• theshonen8899@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I’m a software engineer at AWS and work on video content delivery for services like Netflix. The idea that one single ad could cover the cost of delivering a video that’s been replicated in multiple servers, multiple forgets, multiple countries throughout the world is pretty hilarious. No matter how much money you think YouTube is making I can almost guarantee it’s not enough. There is a reason there is no significant competition in this space, it makes no money.

    • daniskarma@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Genuine question.

      How is been running for almost 20 years, most of them with very few ads?

      I doubt they had been just sinking money for the kind of their hearts.

      I do not know how much it cost to run a service like YouTube. Or how much money they make by ads or other ways. But they have been running for long enough to be a successful business.

      And it’s just the latest few years when they are pushing these aggressive techniques.

      • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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        7 months ago

        How is been running for almost 20 years, most of them with very few ads?

        Investor money, then Google money. Video streaming requires fuckloads of storage and is a HUGE bandwidth hog, especially if people want to watch stuff at 1080p or higher resolutions. Youtube is a money pit, but it’s a major and nearly untouchable internet power, especially given its size and reach.

        And it’s just the latest few years when they are pushing these aggressive techniques.

        The “easy money” from loans with very low interest rates has dried up, also Google being Google.

        • Cargon@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          There’s also the cost to transcode the video and audio streams into different formats so they don’t have to do it on demand whenever someone watches a video. That’s a lot of compute cost plus they have to store all of those additional transcodes which is more storage cost.

      • joneskind@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Unfortunately, YouTube exists because content creators make money out of the ads.

        But free content video is possible with a peer to peer protocol. The content creator get the responsibility to keep the seed alive. The more popular, the more it gets shared, the more it’s available.

        But content creators don’t work for free, and public libraries don’t have the resources to store all the dumb content people deem necessary to make.

        Reminder: give money to Wikipedia. This thing is a miracle.

    • joneskind@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      What’s less sustainable is centralized web. You must know that since you work for Amazon, right?

      When PopcornTime was still a thing you could watch adfree any movie you’d like even in 4K because resources were shared through peer to peer.

      Now, YouTube gets up to 12$ RPM, content creators get maybe 40% of that. With 2 prerolls and 2 midrolls + banners they get plenty enough money to make things work. Google has the most aggressive VASTs of the market. They are everywhere, called multiple times per pages.

      Spare us your tears.

      Besides, no significant competition? Is that a joke?

    • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      It’s not really a single ad though, right? It’s a single ad per view. I realize that each view costs money, but at some point you’re just paying for bandwidth, after paying the upfront replication costs right? Assuming replication is an upfront cost, I might be misunderstanding there. If that’s true though, then surely there’s a breakpoint where ads start making money. Though I suppose if that breakpoint is like a million views, your point basically still stands.