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

281–284 of 284 posts

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

#281

Post by jjk166 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #206
jjk166 wrote: post #149

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…

>Youtube doesn't own any of the content on its platform What additional benefits would ownership grand Youtube? It seems like they have everything worth having (under “License to Youtube, Duration of License, and Right to Monetize”). https://www.youtube.com/static?gl=US&template=terms

I'm not saying Youtube ought to own it, I'm just contrasting youtube and disney's business models. Youtube doesn't have any equivalent to Mickey Mouse. Mr. Beast may generate tremendous ad revenue for Youtube, but Youtube can't sell Mr. Beast. Youtube is a machine made of steel that you need to operate to generate profit; it is valuable only for what it does. Disney is a machine made of gold that you can operate to generate profit, but which you could also sell for parts to make immense and instant sums of cash; and critically the operation of this golden machine adds more gold to itself, it is valuable for what it is.

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

#282

Post by NJRBailey »

lairv wrote: post #217
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.…

Worth noting that most of youtube videos can no longer be discovered through search. Search results can now only be sorted by "Relevance" and "Popularity" while you used to be able to sort by release date Search results are also non-exhaustive and biased towards recent videos as noted in this study https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11727 Basically many videos can no longer be discovered if you don't have a url to the video…

I've noticed that the search is especially bad on the history tab, where even searching the exact title of a video I've seen before doesn't always display it. I've found that the best search for old or niche videos is to ask Gemini with a description of the video (I found it gives better results than GPT 5.1) but it's really unfortunate that the native search isn't more useful.

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

#283

Post by lairv »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #280
lairv wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting that most of youtube videos can no longer be discovered through search. Search results can now only be sorted by "Relevance" and "Popularity" while you used to be able to sort by release date Search results are also non-exhaustive and biased towards recent videos as noted in this study https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11727 Basically many videos can no longer be discovered if you don't have a url to the video…

Realistically you cannot make every video discoverable given the massive ever growing amount of content.

Wikipedia says there's 14.8 billion videos currently uploaded to YouTube, it seems technically easy to index that amount of title+description?

The more likely explanation is that Google doesn't want YouTube to be crawled, which gives them a massive moat for AI training

Post reply on HN