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points by jeffbee 14 hours ago | 0 comments

It's absurd to say that Google did not develop YouTube. They acquired it at a point where it was a galaxy-scale cash incinerator and made it work economically using their superior platform.

[–] Danox 5 hours ago

They didn’t. They bought out another company. Did Meta create WhatsApp? and Snapchat? Everything else that Meta tried to stick their foot in has failed, but Muse seems to be promising. Both are very profitable ad companies. With a few me-too hardware products. Ads bring home the bacon.

[–] christophilus 14 hours ago

Yeah. I was going to say. I really dislike Google, but what they did with YouTube (whose acquisition I saw as a mistake at the time) is impressive.

[–] adam_arthur 14 hours ago

aka waited for cost of storage, bandwidth, compute to come down below revenue from advertising.

As it would have done naturally anyway

[–] conductr 12 hours ago

I think it’s naive to assume the ad revenue would have came at the same pace naturally. At least not without completely pushing users away and ruining the product (nobody likes ads but YouTube ads aren’t the worst). Google having an ad business was a strategic asset for YouTube as a business

[–] flomo 13 hours ago

Youtube was full of pirate music videos. If Google (or some other heavyweight) didn't buy them, they probably would have been sued out of existence like Napster and etc.

[–] TMWNN 14 hours ago

Only if revenue grew quickly enough.

When Google bought YouTube, it already had Google Video. Google saw that YouTube had market traction and pivoted quickly, to its (and YouTube's) credit.

[–] mlmonkey 14 hours ago

Don't worry, they've put an Advertising guy in charge of Youtube, and he's busy inserting as many ads as possible into each and every video...

[–] oblio 14 hours ago

People still don't see where this is going.

TV had both 15-20 minute of ad breaks every hour AND product placement during actual content.

That's where we're going in about 10-15 years.

[–] vineyardmike 13 hours ago

I think the generally accepted ad load has been shown to be about 20%. About 20% of TV is ads, 20% of social media feeds, etc. Seems natural that we’d get there with YouTube.

YouTube has had sponsors and inline ads for years from the content creators, so I’m fairly confident we’re already approaching the saturation point in some form.

[–] mlmonkey 13 hours ago

Difference is, TV had (has) content in 30 minute chunks. But Youtube has, among others, Shorts, which are often 30 seconds. But still Neal Mohan wants to show ads on Shorts.

On top of these ads, creators are inserting their own ads ("this video is sponsored by ...."), so it's ads all the way down (like turtles).

[–] drnick1 13 hours ago

> People still don't see where this is going.

At least 30% of Americans use an ad blocker.

[–] jeffbee 14 hours ago

Google doesn't pay for transit. Their private glass was the whole reason the acquisition worked.

[–] lokar 14 hours ago

And putting cache nodes in residential ISPs and exchanges all over the world.

[–] sowhat1 14 hours ago

Shhh just let the Googlers believe they’re elite super geniuses when all they do is acquire successful tech like Android, YouTube, and on and on.

Everything they make from within flops 99% of the time.

[–] Danox 5 hours ago

Google, Meta and Microsoft’s track record. Is not that good beyond their core in fact, they’re horrible when the playing field is level, Nadella right now seems to be the most vulnerable. It’s copilot or bust..

[–] DaSHacka 13 hours ago

>Android, YouTube

Before they acquired these, how were they doing? I'll give you a hint: they weren't exactly how we knew them today. Android was literally a concept and YouTube was bleeding money with no realistic path to profitability.

> Everything they make from within flops 99% of the time.

As do all inventions? Of course, you just don't hear about all the failings from individuals or smaller companies that went bust as a result. The important thing is the 1% that succeed are so successful it offsets the losses.

[–] kingleopold 14 hours ago

those geniuses that made acq. grow all have big retirement exit btw. Nobody in google worth low digit NW if they have been there for +10Y, so yeah they bet on their work and beat market for several years