Think about it, anyone can host gigs of videos perpetually indexed for free. What percentage of videos have fewer than 100 views?
Google has killed off profitable projects. If you think they'll dump tens of billions every year hosting videos that no one watches, you're kidding yourself.
And what we noticed with paying is that people are very unwilling to pay even a small amount for a service. For instance FB makes around over $50 per user in North America. What percentage of users do you think would pay $50 a year to use Facebook?
So explain to me why Google will continue footing the bill when more and more people prevent them to run ads on the site.
Back in the 90's when bandwidth was expensive we managed to run a free video site without advertising. Since then bandwidth has become orders of magnitude cheaper, and G has economies of scale that no other operator can get close to, they quite literally own the fiber, the endpoints and are present in just about every meet-me room all over the world. Storage costs have dropped even further. So what you think costs Google a couple of bucks to provide per user probably costs them fractions of a cent. And if they dropped the garbage their costs would be even lower.
That seems way too high. There's something like half a trillion hours watched per year. Does it really cost almost $0.10 for an hour of video?
So? That's their problem.
> Google has killed off profitable projects. If you think they'll dump tens of billions every year hosting videos that no one watches, you're kidding yourself.
Can't wait for YouTube to die. Hopefully the replacement will be less centralized and not beholden to a single american company.
> And what we noticed with paying is that people are very unwilling to pay even a small amount for a service.
Most "services" are not worth the effort needed to pay them, the amount doesn't even come into it. This is also a self-created issue. Google et al have trained people to not pay by dumping money into these "free" services to kill the competition. Now they are upset that people don't want to pay them? I can't find a violin tiny enough to express my compassion for them.
> For instance FB makes around over $50 per user in North America. What percentage of users do you think would pay $50 a year to use Facebook?
So? They make $0 off of me. I don't care how much they can or cannot make with ads, that doesn't make ads acceptable.
How will your content get served? If you say you'll just pay to serve it, I think that's a fine answer.
And on other hand if users are paying you something, would they not expect not to have to watch through mediocre sponsorships?
Which means they would continue making content
I can't speak for anybody else but my content will still get made.
> Do you think Google is going to go to a model where things are freely accessible without ads?
Maybe, maybe not, whose to say what Google will do. Maybe they will value the influence or the goodwill more than the lack of income. Maybe some of the content will be free and other bits will be walled off (effectively this is already the case with youtube music). Maybe there will be less MFY content and that's perfectly ok with me, 99.99% of it is crap anyway. Youtuber isn't a profession I recognize.
> Feels like even when a company provides a way to get rid of ads, many people still won't pay.
And that's ok.
> They _say_ they will, but I find often people will want to substitute their own terms (Well, youtube premium is $x, but I think it's only worth $y, so I'm going to just block ads completely).
Yes, or you pay and you still get ads...