Was YouTube ever profitable?
I actually had trouble finding that out (although I only looked for like, 15 minutes). It’s apparently difficult to determine according to some tech websites. I do have this chart that says since 2017 YouTube ad revenue has been 7-11% of Google’s global revenue but I don’t know if that = profit. Decided to meme anyways because I have ads blocked on PC but still see them on my phone.
“I have ads blocked on PC but still see them on my phone.”
If you’re on Android, ReVanced. And if you’re on iOS, well get fucked or something, idk
In iOS you can use Yattee and link to an alternative Frontend. Works well for me.
Youtube has always claimed that it doesn’t turn a profit but I don’t believe them. My reasoning is that if the server costs are more than the revenue today, then they’re going to be worse tomorrow. A gorillian gigabytes of data are uploaded to that thing every nanosecond. A company can’t get exponentially less profitable every second and still survive. And what else is there to prop it up? Google ad results? No way is Youtube not profitable. They’re saying that to avoid tax.
Same with Google’s ads in general. For a long time they were whitelisted by default on just about every adblock list out there because they were so unobtrusive it didn’t make sense to bother blocking them, especially when you compared them to the other ads that were common at the time. They were also generally relevant ads, so people actually did click on them and use them since it actually related to the thing they were searching for.
They’re obviously more profitable now, but you have to wonder by how much and if they’d be a more trusted company today (and what’s that worth monetarily) if they hadn’t gone down this race to the bottom.
ETA: Part of what I mean is that now they create things like Stadia and most people didn’t even bother trying it because they knew it’d hit the Google Graveyard in a few years. Had Google been a more trusted company, people may have been willing to give it a try and they could possibly have printed money since by all accounts the service was actually pretty good.
Instead I’m putting great energy to get away from Google, along with a lot of other people
We are an insignificant amount. Most people likely don’t even know how to change the default search engine on their phones.
Sometimes few people raise much voices. Those who bother and search for new engine are early adapters of technology, spends money on new gadgets and such. Those are who ads are after, not my grandmother.
I tried Stadia. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I played Cyberpunk mainly and didn’t have 90% of the problems that other players had. It was very enjoyable.
I likely wouldn’t sign up for another similar service simply because now I have a library on my Steam Deck (purchased with the Stadia refund) and that’s how I’m used to playing at this point. But it sure was a nice service while it lasted. I thought they were selling it to someone but I guess it didn’t end up happening.
I, personally, don’t see that happening, but I can easily imagine them making it a TOS violation to use adblock and then killing your account if you continue to do so :-/
The thing is, “trust” is hard to put on a balance sheet, and is also hard to make a KPI (Key Performance Indicators are a google innovation to help execs and c-suites feel better about the fact that the don’t do much real work) around, since it’s not really quantifiable in a traditional sense.
As someone that has used ad blockers for just about as long as I have been able to, I would like to think that this is true. However, I’m not entirely sure that it is. I’ve heard that a surprising percentage of people just don’t even know that ad blockers exist. If that’s the case then they may be very well aware of what is happening. (Using made up numbers for the sake of argument since I don’t have real numbers) Like if only 5% of users use ad blockers and doubling the number of ads they show only brings that to 10% then it is certainly worth it financially. I doubt that if you were to graph that curve it would be linear - there is certainly a point where you inundate users with so many ads that even non-technical people will start learning about ad blockers. Regardless of what the real numbers are, I would be very surprised if they are making decisions this big without at least being aware of what those numbers might be. And if they can make a small amount of money indefinitely but they have evidence to suggest that they can make even more money also indefinitely then the financial motivation is obvious. Not all infinities are the same size.
That’s definitely a good point. I looked it up and found a few places saying it was about 38% of users using adblock on the internet in general: https://techjury.net/blog/ad-blocker-usage-stats/
Although apparently the most adblockers are in Indonesia with over 50%.
So that would suggest that if there is a tipping point where increasing ads backfires, we’re not actually that far away from it, and in some places it may have already happened.
Although the analysis that “if you add 10% to the price and lose 5% of customers then it’s worth it” is definitely true. This is why there’s a bottom to every market where for instance some people can’t afford even the basic necessities and become unhoused.
Adblock is a godsend.
Although I actually use Invidious for most videos these days. The only things Youtube has going for it are a decent autoplay function and a professional maintenance team. Invidious has things like ‘not aggressively selling my preferences to every algorithm under the fucking sun’ and ‘a functioning search bar’ and ‘not actively fighting against adblockers’
I don’t really see too many ads as I use Adblock, but on mobile they seem to creep in more and more ads every year.
