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Re:Does uBlock Origin (uBO) currently bypass YouTube's adblo... by bko on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @08:26AM (#38543551)
YouTube is incredibly expensive to run which explains why there's such little competition.

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?

Re:Does uBlock Origin (uBO) currently bypass YouTube's adblo... by jacquesm on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @09:32AM (#38544334)
I think I have a pretty good idea of what it costs to run a video site. Check my bio if you think you have something to explain to me on that front.
Re:Does uBlock Origin (uBO) currently bypass YouTube's adblo... by bko on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @11:50AM (#38546339)
Great so you know how expensive running a video hosting site is.

So explain to me why Google will continue footing the bill when more and more people prevent them to run ads on the site.

Re:Does uBlock Origin (uBO) currently bypass YouTube's adblo... by jacquesm on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @02:31PM (#38548397)
I think you missed the point. Google bought youtube because for them bandwidth and storage are cheap (it's CPU that is expensive).

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.

Re:Does uBlock Origin (uBO) currently bypass YouTube's adblo... by mrguyorama on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @03:39PM (#38549194)
What was the bandwidth of the stream you were working with back in the 90s? Google targets about 8-10mb/s now for 1080p, right?
Re:Does uBlock Origin (uBO) currently bypass YouTube's adblo... by jacquesm on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @03:50PM (#38549297)
Considerably less than that. So much so that our 1 Gbps uplink was enough for a few thousand streams. But so much more expensive and with such lousy compression ratio that you could to much better today for less. Apples to apples.
Re:Does uBlock Origin (uBO) currently bypass YouTube's adblo... by concordDance on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @09:04AM (#38544013)
> tens of billions every year hosting videos

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?

Re:Does uBlock Origin (uBO) currently bypass YouTube's adblo... by jacquesm on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @09:47AM (#38544578)
Youtube is hilarious, on the one hand they keep forcing autoplayed content on you and then they match that with a popup that inquires if you are still watching the video.
Re:Does uBlock Origin (uBO) currently bypass YouTube's adblo... by account42 on Wednesday December 06, 2023 @08:40AM (#38543715)
> YouTube is incredibly expensive to run which explains why there's such little competition.

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.