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

YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

hollywoodreporter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 284 posts

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

#141

Post by deanputney »

wiether wrote: post #117
foruhar wrote: post #113

Hyperbolically, I think it's one of humanity's greatest resources. I can find anything from precision machining, LLM internals, historical footage of WWI, music performances from pretty much any era, and on, and on. There are so many things that I didn't know there was any footage of or that I didn't a single thing about that I find there pretty much daily. I wish the BBC would publish their whole archive through YT.…

> some cracking Scottish chap going for a bike ride with a bottle of whisky. I've seen that one!

Here it is for those who haven't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZk2jV5gJbM

When I looked it up, turns out I've seen it too!

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

#142

Post by jeffbee »

chromacity wrote: post #56
CM30 wrote: post #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.…

It's a cool argument, but I don't think it's how YouTube is being used or how it makes money. Most views go to a relatively small number of mainstream content creators who converge on more or less the same sanitized format, down to the same style of video thumbnails. Sure, there's a long tail of people who do free labor for YouTube by publishing niche reviews or science lectures and never seeing a penny, but if they…

> The majority of views goes toward a relatively small number of mainstream content creators

By any precedent YouTube is radically decentralized. Yes, the view concentration follows a power law, and the power law beats the long tail, but you have to add up thousands of channels to get a majority of YouTube views. Think about how that compares to the overall media landscape. Any two TV channels would yield a majority of viewers. The diversity and decentralization on YouTube is much greater.

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

#143

Post by topsphere »

wffurr wrote: post #70
rambambram wrote: post #42

Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again. To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality videos from one day to the other a couple of years ago. Just opening up Youtube one day and seeing all kinds of thumbnails with people…

The YouTube home screen is a total wasteland. It's a disaster. It's a horrific attention suck that's done enormous damage to humanity's collective attention span. Recommendations are barely any better - sometimes they're loosely connected to the video you just watched, but other times it's just more weird addicting YouTube slop. At the same time, YouTube is an incredible resources; a civilizational achievement. It's…

Check out the Unhook extension (available in various browsers), it can turn YT into search box + video player.

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

#144

Post by Quarrelsome »

bombcar wrote: post #134
Quarrelsome wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It painfully overfits based on what I've watched. I've watched thousands of videos and it still doesn't understand me at all because it appears to treat every action as equal. As an example, I like watching the Starcraft II streamer uThermal but I'm not really interested in other Starcraft II content creators because uThermal scratches that itch. However YouTube will keep showing me Starcraft II content creat…

As a fellow uThermal enjoyer, I have to admit the algorithm knew enough to suggest him to me if I was watching battlecruiser cheese. I just wish they'd recognize that the fifty-first time I don't watch a video they should find something else to show me.

Ahh a fellow Mr Guy (I just wanted to use Mr Guy in a sentence once in my life)

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

#145

Post by csours »

Something interesting to me is that YouTube doesn't even capture the majority of the value stream. They allow content creators to use things like Patreon and their own ad reads to capture their own value.

Of course, the preceding paragraph could be re-written in many different ways.

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

#146

Post by majkinetor »

conductr wrote: post #89
rambambram wrote: post #42

Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again. To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality videos from one day to the other a couple of years ago. Just opening up Youtube one day and seeing all kinds of thumbnails with people…

I noticed that the Shorts pedaling is causing a major deterioration of the service and it started a few years ago. At some point I looked too long at a thirst trap and now all I get is OF girls jumping on trampolines and stuff like that, despite spending literal days of time on longer form content for every second I've glanced at that stuff. They just really want me to interact with their Shorts doomscroll. It certai…

I can't use YT without anti shorts:

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/441709-youtube-anti-shorts

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

#147

Post by bombcar »

guzfip wrote: post #52
rambambram wrote: post #42

Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again. To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality videos from one day to the other a couple of years ago. Just opening up Youtube one day and seeing all kinds of thumbnails with people…

> Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again. Yep, for some reasons the recommendation engines seem to have become “oh you glanced at this post for 2 second or you watched a single video, this must be exclusively what you want” I’ve seen it on social media too, notably Facebook.

Youtube records hovering over their stupid Tiktoks as a view - if you go into view history you can delete all of them and get better recommends.

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

#148

Post by the_snooze »

rambambram wrote: post #42

Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again. To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality videos from one day to the other a couple of years ago. Just opening up Youtube one day and seeing all kinds of thumbnails with people…

>Even searching for specific topics is hard.

It's the tyranny of the marginal user. How I wish YouTube (and generally other platforms for user-generated content) would have fine-grained search and filtering controls that let me specify exactly what I want, no recommendation algorithm trying to guess what I actually meant. But such a feature won't attract and retain the least interested people, so we'll never get it.

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

#149

Post by jjk166 »

Radically different sorts of business. Youtube's income comes from engagement, and it's value comes from its network effects. Youtube doesn't own any of the content on its platform, and you could replace every video on Youtube and it wouldn't matter so long as it remains the place people post videos. Youtube's survival is about gaining and keeping eyeballs, its competitors are other sites that people may spend their time on. The social media features - the comments, the likes - may not matter to you or most anyone else, but Youtube is thoroughly a social media business. Indeed for Youtube most content is an ongoing cost - they must pay to store billions of videos most people will never watch, and certainly which won't generate ad revenue to cover their hosting expenses, so that they can host the thing which actually does pull a sizeable audience, most of which is ephemeral.

Disney on the other hand is an IP curation firm. Sure they make money on movie tickets and subscriptions and merchandise, but they create value by creating and maintaining a litany of characters, stories, and settings which are priced based on the idea they can be milked essentially forever. Disney could pump out flop after flop after flop, but so long as those flops keep Disney owned characters alive in the zeitgeist, it's a financial win. Obviously Disney needs revenue, but it's valuation is only loosely related to its current revenue.

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

#150

Post by IshKebab »

rambambram wrote: post #42

Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again. To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality videos from one day to the other a couple of years ago. Just opening up Youtube one day and seeing all kinds of thumbnails with people…

> If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!

There are dozens of great channels in those spaces. Here are some I remember just off the top of my head.

* Cars: Watch Wes Work (need 1.5x speed here!), Prop Department, Mat Armstrong, Chris Fix

* Woodworking: Frank Howarth, Matthias Wandel, The Wood Whisperer, John Heisz, Steve Ramsey

* Metalworking: Clickspring, Cronova Engineering, Tubal Cain

* General DIY/inventions: DIY Perks, Uri Tuchman, Stuff Made Here, Colin Furze, Applied Science, Breaking Taps

I think it's actually not too bad at surfacing this stuff. They also have a "New to You" button you can click.

My main complaint is it will recommend a specific video to you for aaaages without you clicking on it before it finally realises you aren't interested. You can manually say you aren't interested, but it's two clicks and you shouldn't need to do that anyway.

Post reply on HN