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

It’s time for Alphabet to spin off YouTube?

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 348 posts

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

#91

Post by orra »

rtsil wrote: post #66
madeofpalk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The services may not work a la carte If the service cannot compete on it's own merits, and is being propped up by an unrelated business, how competetive is it actually?

What if it's not an independent service, merely a perk of the actual service? Where do we draw the line? Should Apple be asked to spin off iCloud because email, photos, documents should all be independent services? Note that neither Prime Video nor iCloud are monopolies, which would bring different considerations into the matter.

Prime Video isn't a monopoly, but Amazon clearly has Significant Market Power when it comes to retail. They're anti-competitively vertically bundling Prime Video along with retail delivery.

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

#92

Post by Tepix »

edgyquant wrote: post #85
pier25 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And so the creators don't get paid when you watch their content. I pay for YouTube Premium. Creators get paid and I don't watch ads. We have a family plan so this applies to the whole family. We spend way more time watching YouTube than Netflix but pay for both.

Nearly all of them shill some product in there video. They get paid.

Do you want to encourage this behaviour versus those who merely rely on what YouTube pays them?

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

#93

Post by mbesto »

kyrra wrote: post #19
pclmulqdq wrote: post #2

It's time for antitrust to hit Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon. At the very least. Amazon: AWS is one of the most valuable businesses ever created. You don't need the retail arm any more, now that it is enshitting itself. Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor. Amazon would absolutely be more valuable broken up. Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either…

Google side: from maybe a business idea, you could have it work. But from a technical perspective, it would be near impossible without years of engineering effort. Google has a ton of core internal infra that is shared between all the business units at Google. The only reason this is feasible is that the cost of running it is shared between the units. (Googler opinions are my own).

> The only reason this is feasible

I assume by feasible you mean profitable. Which means there is a pricing mismatch then.

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

#94

Post by himinlomax »

fisf wrote: post #68
kevincox wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked at Google I definitely noticed that YouTube was great at (ab)using untracked or very cheap resources. They definitely get huge benifits of otherwise idle data centers in sleeping regions. As the regular service traffic died off YouTube would put those idle cores to work transcoding video. It is definitely the case that YouTube gets lots of really cheap compute by being part of Google. But that isn't a b…

You are basically making the case for the anti-trust case here. i.e. it is very hard for another company to compete without "free compute".

Anti-trust legislation is not meant to stop economies of scale, it's meant to curb monopolistic practices.

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

#95

Post by judge2020 »

fisf wrote: post #68
kevincox wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked at Google I definitely noticed that YouTube was great at (ab)using untracked or very cheap resources. They definitely get huge benifits of otherwise idle data centers in sleeping regions. As the regular service traffic died off YouTube would put those idle cores to work transcoding video. It is definitely the case that YouTube gets lots of really cheap compute by being part of Google. But that isn't a b…

You are basically making the case for the anti-trust case here. i.e. it is very hard for another company to compete without "free compute".

No, they're making the case for them being a monopoly. Unless Google is preventing others from purchasing compute or hard drives by buying up all of the supply, they are not performing any anti-competitive actions, which would not make them liable under any anti-trust statutes.

I don't think anyone's in doubt YT is a monopoly with how big and widely-used it is. It's just that they continue to survive because of how well they execute their plan of making a good service that gives users what they want (fast, instant access to videos that appeal to them) and pays out creators enough to where they can make a living, or even build a media company (LTT), off of the adsense and monetization opportunities YT enables.

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

#96

Post by chiefalchemist »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #2

It's time for antitrust to hit Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon. At the very least. Amazon: AWS is one of the most valuable businesses ever created. You don't need the retail arm any more, now that it is enshitting itself. Also spin off the media company, comprising Audible and prime video, to make a Disney competitor. Amazon would absolutely be more valuable broken up. Meta: Meta has always run 3 separate products either…

Last I read, which was a couple of years ago, after Google search, YouTube is the next most searched "search engine". It serves ads. Is it really, from Google's POV that different than it's core business?

That aside, as we know now, Google wasted it's time with Plus. Instead it should have fleshed out YT's social aspects. While that's easy to say in retrospect, it's still not a bad idea if Google wanted to "social media" product.

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

#97

Post by throwaway472919 »

ydnaclementine wrote: post #90

It's time for Android to spin off google too. Their new "Did you know google made a PHONE?" commercial feels like terrible marketing. They should market it something like: "Android, powered by Google", and take advantage of the view that google is at least seen as a modern bell labs (by normals at least), so people can get the feeling that smart people are working on android. Otherwise I don't think anyone really kno…

Was a bit surprised it got past the lawyers re:antitrust, it's very heavy on "You already use EVERYTHING Google"

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

#98

Post by nerdjon »

jl6 wrote: post #7

I always assumed YouTube’s technical foundations were significantly subsidized by the mothership, but I have no data to base that on other than looking at the $29bn/year revenue figure and wondering whether that amount of money would be enough to provision the amount of compute, storage and bandwidth that YouTube needs, plus all other expenses (including revenue sharing with uploaders). Yes, $29bn is a lot of money,…

This was my first thought as well.

Is YouTube viable as its own company at the scale it operates? I have to imagine the infrastructure costs for YouTube would be extremely high and would likely cause YouTube to downgrade quality or try even harder to put a subscription behind even 1080.

Now obviously contacts can be signed and I highly doubt they would be paying normal prices in any cloud environment given this hypothetical situation. But it wouldn't be the same as it would be now.

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

#99

Post by crazygringo »

dghughes wrote: post #63

YouTube has become horrible experience practically unwatchable unless you pay for the monthly Premium service. And this is coming from me a person who grew up watching TV stuffed with ads. I can't imagine with young people who never watched TV think of bare non-premium YouTube. Non-premium YouTube is just an ad machine that happens to show some video content between ads. It used to be the opposite of that.

I don't know what you mean.

If I watch a 9-minute clip, I get 2 ads at the top but can skip them after the first 5 seconds of the first ad. And then there's often a 15-second unskippable commercial in the middle. So about 4% ads. Sometimes there's a single first unskippable 15-second ad instead, so about 5% ads. (And the ratio seems roughly the same with shorter videos, as they don't have the ad in the middle and sometimes skip the intro ad altogether when watched in succession.)

While network TV is 8 minutes of ads in a 30 min slot, or 27% ads. So about 5x as much ad time.

If YouTube started implementing unskippable ad segments that were multiple minutes long then there would be a comparison. But in my experience, YouTube is miles better than network TV ever has been in our lifetimes.

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

#100

Post by judge2020 »

edgyquant wrote: post #85
pier25 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And so the creators don't get paid when you watch their content. I pay for YouTube Premium. Creators get paid and I don't watch ads. We have a family plan so this applies to the whole family. We spend way more time watching YouTube than Netflix but pay for both.

Nearly all of them shill some product in there video. They get paid.

Even with sponsors, adsense is always an incredible driver of revenue[0,1] especially as more and more people (especially in the US) have an iPhone which prevents any ad blockers within the YouTube app.

And YouTube Premium views pay out a lot more per view than any ad-supported view[2,3].

0: https://twitter.com/linusgsebastian/status/16094682622194032...

1: https://twitter.com/LinusTech/status/1486918784401088515?s=2...

2: https://twitter.com/LinusTech/status/1486935690315112455?s=2...

3: https://twitter.com/hankgreen/status/1513177490730061829?s=2...

Post reply on HN