to people saying YouTube is a moneysink for google:
yes it is, if you just look at direct expenses of running it. but you're overlooking the fact that it has enabled google to amass so much data(we're taking about 500 hours worth of videos being uploaded per minute) that they can train anything with it.
it's a service that's too big to fail. even whole governments, courts, and other institutions depend on it. so, I refuse to believe that YouTube will be non-existant because a sliver of users refuse to be profiled by invasive advertisements.
A new charity that takes your failing social media company off your hands (and your ledger!) and donates it to the United States Postal Service to administer and, after government streamlining, channel all profits into funding summer camp and spring break for our underprivilaged senators, congresspeople, and justices of federal rank or higher.
This is where I am a bit curious. In a world where we didn't have user tracking and just did ads the old fashioned way like television via over the air signals and used content as proxy for viewer interest, would folks still use ad blockers or accept having ads as part of the viewing experience? Is there a happy medium where users are willing to watch some ads, and advertisers don't track everything but still get some measurement that there shit is being viewed by real people and not bots. IDK. Is there a minutes per hour of ads per content that makes sense for video?
We just muted the TV during the ads and did something else until the show came back on. Ad breaks for regular shows like dramas were a predictable length of time, so you could time your bathroom or fridge run pretty well.
I don't mind ads if they're solely keyword-based, and one per 30 mins or so. but I do mind the tracking by ad companies(most notably google and meta).
but nowadays I'm so deep into privacy hole that I steer clear of anything that's not FOSS, unless it's absolutely necessary(e.g.: degoogled android). So naturally, ublock origin stays on all the time.
for sure. I listen to a number of podcasts that instead of having dynamically inserted ads, still have the hosts do an ad read. I don't mind that at all
Fair play though lol I hadn't quite realised how long it had been.
Also I wouldn't take the losses up until 2014 to mean anything except that the 2015 financials hadn't been published at that time the WSJ article (which both links source) had been written.
The data has so many more uses than just ads. They sell the data, use it to train AI, etc. The data itself is more valuable than their entire ad network.