarlostoro »

JohnFen wrote: post #205
giancarlostoro wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either way. Spinning off the loser (Facebook), and the non-social networking product (WhatsApp) You don't think of it as a social networking product, but it is used as such. I consider Discord social media, and WhatsApp is honestly a text only Discord competitor in the grand scheme of things, all the group chats are reminiscent of Discord servers, but for people who don…

I've never thought of WhatsApp as a social networking product. For me, it's just an SMS replacement necessary to talk to my friends outside of the US. Not saying my perspective is correct, but I think of a "social networking" product as one where I'm talking to groups of people. That's not how I use WhatsApp. That's always 1-on-1 conversations with people I know in the real world.

For some people it is all the social media they get. People share memes, and pictures, and live updates.

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

#310

Post by devmunchies »

JohnFen wrote: post #292
devmunchies wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

I don’t mind ads, what I’m paying for is time. I don’t like ads where I have to wait for them to end.
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