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YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

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Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#31
Honestly, I'm not at all surprised. In many ways, YouTube (and other content creation platforms in general) are just a better deal for many people than traditional forms of entertainment.

The thing with traditional media is that it's all about limits and compromise and trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The TV and radio airwaves are limited, as is the schedule. Cinemas and screening times are limited. Shops selling books are limited. Etc.

So what you get is very generic and milquetoast. It's bland content aimed at a large audience that (presumably) doesn't want to think too hard or leave their comfort zone, which is designed to appeal to every possible region on Earth at the same time and which doesn't scare away corporate types that see anything outside of a few specific genres as too risky to deal with.

Much of what's on YouTube isn't like that. Yeah, there are censorship issues and other such problems, but many of the videos and channels there are as niche as niche can be, and all the better because of it. You don't need to care if your videos appeal to 300 million people in the US or are understandable to a few billion worldwide, you just need to care that an audience that wants that sort of content can discover them and find value from it.

Almost every commenter on this site watches something different on YouTube, often about topics that appeal to only a tiny percentage of the population. Platforms like YouTube can support that, traditional media companies can't.

The cumulative impact of all those different channels and creators is bigger than any small library of mass market works could ever be.

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#32
post #25
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Click History on the homepage left sidebar > Comments on right side of History page https://www.youtube.com/feed/history

And now try to find the comment someone replied to

Oh, fair enough. That is indeed not shown anywhere it seems.

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#33

It genuinely disgusts me that the world's largest media company shoves addictive, short form content down users throats (especially young people). Anyone working on it at Google should be ashamed of what they're doing.

YouTube is actually the least engagement-driven/addition-maxing social video provider, by far. Meta and TikTok are famous for discouraging external linking, limiting reach to non-targetted users, heavily moderating content to match engagement metrics, disguising advertisement as content, etc...

YouTube for the most part just serves what you post, does minimal content moderation, stuff a dumb insurance ad on the front (of the long-form content) that looks like a dumb insurance ad, and then does it for everyone else. I mean, sure, they could do better. But really if the world of amateur video content was all YouTube it would be a better place.

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#34
post #4

you know what... besides everything, good for them. I don't know if many of you remember the olden days of Youtube, when it wasn't lead by corporate greed, and before it was infested by greedy abysmal shitty people - When profits weren't the driving force behind content creation. Whenever I see content creators like that on Youtube right now I just wish them the best, and if they have a platform currently that suppor…

This just highlights how YouTube is a different thing for all users. One person's experience can be radically different from another's. I wouldn't even know someone like MrBeast exists if Hacker News hadn't told me about it. Most of what I watch on YouTube is regular media that would otherwise only be available on obsure local networks or DVDs that I don't have, like Thrasher's skateboarding videos, broadcasts of the X-Games and Red Bull action sports events, ESPN/CBS/NBC highlights of yesterday's major pro sports events I didn't watch because they're on too late for me, or music videos via YouTube music. None of these are YouTube "creators." They're just normal media that uses YouTube as an additional distribution channel.

Honestly, my favorite channel is probably BBC to watch snippets of classic BBC Earth series narrated by David Attenborough. I'm pretty sure I could get them through HBO Max, which I believe is the US streaming that has distribution rights for BBC Earth, but it's convenient to get stuff like this all from one place and pretty much everything has a YouTube channel.

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#35

It genuinely disgusts me that the world's largest media company shoves addictive, short form content down users throats (especially young people). Anyone working on it at Google should be ashamed of what they're doing.

Where is it being shoved down anyone’s throat? You literally have to intentionally click a short video or use the shorts tab to see any YouTube short.

Shorts are pushed on the homepage and in the sidebar. At least in the UI that I see in Firefox desktop.

I sometimes wonder if other people get other UIs than I do. There's technically nothing stopping them from 'tailoring' the UI for different people.

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#36

My biggest concern about Youtube is that they do not truly have a competitor. They just raised premium prices again making it one of my most expensive entertainment subscriptions.

I suspect they're going to soon do what Amazon did as well, where they start putting ads into the regular YouTube Premium service, and charge an extra $3 a month for a completely ad free experience.

I have the family plan shared across six accounts, and it went to $26, which really isn't that much but I'm not entirely sure why they're doing it.

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#37
post #14
post #4

you know what... besides everything, good for them. I don't know if many of you remember the olden days of Youtube, when it wasn't lead by corporate greed, and before it was infested by greedy abysmal shitty people - When profits weren't the driving force behind content creation. Whenever I see content creators like that on Youtube right now I just wish them the best, and if they have a platform currently that suppor…

I've been getting off of YouTube more because now creators censor themselves even more than network TV does. You can't say "kill", you have to say "unalive" or "took their life" or shit like that. You can't say "rape", you have to say "SA". You can't say "porn", everyone called it "corn". Apparently you can't even say 16, because I saw a YouTuber say "61 backwards" when talking about a creep on the internet. I rememb…

the problem is these "creators" want to get paid by generic advertisers, so they have to conform to the clean standard.

if they just wanted to express themselves, they could.

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#38
post #9

I always see it as more of a social media company rather than a media co.

I often comment on videos but never do I check replies to my comments there.

I tried to one time, but I couldn't even figure it out so I gave up.

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watch more YouTube anything else combined by a pretty significant margin. I'm sure there's a lot of crap, but it doesn't show me too much of it. It has learned my preferences well enough to know that it should show me chess, Mario Maker, Australian machine shops specializing in resource extraction industries (a very specific genre to be sure, but I'm subscribed to two separate channels here) and various other thing…

The thing that makes me a little sad about Youtube's dominance is we haven't gotten to a place where you can easily host video on an RSS feed like podcasts, and distribute discovery across many platforms. Paying YouTube so I don't have to suffer their egregiously bad ads feels like a shakedown more than a valuable service.

I'm happy to pay for YouTube since it's so good, but otherwise I totally agree. It's a bit odd, audio in the form of both podcasts and music seems to have settled on a model where creators and distributors are separated and pretty much everything is available on pretty much every platform, whereas video (both amateur and professional) has settled on a model where any given piece of media is typically available from just one place, at least when talking about subscriptions rather than "purchases." I wonder if there's something about the format that prompted this or if it just happened to work out that way.
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