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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?

#341

Post by maximus-decimus »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #230
PixelForg wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

of course it is fair to be paid, they should be paid regardless by YouTube though, not by me watching the ADS. If I block the ads, YouTube should pay them nonetheless. Because I chose to block the ADS, not the content creator. But it's not my responsibility to watch the ADS or the sponsored content. The content has been uploaded as "public & free" and I watch it for free.

Where is Youtube supposed to get the money to pay them if you don't watch the ads or buy premium, which is how they make money?

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

#342

Post by hodgesrm »

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…

> 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.

What might instead generate more value is to spin out Google Workspaces (aka docs, slides, sheets, drive, etc.) It feels as if their business products are losing out to Microsoft, which IMO offer a greatly inferior collaboration experience for distributed teams.

To pick one concrete example Google Drive is poorly suited for storing business documents due to its hostility to hierarchy and poor tools for viewing and search. By contrast Sheets is amazing. We run our business on it. These product deserve a separate, innovative focus that does not treat document management as a search problem.

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

#343

Post by peoplefromibiza »

maximus-decimus wrote: post #341
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

of course it is fair to be paid, they should be paid regardless by YouTube though, not by me watching the ADS. If I block the ads, YouTube should pay them nonetheless. Because I chose to block the ADS, not the content creator. But it's not my responsibility to watch the ADS or the sponsored content. The content has been uploaded as "public & free" and I watch it for free.

Where is Youtube supposed to get the money to pay them if you don't watch the ads or buy premium, which is how they make money?

by selling ADS.

TV commercials are paid regardless of how many people are watching them, you pay for the potential audience, not for the actual number of viewers (which is always presumed).

Putting pressure on the viewers (us) to undergo the torture of constantly being nagged by glovo and audible ads every 15 seconds, it's frankly the best way to not get any more viewer and scare the old ones away, for the content creators.

You want to advertise on YT?

You pay for it and hope people will watch your ads, if they skip them, they are probably sh*t and you need to make better ads, not force people to lower their standards.

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

#344

Post by maximus-decimus »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #343
maximus-decimus wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is Youtube supposed to get the money to pay them if you don't watch the ads or buy premium, which is how they make money?

by selling ADS. TV commercials are paid regardless of how many people are watching them, you pay for the potential audience, not for the actual number of viewers (which is always presumed). Putting pressure on the viewers (us) to undergo the torture of constantly being nagged by glovo and audible ads every 15 seconds, it's frankly the best way to not get any more viewer and scare the old ones away, for the content cr…

I'm confused here, what do you propose? Showing ads but allow to skip them? if you think they're bad?

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

#345

Post by jrussino »

brnt wrote: post #331
ryandrake wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "Generate a new Star Trek TNG episode with the original actors and a believable, good story" It would be incredible, but incredibly awful. Also, a series is going to have a (set of) formula, but what makes an episode good is if it deviates from that formula.

Sure, but notice the trend toward prompt engineering and curation... for a show with a big fandom like Star Trek, you could end up with a whole community working on steering the algorithm, generating episodes, rating/up-voting their favorites. There's already a massive interest in fan fiction; this seems like it would be like fan fiction on steroids.

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

#346

Post by jrussino »

jrussino wrote: post #345
brnt wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Generate a new Star Trek TNG episode with the original actors and a believable, good story" It would be incredible, but incredibly awful. Also, a series is going to have a (set of) formula, but what makes an episode good is if it deviates from that formula.

Sure, but notice the trend toward prompt engineering and curation... for a show with a big fandom like Star Trek, you could end up with a whole community working on steering the algorithm, generating episodes, rating/up-voting their favorites. There's already a massive interest in fan fiction; this seems like it would be like fan fiction on steroids.

Stupid shower thought of the day: a block chain for fan fiction "canon", where the community maintains an official consensus of which AI-generated episodes are canonical and in what order, that then gets fed into the AI as input to generate new episodes while maintaining continuity, progression of plot and character growth. Probably with multiple forks.

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

#347

Post by taco_emoji »

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.

Well, I have no idea what those are, so...

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

#348

Post by madrox »

8note wrote: post #314
sircastor wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the same kind of thing for Apple to buy Disney. In the abstract, the money and some shared goals make sense, but the reality would be a very challenging struggle to combine two ideologically different companies.

I'd see Disney as buying Nintendo, rather than Apple doing something with either of them. Both Disney and Nintendo operate on brands and content IP. Both keep releasing the same content but updated to dedicated fanbases

I once advocated at this when at Disney, but the truth is that Nintendo has no interest in selling to anyone and they don't have to
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