This is the latest #youtube "innovation". #Google with a market cap of $1.7 trillion and $120 billion cash on hand, "needs" to charge for ads on YouTube.
This is, of course, not true. They have more than enough revenue to run YouTube without ads in perpetuity, but they want to please shareholders. The #Peertube community is showing how you can distribute the costs of hosting content as well. If you don't support Google's continued monetization of monopolized video...vote with your feet.
@tilvids The problem with foot-voting is that it just makes you miserable.
None of my Twitter community moved over here. I see only one or two posts a day on Lemmy, which rarely have comments. BookWyrm doesn't even have most of the books I'm reading.
I have yet to see one of these open source options be anywhere near as good as the thing it's trying to replace.
@tilvids this is irrational logic.
Company A earns $X.
Therefore company A doesn't need to charge for Y.
See? No link.
In reality, Company A earns $X largely because of ad revenue on platform Y, and pays out creators from said revenue, as well as profiting from it.
So yes, I fully sympathize with any company running 500 petabytes of video storage wanting to retain their passive revenue stream.
If you don't want to give them ad revenue, go watch videos somewhere else.
@tilvids I ignored PeerTube for a while with the reason that most people are on YouTube, and there are ways to watch my content there for privacy conscious people , too.
Now things have changed enough that I finally sent my registration request to TILvids.
@tilvids Bad take, imo. YouTube already ran at a net loss for about a decade before ever having a profitable quarter. Video hosting is an incredibly expensive endeavor, especially for an enormous platform like YouTube which allows users to upload nearly unlimited video data at no upfront cost. Just because Google has a lot of money doesn't mean that they can sustain a massive platform like YouTube at a loss forever, nor should they have any obligation to do so.
If anything, the poor playback quality, long buffer times, and lack of moderation and copyright enforcement on PeerTube are excellent examples of why cheap video hosting doesn't work, even at the much smaller scale that PeerTube operates within. I think what you want is a smaller-scaled platform, which PeerTube is good for. But that's not the type of product YouTube is, nor should they aim to be.
PeerTube makes it pretty straightforward to scale up with mirroring instances, peer-to-peer distribution, etc. The reason YouTube is so expensive to run is because of its centralized nature.
Expect to eventually see YouTube evolve into the cable model of both mandatory monthly subscription AND ads. Google has been using their free model to dominate the market and freeze out competition. They're going to try to cash in on that now.
The reason YouTube is so expensive to run is because of its centralized nature.
I think it has more to do with maintaining a massive CDN with hundreds of server farms caching content for a worldwide userbase so that users can watch a video that was uploaded on the other side of the planet without having to buffer. Plus maintaining their social features, extended editing tools, notification services, paying moderators, handing copyright claim issues, etc.
Sometimes there's actually more to the story than just "corpo bad".
Our PeerTube instance is based out of Germany, which means it loads great for much of the EU, but videos were slow to load for the US. It took less than a few hours to spin up a second instance in the US, set up a mirroring strategy to the main site, and now videos load very quickly in the US. The problem isn't setting up CDNs, per se, it's the centralized nature of YouTube.
And again, Google's revenue is high enough that they could absorb this easily, as they have for 15+ years.
Your instance also has like 1% of the functionality that YouTube does. No immediate user registration, no integration into third-party platforms, no TOS, no copyright enforcement, no auto-captioning, no playlist support, no support for "shorts"/"stories"-formatted content, no interactive functions like in-video cards, no rental/purchase options, no partnerships with studios and other rights holders, limited livestreaming options... etc. The list goes on.
Not saying any of this to try to dunk on TILVids or PeerTube in general, just saying that we're talking about two wildly different product types, which cater to two wildly different audiences. YouTube is providing an order of magnitude more features and functionality to their platform than what PeerTube is currently capable of. The business models that work for PeerTube aren't really comparable.The SOPs that work for your platform are nigh impossible to work for YouTube. It's like the difference between a local crokinole tourament compared to the NFL.
Not suggesting it is, at all! Honestly, it's a bit of a relief to see smaller-scaled services that don't try to be all-encompassing. But the standards for one method of building a platform don't really apply to another very well.
To the best of my knowledge, Google doesn't publish this data publicly. But many estimates fall within $2-5b/year in operational costs. Considering storage for exabytes of data mirrored across dozens of server farms, bandwidth, licensing, creator payouts, employee/contractor salaries, leases/maintenance on buildings and other infrastructure, legal costs, etc... I'd wager that the cost is even a bit higher than those estimates.
Could be. Like I said, they don't publish the exact data, so all we can go off of are estimates from others in the industry. Could be more, could be less.
Doesn't change much in this context, though. Google has little obligation to make their products available for free. Yet YouTube is still largely a free-to-use platform, anyway.
And, ironically, "free" still comes at a cost, being your time and your data.
@tilvids the second this popup becomes unskippable, I’m out. I have no issue with a reasonable amount of ads (hi twitch ig) but these guys are literally pushing beyond the limit of what’s bearable every 6 months. On top of that, with cost of living as out of control as their profits, they have the audacity to suggest subscribing to their premium tier at a whopping 13.99 (!!) a month. Spreading the poison and renting you the cure, smh. “Don’t be evil”, right?
@tilvids This is somewhat troublesome for folks that run adblockers at the edge network rather than on client devices. It was a good run YouTube, using my peertube instance much more lately and for the foreseeable future I guess!
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