this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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Corporate apologia ๐
Do you work for free yourself? Is it completely unreasonable to expect money in return for your services?
Except Google is double dipping, making money off of your data while charging for the "privilege". Fuck all that
Agreed. However I still can't make a good faith argument as to why YouTube should be free. I too prefer not to pay but I never expected that to last forever and we've had a good run. I basically got a 15 year free trial and now they want me to pay for it - fair enough (I don't yet thought)
JW do you know how much money google actually makes off of your data?
I tried searching it and didn't find anything.
"Selling my data should be enough money to cover video bandwidth" is a common argument in this thread and was wondering if anyone actually had numbers to back that up.
Even that's misleading, because Google doesn't actually sell anyone's data. It's not like advertisers buy user data from Google. They have a product they want to advertise to a specific audience, and by choosing to advertise on YouTube, they can tell Google to only show these ads to their specific target audience, which YouTube can do, because they know who you are and what you're interested in.
Do the Google engineers work for free?
No. What's your point?
Then it sounds like everyone is being compensated just fine.
Just a reminder that blocking adblock is contributing to google engineers salary, so you're arguing to maintain the status quo and not disrupting it.
Every single piece of apologism here casually pushes the idea that YouTube isn't profitable and their poor staff are starving.
In 2020, YouTube gleefully declared they were generating $5 billion in ad revenue every 3 months.
Even after their bandwidth, storage and incredibly well paid engineers, there's no way they're burning that much money on expenses. That's a billion dollars -- 1000 million -- per data center, per quarter. Enough to buy half of the CPUs leaving Intel's factories
They're not attacking ad blockers because they're struggling to make ends meet as they hack away in their garage.
They're doing it because there is no amount of money that can quench the greed of their shareholders.
And there's you, grovelling at their feet.
Naw dog, just wanted to point out your one sentence reply didn't do what you thought it did, because it was using an assumption made under a status quo to argue against the status quo, with no further details.
You've definitely got me curious though - do you have actual numbers for operating expenses?
Here's where I'm coming from - in my experience, it's not uncommon for someone barely breaking 6 figures in salary to cost the company 300-500k. Take into account senior staff, and imo we can just say each full time staff costs the company 500k. And that's just for companies I've had experience with, which has benefits and compensation nowhere near as nice as googles.
I casually looked around the internet and saw the that YouTube had roughly 2000 full time engineers, so the numbers come out to, with my shitty assumptions, 833 million a month.
I'm going to say that's the minimum, because as I said earlier, YouTube employee compensation and benefits are leaps and bounds better than mines, and we're not taking into account the additional cost of bandwidth and hardware.
I gotta go head out so that's as much sleuthing as I can do - care to do some number crunching for the bandwidth end of costs, so your revenue statistic can be reasoned with alongside two lemmings shitty estimate of operating costs?
I doubt the information needed to accurately predict their costs is publicly available.
But they announced $29.2 billion in revenue in 2022. That's about as much as countries like Australia, Canada and Italy spent on their entire military.
And that's just money. Google is absolutely aware of how much indirect value there is in the internationally recognised brand and near total capture of a communication medium.
So again, who exactly am I supposed to feel sorry for? Who is supposed to be suffering? It's not their staff. It's not their shareholders. It's not their suppliers.
They pay a lot of creators fuck all, despite the platform being nothing without them. Will the extra revenue be going to them? Because nobody has mentioned them in any of their guilt trips so far.
As far as I can tell, I'm supposed to feel morally obligated to listen to KFC advertisements at ear splitting volume every 2 minutes for the privilege of watching a video that will make the creator nothing so that some of the wealthiest people in the world can grow wealthier.
To put it bluntly, that's corporate propaganda.
Here's to open source alternatives taking off, but personally I'm not holding my breath.
Big creators, moderators, and hosts gotta get paid, and as much as I believe in people doing things out of the goodness of their hearts (I am on Lemmy after all), video hosting seems like an order of magnitude more expensive to deal with than text and photos.
If you want to argue, then make an argument.