coffeewithalex
If you think so, you should explain where exactly the 1.624 trillions $ value of Google is, given that its net assets are about 267 billions $ and they had about 118 billions $ in cash (or cash equivalent)
You can sell a cow for $1000 on the meat market. Or you can keep that cow, so that it produces milk for many years and earns you a total of $5000. This is the difference between net asset value and valuation. If you were to buy a cow, and producing a cow was next to impossible (cows are one of a kind, like unicorns), then the price of the cow would be closer to the valuation than its net asset value. And once you have that cow, as a responsible farmer you will milk it to the last drop, to get the most out of your money.
Now I’m sorry for the cow, but a business isn’t a living creature so exploiting it is ok.
The company isn’t necessarily expected to grow. Companies are expected to be milked. Sometimes companies don’t grow and that’s ok, they’re still being milked. The only requirement is that the owners of the cow, at any age of the cow, will believe that there’s milk in there somewhere some day.
It’s not a loan, it’s actual ownership. And the expectation is that people get something out of it.
YouTube would exist almost as a hobbyist site that has issues scaling its users and monetizing its activity. At some point it would have failed because people would find it frustrating to face the lags, and the owners (who by the way are still owners, who still invested in it, so actually very little changes in this mechanic) would introduce subscription fees or something in order to use the platform. Would it have become a ubiquitous platform as it exists today? Would you have it on your tablet, tv, phone? Probably not, but any of its competitors would have gone on a very similar journey and you’d be complaining about a different company, because you need investments in order to grow, become better, more attractive, and become both the way that people choose to upload content, and the way that people choose to consume content. And it would have been YouTube who couldn’t have afforded to keep the lights on at this moment.
A loan without the need to repay it.
I’m sorry, but that statement is as false as “developers get paid to much simply to press buttons. Anyone can do that”.
At the heart of this statement sits a conviction that you understand the topic, while you are missing some fundamental facts about it.
Why don’t you play a few thought experiments? Put yourself in other people’s shoes. If you were someone who had money, why would you put it in a loan that doesn’t have a need to be repaid? If you’re suggesting that the entire stock market rests on the “greater fool” principle, then maybe you don’t know about the end goal? Did you consider the “return on investment”? This literally is the very thing that powers the farmer who buys a baby cow, and what makes trillion dollar companies. Literally, the same instruments and calculations that financiers and CEOs of huge companies use day to day, my acquaintances who literally run their own pig farm, use every year - from options on feed, to futures on meat before even buying the piglets. The only thing they don’t do of this equation is stocks, since it’s a small farm and it’s owned fully by the family, and they don’t need to scale.
Stock prices are one element of what makes business possible. Youtube would not even exist without this mechanic.
It’s like complaining that people have sex.
It’s a core facet of running a business. It’s a requirement and an expectation. This is part of “keeping the lights on”.
We all know that Youtube need to get rid off of AdBlockers because they want to make more money than what they are making now.
Making money by charging for completely optional services is not only not wrong, but the very reason why we have most of the good stuff that we have.
If they just need to cover business costs they could just make the service subscription only, make the fee high enough to keep the site running and earn something and allow to see only the first 10-15% of each video to not subscribed users and forget all this charade about AdBlockers.
Awesome! Submit your resume or send it as a proposal. If they didn’t think of this first and discarded it because of reasons that you haven’t considered, this might be an opportunity to benefit everyone.
Umm, actually it did. The solution to a problem is to first acknowledge it. The problem is being an asshole that can’t let a day go by without rubbing something in.
The YouTube problem? For me it’s not a problem any more than anything else price-related. It’s interesting to see who is affected by the change and whether it impacts actual customers. What’s not interesting is seeing a long string of whinging and schadenfreude from people who strongly believe that it’s wrong to pay for services and who have not spent a cent on this. That’s ok, believe what you want, but don’t be an asshole about it.
So you’re openly hating on people for being normal, without offering a single alternative of a video platform that’s not all of those things that you labeled as evil.
There are alternatives, they’ve been posted many times over in this thread and similar ones.
The alternative to shopping isn’t shoplifting. The usual things that people list are client side apps that circumvent intended operation of the platform, reaping as many benefits without paying the cost. But hosting isn’t free. Running a business isn’t free. And hating the people who literally subsidize your unauthorized use of the platform is hypocrisy.
It’s not fair to pay money for services to a company involved in unrelated lawsuits? Does the antitrust investigation negate the expenses associated with running the operation of serving you content?
Are all competitors dead? You can switch to watching TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, for random user generated content. You can go to nebula if you want YouTube style documentaries. You can go to any movie platform if you want to watch random stuff. They are all either in the red, backed by VC, waiting to do the same thing, or serving aggressive ads, or selling your data, or costing money.
How much people are willing to pay is irrelevant in the context of fairness. Fairness is about a company breaking even. Customer readiness is however relevant to business, and in this case I’m afraid that the evidence is against you - after countless similar complaints in the past, people haven’t left the platform, and people have signed up to pay.
Paying for services is normal. It’s unrealistic not to. It’s unproductive to pretend otherwise.
Do you feel better after making fun of people who use other devices and not just a smartphone and browser? There are a hundred news that aren’t your problem and you don’t comment there, but you make sure to come in here and “rub it in” to people who care about this, by not providing an actual solution.
Very noble.