It's really not any different than what Netflix is doing now, right?
Discounting SEO, the major issue was that they didn't build their own ad network. You set up business in Google's front yard and didn't like it when they told you to get out.
The ad network (or rather the monetization model) is the hardest part of building a video sharing site. If that part wasn't figured out then it's hard for me to believe you were actually serious about building a content network.
Given how much this guy cried about how much money he is "owed" I'm less likely to believe he was slighted and more likely to believe he was a greedy exec who was in over his head.
If you stream 5min clips, that's 1200 clips for 1 euro. There should be enough ad networks that offer 2 euro CPM to make a profit.
On the other hand, how can they make a profit if nobody is discovering their site?
[1] https://superuser.com/questions/434532/what-data-transfer-ra...
But it's not. Your example is contrived, as Hetzner likely doesn't expect you to stream a 100 hours of 1080p HD content to 100 people simultaneously. Your users would have a laughably bad experience at scale. On a single box, it's unlikely you could max out your throughput - you could at most support 45 users on a single Hetzner node (1080p @ 22Mbps on a Gigabit connection in the best case).
If you are going to be serving content with any level of seriousness you need a CDN. 1TB of bandwidth on Cloudfront costs $87. Akamai charges $100-$150. Thats 100x than 1 euro/TB you initially priced out.
With a 1Gig connection you can only serve ~45 concurrents streaming 1080p. If you wanted to support more than 45 concurrents, you would need
1. To distribute content to separate instances
2. A routing infrastructure to reliably route connections to that content.
And then, congrats, you have just built your own CDN - albeit in one datacenter. If you don't want your users on the other side of the country constantly complaining that your site is slow compared to Vimeo, you would have to build it on the other side as well.
If you believe your hodgepodge CDN is going to be much cheaper than Cloudfront (on the order of 1 Euro/month, where you could support it on ~1.5M views/month), then you should probably skip the whole video sharing nonsense, and get rich becoming a CDN provider :)
If you believe otherwise, please enlighten me on how you can build a HD video streaming service for 100 concurrents without a CDN. Like I mentioned, on a 1GbE connection, you can serve a theoretical max of 45 users on one node. Where do you go from there without something that looks like CDN?
1200 views for 1 euro, that's 1000 eur for a million views. On top of that YouTube's rates of paying creators are in the same ballpark at 1k/million views.
So yeah your ad model needs be paying 2k+ per million views ( any one more familiar with the ad industry know the real value made curiously? ) on a video or your screwed
https://fortune.com/2016/10/18/youtube-profits-ceo-susan-woj...
> he walked away with about $50 million when News Corp purchased my space. He should have walked away with a lot more
He thinks that News Corp should have paid more for myspace? Because they got so much value from it.
I think Peertube and other Fediverse stacks like Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed & Lemmy will continue to bleed users from more traditional sites over the next few years. They've significantly lowered the barriers to running your own social site, creating a great variety of communities that otherwise would be much smaller or non-existent.
First, Google isn't a monopoly on search. Popular? yes. Best product? For most use cases, yeah. The fact that the search competition is a click away makes it dominant in the market but not a monopoly or monopsony.
Second, companies are doing fine in this regard by bypassing Google. There are online businesses that exist solely on Amazon and Instagram. Building out a strong social presence is one way to get traffic without relying on Google search. Several major content hosting sites (images/gifs) have taken off in part because of their social saturation.
Is it easy? No, but to GP's point it doesn't sound like they were being strategic in this regard either.
Also I don't care too much about the OP's attitude or lack of strategy, actors don't have to be paragons of virtue in order to be wronged and their situation be an example of a larger problem.
Also, finally, why do you need to dispute the basic facts, no one in their right mind thinks Google isn't a monopoly on search, I think that is more or less an established fact at this point.
I disagree. I have worked at several companies with very successful sales and marketing departments where referrals from google were a noticeable but ultimately unimportant part of the revenue picture. I have also worked at a place that literally lived and died by the grace of a top ranking on google, once we hit the 2nd and then 3rd page, the business was basically dead. This sucked, but it was very nice for the company that replaced us. There is no inherent reason why one company should be entitled to the slot any more than any other (besides the google algorithm that determines ranking).
"A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity" [0]. Bing exists so by definition, you are wrong.
For example, Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning:
Any abuse by one or more undertakings of a dominant position within the internal market or in a substantial part of it shall be prohibited as incompatible with the internal market in so far as it may affect trade between Member States. Such abuse may, in particular, consist in: (a) directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices or other unfair trading conditions; (b) limiting production, markets or technical development to the prejudice of consumers;
With Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 we get supreme court cases that states things like: The purpose of the [Sherman] Act is not to protect businesses from the working of the market; it is to protect the public from the failure of the market. The law directs itself not against conduct which is competitive, even severely so, but against conduct which unfairly tends to destroy competition itself.
And in an other supreme court case:
The goal was to prevent restraints of free competition in business and commercial transactions which tended to restrict production, raise prices, or otherwise control the market to the detriment of purchasers or consumers of goods and services, all of which had come to be regarded as a special form of public injury. For that reason the phrase "restraint of trade," which, as will presently appear, had a well understood meaning in common law, was made the means of defining the activities prohibited.
Not a word about monopoly but a lot about behavior which in common speech people call monopoly but actually refer to behavior which is illegal according to anti-trust.
Whether you use anti-trust synonymously with the word monopoly doesn't change the fact that Google will still show Bing and Yandex in the search results.
An example of anti-competitive behavior here is actually from Amazon, when they had de-listed Apple TV and Chromecast from their marketplace for years because it competed with their Fire Stick.
Are you suggesting that we should ignore people misusing economic terms when discussing economic policy? I don't see how ignoring blatantly false facts is better than educating people such that they can properly discuss a topic using the proper terms.
But as site owner, you need traffic. SEO for some search engine built by your brother, used exclusively by your family, wont help you grow your business. You need eyeballs, and more than 90% of those are on google [0]. Pretending this is a perfectly functioning market and websites can just ignore google is... unrealistic.
If Google were to try and charge users for search, everyone would immediately switch to bing which keeps them in check from raising prices like they would if they were the only provider of search. They are in no way a monopoly.
If you substitute "harmfully disproportionate market power" for "monopoly", the points most people are making remain similar.
> educating people such that they can properly discuss a topic using the proper terms
Where did you do that? The only recommendation for a better term I see is "harmfully disproportionate market power", still quite a usable mouthful and made by someone else. Your contribution seems to boil down to "your wrong", and I'm still unsure if this is intended to be about the use of the word or the actual point. Probably both, with one being secretly used to support the other.
Google -> search results (for free) -> website (owner paid for seo/adwords and charge the customer)
Similar thing happened with google maps while they were never a monopoly by your definition because other solutions exist.
Isn't that the case because mainstream American advertisers don't want anything to do with it? I don't think it's a matter of west coast tech companies being prudes, but rather tech companies appeasing big consumer goods companies that spend billions on advertising, like P&G, J&J, PepsiCo, etc. And those companies are in turn likely appeasing 'middle america' by trying to keep their brands as bland and "family friendly" as possible.
Edit: (And now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure Amazon sells pornography, so that's one of the big tech companies at least that is willing to. And I don't think it's a coincidence that advertising from those big consumer goods companies isn't nearly as important to Amazon... Then again Amazon doesn't allow nudity on twitch, which perhaps could be considered roughly analogous to Google's similar ban of pornography on youtube. Perhaps twitch, as a consumer brand, is subject to the same social pressures from the American public as PepsiCo?)
Although that also describes another beverage, coffee. The difference between the coffee and soft drink industries is interesting though. Two massive corporations dominate almost the entire soft drink industry, with a handful of minor providers (notably Keurig Dr Pepper) and a long tail of much smaller 'boutique', novelty, or regional brands. Comparatively, no coffee company controls as much of the industry as either the Coca Cola Company or PepsiCo do.
(Also, PepsiCo in particular owns a ton of other non-beverage brands. Their subsidiary Frito-Lay produces the brands Lay's, Cheetos, Doritos, etc. PepsiCo is huge for American consumers. To your point though, snack food isn't much better than sugar water.)
You can make the same argument for anything, from butter to guns to video games to literally anything that plugs into the wall and consumes electricity.
Use anything beyond reason and it becomes destructive.
Amazon also runs an entirely separate and special cloud staffed only by US citizens to assist the military in running software that decides who to detain, torture, and possibly murder, so it is unsurprising that they have no corresponding aversion to media depicting less violent interactions.
That literally happened.
That's kind of the point. Using Monopoly power in one industry (advertisement or search) to cripple a competitor in another (video) is kind of the definition of anti-competitive behavior.
Its actually very common practice and has been for a very long time (way before 2007). Once people get mindshare, they get offers. The top you tubers, twitch streamers, etc have negotiated contracts with terms that are very different that what a standard creator has.
Think of it just like Hollywood. The top talents are sough after and franchises are built around them, the rest have to audition.
I'm not suggesting you change your personal choice, but as someone who is a sometimes member of those communities, I resent being called trash.
The same is true of YouTube if you heavily scrutinize your subscription list.
It’s extremely annoying because there are pockets of communities that remind me of the Internet before the masses trashed it and everything was centralized around a handful of sites. I’ve been playing with Mastodon lately and that reminds me more of the 90s Internet.
If I'm interested in a subject / person, I try to both read about it and listen video about it / from him. I found that the two information sources are often complementary.
When you paint a medium or platform with a broad brush, and chastise them for not censoring it to your liking, you should at least check the alternative you're recommending is at least as censorial.
OK but this story begins in 2006. At that time there basically was only Google for generating significant traffic. Facebook was growing and Twitter had just launched but neither had the size of audience (or real ad products) to generate the type of traffic Google could
Google has been stung and made to show search results in an unbiased way with relation to their products. While it happened in the past the current monopoly, anticompetitive, antitrust commission in Europe California and some awaking Asian countries prevent that kind of behavior
That is the crux of antitrust/monopoly protection commission. The reason the exist
These people where on reddit up until recently you just never visited the subs that got banned. It took some loud squealing to make the admins do something, then the result was way worse. It made the "disgusting trash sites" and the people that use them more vigilant that why none are really growing.
Then a bunch of subreddits got banned and more quarantined. They labelled those who subscribed to a quarantined as a "community" and not just something you subbed to.
Now any subreddit you "join" and "leave" and they have dropped the subscribe/unsubscribe wording further enforcing the isolated community angle of invested enthusiasts rather than the casual subscriber to random things. Now if you subscribe to some random subreddit you can be viewed as agreeing with all its postings and viewpoints where previously people wouldn't think this way about using the site.
Things won't grow as they are aopealing to the hardcore focus users rather than the casual ones. Any competition would do well to appeal to the more casual and disconnected users.
The "final blow" was adsense being cutoff. Their revenue model to compete with google was ... adsense. OK.
Their traffic model was google search. Ok.
Between the lines it sounds like some aggressive SEO, and maybe the network click bounce thing (you click on one video, and then it clicks through to another site etc). Be curious what their content moderation story was.
Seriously, if you are building a google competitor, you probably need to use something other than adsense. And a reminder, adsense is a key revenue generation value add.
The paying of creators definitely anti-competitive. I do think there will be a youtube alternative (small scale) eventually.
The problem is a lot of these "competitors" get filled with absolutely trash / hateful content right away because the first people to use them are the rejects from youtube and the moderation teams are so glad to have someone show up they don't moderate heavily enough. Checkout some of the reddit competitors, total disgusting trash.