https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gross-profit
Alphabet gross profit for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $42.688B, a 7.85% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet gross profit for the twelve months ending June 30, 2023 was $160.503B, a 1.7% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2022 was $156.633B, a 6.77% increase from 2021.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2021 was $146.698B, a 50.01% increase from 2020.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2020 was $97.795B, a 8.71% increase from 2019.
Huh, they seemingly have money to not fuck our eyes without lube for ads, but I guess they somehow just don’t have enough money, 156 billion dollars is really nothing after all. Probably more money in between my couch cushions. Such a small indie company that has to struggle to remain afloat, like an Etsy store.
This phenomenon is normally created by a bunch of mid level people without many stock options trying to get promotions. They need the big arrow to go up to get a good raise, be recognized, etc in their individual business units.
The people pushing things to go up are typically not motivated by the gross number as much as they are making their boss happy enough to pay them more. That’s why the change is all that matters.
Yes but does YouTube it’s self make money? There isn’t a reason to run a section of your company if it costs you money.
I am not justifying 17 ads in a 10 minute video, but no company keeps a product that doesn’t make money
There isn’t a reason to run a section of your company if it costs you money.
It’s funny that you say this, because Google intentionally ran YouTube without making any profit from it for many years. The goal (which they succeeded in) was to starve out any competition and establish YouTube as the online video monopoly. Ever since establishing that monopoly, they’ve been squeezing more and more money out of the platform knowing that social inertia will work against any would-be competitors (everything is on YouTube, all of the content creators are on YouTube, all of the viewers are on YouTube, so how does someone convince enough people to move to another platform?).
True but data collection is still done and generates $$$
Think about gmail & Google docs
Yes there is a reason to run a part of your business at a loss. It is well known market strategy and it is called a Loss Leader.
You offer a product or services at a loss because it helps you generate more revenue in another part of your business.
And plenty of companies keep products that don’t make money, because they are Loss Leaders into products that do make money.
There are lots of reasons that one area of your company may make less money. It’s like how the NYC subway or post office technically don’t “make money” but the value they bring to the whole system is a net positive by enabling all the other companies to make way more.
Government ≠ Private/Publically shared company.
Google couldn’t care less about what it brings if it doesnt make more money than it takes.
Alphabet
what does this mean? is it the stock market in general or google or is it tech co’s?
Just because a company is profitable it doesn’t mean they can’t ask users to pay for a service.
I don’t love Alphabet either, but in their shoes I’d block ad filters too. YouTube is spectacularly expensive to run.
Ok, I’m curious. Gonna do some math.
- YouTube makes $30B/yr in revenue.
- YouTube has 2.7B active users.
- This means that YouTube is making about $11.11/person/year.
- uBlockO has 10m active users.
- This means that uBlockO is costing YouTube $111m annually, or about 4% of their overall revenue.
I’ll admit, that number is bigger than I expected. But almost any other line item on their budget sheet would be bigger.
ETA: it’s worth noting that YouTube has estimated operating costs of $5B, so this isn’t coming anywhere near making them unprofitable.
Is that 10 million active users of uBlock Origin or 10 million active installs? Also relevant because I’ve seen workplaces that deploy UBO to all users thanks to advertising being an easy vector of getting users to click random links they shouldn’t
I could tolerate ONE ad per video, at the beginning, but 3 or 4 ads in a less than ten minute video? Fuck that.
You see YouTube is a American company and in America every thing is extreme you ether have a lot of ads or no ads you can have a extremely massive car or a cat that’s soo small it doesn’t exist
But… But… What If I want a large cat and a tiny car?
I want my leopard riding shotgun in my smart car.
I could only tolerate ElectroBoom-style “This video is sponsored by oscilloscope company” ads.
That’s the thing.
You’re already proud to lower your standards, why not lower them further?
Straight up what made me switch to YouTube premium was a bit of a 2 pronged thing really
They started including Google Play Music with it, and then I got an unskippable 1 hour ad in front of a video that after I reloaded the page I got the same ad again.
Edit: I don’t have an issue paying for a service if the price is right. I got what I wanted for I price I’m willing to pay.
Basically I saw it as “I already pay for Spotify, I might as well get rid of ads consistently and get music streaming for the same cost.”
I still think Google Play Music was better than YouTube Music currently is though.
Edit: Thinking back on it it was called YouTube Red when I signed up, it’s been a long time.
They bundle YT Music in your subscription because they wanted a share in music streaming, invested in an infrastructure on their platform and then realized that their service doesn’t offer enough to make people want to use it over their competitors’ music streaming services. Instead of taking that loss or making their service worth using, they bundle the shit nobody wants with what everyone needs and use that to justify a price hike.
If there was a basic subscription that just removes ads on the videos I click on without any other useless crap attached to it, I would pay for that. But no, it’s predatory, anti-consumer bullshit, so I just block their ads.
This entire shitty ad model these companies have pushed onto the net needs to go. Seriously. Find a better way to monetize your world.
It’s not even just the Internet. Marketing fucks up every aspect of our civilization. We can’t even handle having a professional election anymore without trashy ads and people acting like children. You can’t even watch legitimate news anymore. …nevermind mind whack kids pranking people on YouTube being used and turning into assholes for YouTube monetization.
Honestly I’m starting to wonder if the reason why we got ourselves into a ad filled hell hole is because we expect soo much to be free and those things have to make money somehow and server space and the electricity they run on aren’t free and the only people willing to spend money are whales and advertisers and from what I’ve been told YouTube was never profitable on it’s own for Google and the only reason they’ve been keeping the site on is because it brings attention to other Google services while also preventing competition so I greatly think we’d all benefit from being open to paying for sites that are like YouTube so YouTube and advertisers have some real competitors I don’t know how a my theoreticall site would profit without ads but it’s still sad that sites like YouTube are expensive and unprofitable making it so Google is the only option solely because they can afford the loses making yt premium even more greedy
IF you want to get down the rabbit hole of expectations. I lose 34% off my pay. Like that. Poof. Taxes. I lose another 50% of what’s left to rent and groceries (not eating out). That doesn’t cover internet or utilities. Then transportation. And that’s just essentially living. My place isn’t all that.
And now you want me to pay for every website I visit. Or every service I use? Or I don’t use them and just go back to “essentially being alive.”
And I’m in the top 20% of income earners according to recent stats, which is insane because I’m not making fuck you money.
I think the real issue is greed. There’s no need for Disney+ to cost $20 a month. There’s no need for me to pony up another $1.5 a month to get 50GB of storage instead of the 5GB they know you’ll outgrow in a week. There’s zero need to pay $18 a month for a blue checkmark. They tell you it’s because it costs lots and lots of money to operate and the ads just barely cover our costs. Sure.
It’s just greed. It’s all just amoral, unethical, greed. Right on up from the rent/mortgage to all the shit you buy or “consume.”
We saw this surge with COVID, GME, crypto, NFT, absolutely wild, insidious, and morally bankrupt schemes exposing just how much wealth is pooled away from working class (they actually call them ‘dark pools’, where money goes and disappears). Something clicked. And it became a feeding frenzy where everyone is just steadily driving up prices, but not a single company is unprofitable. All the lay offs? None of those tech companies were in trouble. In fact, most made record profits!
This answer confuses me. The message on that pop up is “buy YouTube premium, so you won’t be stuck in our ad supported model” and now we’re ranting that they need to find another model to finance themselves? Isn’t YouTube premium exactly that?
Paying to remove ads is part of the ad business model. Upset your customer enough until they give you money to make it stop. Once you pay to remove the ads you have rewarded them for implementing ads which lets them know that implementing ads was a great way at making money.
So YouTube premium is not another model. It is the same model. Another model is paying for a service that never had ads at all such as NebulaTV or CuriosityStream.
So “pay or you don’t get shit” is okay, but “pay or see ads, your choice” is bad somehow?
I don’t mind ads as a concept. The issue is how invasive and numerous they’ve become. Get back to the days when ads were just banners around the actual content or an easily skippable video that plays before what I’m trying to watch and I’ll happily disable my ad blocker for you. Unfortunately hardly anyone does that anymore because they view it as a missed opportunity to make even more money.
I’m not against using ads to support websites but it’s the same basic concept as piracy. If you make the experience of playing by the rules so unbearable that it seems easier to go out of my way to break them then I probably will.
What everyone else said but also they still collect and do whatever they want with your data even if you pay them. They purposely made everything more shitty and then charged to put it back to how it was originally. Also, they stayed free as long as they did to kill off the competition and it clearly worked. I just can’t ever justify giving them money. Especially with the double dip on my data.
But no, not like that. Clearly they need to find a way of materializing money from thin air.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gross-profit
Alphabet gross profit for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $42.688B, a 7.85% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet gross profit for the twelve months ending June 30, 2023 was $160.503B, a 1.7% increase year-over-year.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2022 was $156.633B, a 6.77% increase from 2021.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2021 was $146.698B, a 50.01% increase from 2020.
Alphabet annual gross profit for 2020 was $97.795B, a 8.71% increase from 2019.
“Guys they don’t have any money, they just gotta be privacy vampires and spam us with ads, they have no other means of funding it!”
Maybe stop being a bootlicker for a company that used to be “Don’t be evil.”
Yeah! There needs to be a model that does neither cost nor inconveniences me. Everything else is unacceptable and corporate BS!
I think about this Jaron Lanier talk a lot.
Make it possible to get Premium without YT music bolted on it.
Believe it or not Google: Some users don’t want it or already have a platform.
I’ve been around since YT red, and while Google Play Music was a better app, I am OK with YT music and primarily watch YT over the other sites and yt music is all I listen to in the house or car. So, while not cheap $22/mo for premium family fits my needs.
I’d be OK if yt allowed me to skip/blocked sponsored ads too. At least on PC sponsor block works well. For my TV its a few more hoops to get that there, which I haven’t done. Not terrible to ffw across them
I’m not paying them a penny either way, but if you’re going to, wouldn’t you want more features for your money, even if you don’t use them? Or are you suggesting they charge less for a subscription sans music?
Yeah. Nah.
I shouldn’t have to watch any ads on an already-profitable product. Accepting less is just me lowering my standards so people richer than me can be even richer.
It’s more than that. Would you devote 1-5% of your PC resources to others while you watch a video, if you could watch a video without ads? Yes. I bet so.
We are able to easily shoulder the burdens of hosting, yet Google wants to dominate us and force us to use their hosting at the psychological cost of being their sponge for anyone’s paid information campaign. YouTube in 2016 was non-stop Trump ads. Non fucking stop.
FUCK Google.
No no we are not. How are we going to distribute all the videos. I don’t think you realize how much storage youtube takes up. Could we have something yes would it be as big and vast as youtube not even close. I mean we can’t even distribute a handful of reddits traffic without failing.
Huh that doesn’t make anysense? Youtube is profitable because of ads. It’s not like it has a secrete revenue source and the ads are just gravy on top.
Huh that doesn’t make anysense?
I mean, if you use your brain it makes perfect sense.
I don’t watch ads. Youtube is profitable. I shouldn’t have to watch ads on an already-profitable product.
Accepting less is just me lowering my standards so people richer than me can be even richer.
Might wanna brush up on that reading comprehension, lol.
They’re going to randomize all vars and function names, mark my words.
Yup. Ad blockers work on pattern matching rules. Countering them might take some work but it’s not impossible - make the URLs that do the bad shit indistinguishable from the ones that make the video works and likewise html elements. Randomise everything, make the paths to things unpredictable. I’m sure YouTube could even merge the ads into the content stream so they are unavoidable.
“I’m sure YouTube could even merge the ads into the content stream so they are unavoidable.”
Who is going to tell him?
Last part is already done. Ads are delivered by the same DNS as the video, which is why DNS-based blocking methods like Pihole don’t work for YouTube video ads.
If you meant that Google will re-encode every video on their platform and insert ads like the sponsor segments, that’s not feasible. Ads ads served on a bidding basis and the advertiser who pays most, gets their ad delivered. That would be Impossible unless you keep multiple copies of the video with different ad segments.
You don’t need to re-encode the video. Look up HLS segments, which is the standard for streaming video and I assume YouTube uses it.
Each video is split into many segments, like 10 seconds long (though the duration doesn’t matter). The browser first fetches a “playlist” which is just a list of these segments. Then the video player plays each segment in order. So Google could just insert ad-segments into the video stream, and if they did it cleverly, there would be no way to determine that they were ads.
At the end there will always be some way since to the user the text should be similar or the UI should be similar… So there will be always a way… But yeah it can get more complex.
The only exception is the case they implement the web integrity thing at browser level or equivalent.
