Posted by geerlingguy 5 days ago
Hijack data-centers with Gorillas. re-claim the community ...
Then again, their search engine is also subpar nowadays.. :)
This sentence is just oddly thrown in there and is made the title of the article. Yes they're a monopoly, but so what? As you say they're the best bang for buck subscription service on the market.
The problem is that they are unable to see why their viewership has dropped, that's it. I'm sure Youtube might provide context as to why at some point.
Nobody wants to hear ad-blocking has negative effects. But it does, and it's effectively killed off any YouTube competitor.
All a VC has to do is read a comment section on the topic of yt to say "nope" to funding a competitor.
Huh? RLM is about as inoffensive as it gets
Words are best when they have meaning!
They're something like 75% of video hosting, and if you exclude vimeo for being paid-only then it's over 90%. That sounds like a monopoly to me.
We should all use the common definition of words. That makes communication possible!
dictionary.com gives this definition: "exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of prices."
That's... not what I expected. To me having a monopoly means being the only provider, but I'll bend the knee to the dictionary.
In this case though, with competitors at 10% or 25% market share, you can easily publish videos at a cheaper vendor.
But you can't say it's a monopoly across the board.
Youtube began as a video hosting platform where creators got a huge cut from ads being shown on their video page. Today, the ads are injected into the videos and creators get only a tiny portion of the profits - if any. The views are gone as only (highly)monetised content is being promoted by the algorithm. Google simply prioritises making money for themselves instead of providing a service that merely breaks even.
Youtube has done what most businesses do - they pay the initial opex costs and provide some kind of freemium, they get huge number of users, then they monetise the sh.. out of them. And it always ends the same - the platform dies as users leave. Youtube is not any different. It's just so big that this process takes much longer than usual. But do not be fooled, it is happening.
Nowadays, people are slowly realising that there is no more free lunch and that you have to pay for the content(see how many streaming services there are compared to just a few years ago). This is why paywall services like Patreon are so popular(and why I have created my own as well as it is one of few viable online businesses left in the digital space).
Content creators who are relying on anonymous views, that Youtube always provided and which is now slowly dying, will end up out of business and many in debt due to costs of the video gear they bought and oversaturated marked/competition. There is plethora of this "i'm broke" videos on YT itself exposing the harsh reality of digital content creation of today.
On the other hand, smart content creators have realised that the way forward is to build smaller community of reliable fans and use paywalls/pay-per-view model, where they can charge tiny amount whilst getting 95% of it for themselves, which incentivises users to pay(ie. i am willing to pay 10 cents directly to my favourite content creator rather than 5$ to youtube). Some are stuck in the middle with injecting sponsored content into their own, but that will die out soon as well and likely YT will ban it straight up sooner or later. There will be some networks that host multiple creators, like we already have with unauthorized.tv, censored.tv and others. The YT alternatives like Odysee or Rumble will not survive as they are using the same outdated business model as Youtube does but they lack the backing of Google(not just money but infrastructure).
It will take time but people will eventually flock to specific content creators instead of relying on algorithms to recommended them content they might be interested in - as this has been completely broken for a decade now and caused huge amount of great content creators to just quit for good. A huge loss to humanity as a whole.
This will be the next generation of content creators whom will understand that the game has changed.
Here's a post from another youtuber about a recent video getting restricted: https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxcapSFGmm6m59kSEn62RGOZsmUEK...
Jeff is known for his rPi experiments, so the question is why this seemingly random blog post.
How did Jeff even get to know about this post? Unless the author sent it over to him?
Soo many questions. Mostly because the author of this blog post isn't a YouTuber (AFAICT)
Google search alerts are a thing (https://www.google.com/alerts). I'd expect a public figure, however niche their following is, would set them up to track the conversation about them.
Not to be rude, but this is one of several accusations of astroturfing I've seen on HN lately. They have all been so clearly off the mark that it makes me wonder if there was some event that triggered users here to be so paranoid?
Pretty sure they are all in a discord channel together.
Pretty sure YouTube made an algorithm change and it's causing problems. Again.
I think it is reasonable to assume that most popular YTers are in a discord/telegram/whatsapp/text chain together. This is their community, so it makes sense to have a quick line of comms between them.
Just like how HN is a place for .. hackers to socialize, it is conceivable there's a $place where they meet and discuss inside-baseball stuff.
We know that large groups of YouTubers, particularly the "elite" ones, are in chats with each other, this is true. But the sheer variety of them talking about this from across different spaces on YouTube and different tiers makes it seem unlikely to me they are all in the same exclusive social space. I think we operate with different priors though.