I am pretty dismayed to be this right. I didn't think YT would be nearly this aggressive in service of the ideas I outlined.
Basically, they take a cut off that activity. In some cases they could take most of or all the money, which is a clear win for them, but even when they pay out they're earning revenue on the transaction. It's been their core business model, so the problems with advocating an adfree behavior become obvious.
I would add that this becomes more urgent if they're in crisis. Makes me wish I could get the master copies I'd uploaded back, but there's no chance of that.
Bottom line: shots fired. You must work with YouTube the way they want you to work with YouTube, or you'll get punished.
Eventually this is going to get them in trouble with the Sherman Antitrust Act.
From Wikipedia:
> "Innocent monopoly", or monopoly achieved solely by merit, is perfectly legal, but acts by a monopolist to artificially preserve that status, or nefarious dealings to create a monopoly, are not. The purpose of the Sherman Act is not to protect competitors from harm from legitimately successful businesses, nor to prevent businesses from gaining honest profits from consumers, but rather to preserve a competitive marketplace to protect consumers from abuses.
It's pretty clear that Google used their dominant position(s) in web search and web advertising to then dominate the user-generated video space. And now they're engaging in the type of abuse of customers that the Sherman Antitrust Act was designed to mitigate.
> It's pretty clear that Google used their dominant position(s) in web search and web advertising to then dominate the user-generated video space.
That's not particularly clear to me. YouTube was already pretty huge when Google bought them in 2006: according to Wikipedia, the fifth most popular website, albeit of a far smaller Web. Google, meanwhile, had their own video-uploading service, Google Video, which launched three months before YouTube but was not nearly as successful. Sure, there's no doubt that YouTube has benefitted massively from Google's resources in the decade since, including their willingness to let it run without a profit. But based on that history, it seems far from inevitable that Google would be the one to dominate video.
It also doesn't seem like YouTube's growth is all that directly linked to Google Search's monopoly status, other than in that the latter powered Google's profits (but there are plenty of sources of money in the world). Google Search's video results have always shown videos from all websites rather than being YouTube-specific; who knows what they might have done if there had been more serious competition, but there wasn't, so they don't have that particular blood on their hands. You could argue that Google used its Search leverage to promote Web videos in general, as opposed to some other form of media, but I don't know what other form would be or why it would be preferable to video. (Perhaps live video? There might be another universe in which justin.tv was successful early on, rather than waiting most of a decade for the unexpected explosion of Twitch. But I think that given the state of Internet connections at the time, it made more sense for YouTube to happen first.)
The internet today vs 12 years ago seems heavily biased towards video content. Different landscape, where Facebook and Google/YouTube now account for a majority of all internet traffic. If YouTube manipulates people, they’ll lose support and maybe risk a lawsuit. I’m not very familiar with the specifics here, but YouTube is the dominant video platform. If Facebook cleaned up their design and embraced an open web with public links, they could probably destroy YouTube.
I fail to see how this behavior helps artificially preserve their status as a monopoly or constitutes a nefarious dealing to create a monopoly, and the fact that Blender is using this opportunity to switch to another provider is not going to reinforce your point about YouTube being a monopoly.
No you're right, this particular behavior doesn't help to preserve their monopoly. It's evidence that they already have one.
Companies who have to survive in a competitive marketplace don't typically go around driving away customers en masse. This is like something from 1990's Microsoft.
Having a monopoly isn't illegal. Using monopoly powers in certain ways is, and this isn't one of those ways.
And yes, companies who have to survive in a competitive marketplace drive away non-paying customers all the time. Because they're not paying, and so the slight chance of turning them into paying customers, or benefiting existing paying customers, is worth the loss.
Well, strictly speaking, this is a legitimate dictionary definition that doesn't involve money:
> a person of a specified kind with whom one has to deal
[edit] Youtube has 3 kinds of customers (or users, if you wish): publishers, viewers and advertisers. It makes sense to separate them like that, but not based on a "pays/ does not pay" criterion. If PewDiePie is a customer, then most definitely Blender Foundation is a customer too.
If money is the criterion of being a customer then they are one by driving traffic to other monetized videos, via recommended feed, or via follow up searches, that would otherwise not happen.
Anyone having a YT channel will tell that ‘suggested video’ is a dominant traffic source so it’s not an edge case.
In sum, YT was already making money thanks to Blender videos.
Don't forget that Google owns the backbone that Youtube videos transit on for free. By leasing that dark fiber, they get peering agreements that effectively makes their ability to send bytes to the internet free. No one else has that ability.
Yes they do; you could buy it yourself if you wanted to. Nobody else having the scale or cash & willingness to do so is not the same thing as being unable to.
Sure, its clear to you and I. But we on HN aren't whom you have to convince.
Do you believe the US DOJ or more powerful states would go after Alphabet/google? That's the ones that count. I just can't see our current administration going that avenue.
Yeah I don't know. With this administration, anything is possible. There's lots of bad blood between silicon valley progressives and the Trump admin, too.
Silicon Valley progressives? Are you talking about RMS or something?
Are (American) liberals automatically progressive even if they collude to lower salaries, pay less taxes, and contribute to housing bubbles? Not to mention selling to the DoD and ICE.
No that will absolutely never happen, ever. Sorry to burst your bubble. It isn't even in the realm of possibility, spotting Bigfoot riding the lochness monster is more realistic.
Honestly no. It's incredibly obvious. There is no need for a detailed explanation of why Google will never face a 1930's antitrust lawsuit. It's simply not in the realm of reality. It was barely possible in the 90s.
I'm surprised why anyone is surprised by this or thinks it should be any other way. Google is running YouTube as a business and they're running it the way they believe will be the most profitable.
For some reason, people are still hanging onto a belief that Google cares about its users in ways other than to profit from them.
Of course, it could well be that people aren't surprised and are just highlighting the Google's behaviour towards certain channels.
It's not particularly surprising given how shitty youtube's behaviour has been towards its content creators lately. It's just a reminder that nobody should accept it.
Kind of like sometimes a president's behaviour isn't surprising, but still deserves to be highlighted and nobody should accept it.
A fair comment. The only way people can refuse to accept their behaviour is by not giving YouTube their business (by either visiting the site or submitting content) and who's going to do that? It's YouTube :-/ It's their way or the highway (or Vimeo)
I watched your video and you made some great points.
As an aside, I have to wonder if you've thought through your desire to serve your website over HTTP instead of over HTTPS.
You noted that you use ad blocking software because ad networks are a common route by which malware propagates. HTTP websites comprise another salient target for malware. If I am at a coffee shop with a compromised wifi router and I load your HTTP website, that compromised router can inject malware into your page and my browser will run it, just like it would have run malware served by an ad server. If your website were served over HTTPS, the router wouldn't have been able to do that.
I imagine you knew all of that, and you're right that HTTPS does have some problems, but trying to avoid those problems by opting for HTTP is exchanging those problems for (imho) much bigger problems.
It's simpler than that. I'm hosting websites on Hostgator, my income is that Patreon I mention in the video, and though I have a little knowledge on webmastering it's not much compared to what I make content for. I don't know how, and I'm seeing high prices for getting HTTPSed up, though I have a mental note that using Cloudflare might be a way to do it. That said, a service like that seems like it would cost a bunch of money too. I think I can't afford to use HTTPS, and I think this may be a feature not a bug to some people out there controlling things.
I could well be wrong. I'm hoping for the reasons you mention that some benevolent hacker people work out how to bring this to people for free and make it simple to do.
Well, they picked the wrong org to gamble on strongarming in the case of Blender. Instead of getting them to monetize they've just compelled Blender to move platforms.
Blender serves as an optimal test case for other large non-profits with online video content that Google may push off YouTube (would love to see PyCon move their archives off as well).
Discovery and subscriptions will need to be solved, but that’s not insurmountable (ie RSS). CDNs can be plug and play in front of nginx (if P2P torrent isn't your cup of tea), backend storage can be whatever is cheapest.
If only things were so simple.
This reminds me how not too long ago, how everyone was trying to make a clone of HN and Reddit within 24 hours in x programming language.
It's one thing make a service for few 100 users, it's a different beast to serve millions of users. In case of Online Videos, it is not only extremely difficult, it still remains very expensive. There is literally a handful of companies who can financially and technically pull it off at youtube-scale. After more than 10 years, youtube either makes very little profit or still not profitable.
I don't disagree. Consider that perhaps you can't serve videos online and expect it to be entirely free. Can you run your compute for free? No. Can you host your database for free? No. Why would serving videos be any different? (Let's ignore limited free tiers for this argument).
The more popular the content, the cheaper per unit it'll be to serve (based on bandwidth/transit costs and how they scale, and that you most likely can serve it out of RAM with Varnish, a very inexpensive CDN, or peer to peer), but there will still be a cost, and either the producer or the consumers of that content will need to pay for it.
Pure p2p networks scale by O(log n). This means if the popularity of your video scales with n then your infrastructure just scales with log(n). The idea is that leechers become seeders. So with every new layer of distribution the coverage increases exponentially.
Pure p2p networks can’t ensure a base level of quality service; you’ll always need your own infra to fall back on (which is as simple as a few dedicated servers or a CDN), but I agree p2p peers can offload some costs.
Youtube is anything but centralized, they literally pioneered distributed video content with their GGC nodes, with at least 10s of thousands of nodes all over the world. They may not be the first, but almost definitely the largest.
I don't understand why you are mentioning peer to peer technology? What does that have to do with anything? Youtube is not a cute side project where your viewing experience depending on how many peers your video has. Peertube depends on webtorrent, you literally have to host and seed every single video on your platform and duplicate it multiple times by others. Good luck doing it over petabyte scale. Google does something similar, but popular videos are hosted at users-end point on GGC nodes, distributed over 10,000s of servers all over the world.
> I don't understand why you are mentioning peer to peer technology? What does that have to do with anything?
The super-seeding / swarming approach developed for the BitTorrent protocol is quite interesting. One original seeder just needs to upload to a few leechers. Then this leechers become seeders themselfs and start to upload to a next layer of leechers and so on. This approach scales exponentially meaning you can cover the whole internet in just a few steps. Further more you can start uploading yourself even before you have completed receiving the file.
E.g. if every node just has 10 uploading connections then you just need 8 steps to cover 100 million = 10^8 peers. Remember the traffic on the original seeder (and every other node) is just 10 uploading connections.
I really want a competitor to YouTube. But when it works, the experience as a user is Really Good (tm).
1. YouTube Red so I don't have to see ads
2. Queuing and casting from my phone to my TV.
3. Fast loading and buffer-free streaming (as long as your bandwidth is good enough). Note I'm in Australia - Mixer and Twitch often aren't smooth for me even though I'm on 100 megabit fibre. Sydney or Melbourne PoPs will beat Hong Kong and Singapore every time.
I watch Pycon and LCA videos on YouTube because it's easier than going anywhere else.
What will stop Google to buy the next big video platform, US and EU did not stop them buy YT or FB to buy Whats App, if a competitor would show up the only way it could survive would be to be bought by MS,FB or other large company, this could lead to bad products or bad customer/user relations since this big companies are not known for their good customer support or caring for the users experience.
Nothing. They gain by use of a chilling effect: most of the seemingly negative actions and expectations they're known for, tend to rebound in favor of their core business.
It's all meant to be Logan and Jake Paul and PewDiePie and whatever will drive low-quality mass views so long as the viewer quality isn't so low that they're losing advertisers. At a scale like this, it's just pure statistics.
This is not damage. This is benefit, in terms of getting other content creators in line. The message is clear.
While there are certainly benefits, I can't agree that YouTube loses nothing here. PeerTube is a potential competitor in an ecosystem that's currently functionally monopolistic, and even in a vacuum, having a nontrivial community move to that platform will immediately increase awareness and provide legitimacy.
Perhaps more importantly, the FOSS and tech communities are not a vacuum. Google and YouTube in particular have been getting increasing amounts of negative press recently, and this strongarming of Blender further drives home how far they have gone from the era of "Don't be evil." Additionally, the precedent of changing platforms rather than giving in to Google's pressure has now been set; While there will be no mass exodus, it is easier for entities to follow in Blender's footsteps than it would have been to set the lead, and we may hope that this move turns out well in order to further encourage others with similar inclinations.
I will be watching carefully for another group to make this switch, because the most important person in forming a crowd isn't the leader, it's the first follower.
Funnily enough, PewDiePie is no longer on YouTube's good-side, and virtually all of his newly uploaded videos get demonetized by YouTube. He's no longer "advertiser-friendly"
No. It's much like the music business: they need new PewDiePies, though it's cumbersome to create them. Once you're PewDiePie for a while, you have more resources and access to lawyers and managers, and you come around looking for a better deal.
From YouTube's point of view, that's bad, so they need a replacement. It's quantity of views they need, they don't actually have a stake in the success of any one creator.
Is it possibly because you're a nerd, and the internet is no longer for nerds? It's now a platform for mass consumerism, and what interests the masses, and is thus good for advertisers probably shares little overlap with your interests?
It is likely that PewDiePie has a negative enough image that YouTube believes that associating a given brand with his content will not generate ROI for the advertisers. By demonetizing these videos 1) the advertisers win because their ads are shown more frequently in "profitable" spots, 2) YouTube wins because they build trust with their advertisers, and 3) YouTube wins again because they don't have to pay out to the content creator for valueless ad spots.
That is potentially the real story here, IMO. Ton has a track record of doing amazing things with impossibly small amounts of money. Given that his interests are in (video) content production, I'm not sure YouTube really thought through how this could play out...
They lose high quality content and have indirectly caused the promotion of a competitor. Also exposes their inability to answer basic questions, giving rise to questions from creators about their value and longevity on the Youtube platform.
It seems like Google is pretty conscious of their own PR, presumably actions like this alert Youtube employees that everything they do isn't in the best interest of humanity.
I agree with the first sentence but not the second.
I think a lot of employees are just not taking a step back to look at the sum of the parts they are helping to build, or maybe they have optimism/trust in their leaders to not fuck everyone over, and others might just draw their line further down the sand (e.g. no Pentagon contracts).
I imagine a brave few are also working to change it for the better from within. I'd definitely choose to work at Apple instead though, Google seems fundamentally creepy these days.
You made a video about YouTube criticism and host it on YouTube? Either that's being optimistic about them, or the dominance is so large that it outweighs everything else...
...wouldn't that be a logical place to post your YouTube criticism? Do you think Martin Luther weakened his message by nailing his criticism of the church to the door of a church? Do you think picket lines are misguided for surrounding their targets when they could picket unrelated areas farther away?
It has become a pretty common complaint lately that people should only have their protests in places where the only people that will see them are the people that already agree with them.
Does this still have any relation to my post earlier in the tread, or is this some different topic you're talking about? Because it sounds as if you're saying that I'm arguing everyone should stop criticising YouTube.
Nailing your complaints about X to the door of X, does not support X. Uploading it to YouTube makes the network effect bigger because anyone who wants to hear what you want to say will have to go to the site. It works more like vouchers, where you get a discount (technically worse for the store because they get less money) but because you'll have to go to the store to redeem it, and you'll probably buy more, it's worth it.
Here's an idea: if you want to drive home the point that you don't do it for the ad money, and if you want to force yourself not to depend on that money, you could give it all to FOSS foundations.
You could publish your YouTube check every month, as small as it may be, on your blog or website, alongside an equivalent donation to, say, the FSF, Mozilla, Wikimedia, Archive.org, Blender, EFF, or whatever foundation you like.
If you publicize it on YouTube and here, you may even start a movement of sorts.
> So this seems to have happened because Youtube wants The Blender Foundation to agree to have their videos monetized.
But that doesn't seem to make sense. There are lots of popular channels that don't have advertising and Blender's videos are popular but not that popular.
I haven't looked at the contract they posted, but they seem to have the same interpretation as you. Maybe it's just an updated contract that includes new rules if you monetize?
(that aside, the communication chain from google posted there is just atrocious. I wouldn't sign a 6 page contract based on those robo-emails either)
> There are lots of popular channels that don't have advertising and Blender's videos are popular but not that popular.
It makes sense if it's staged rollout. I'm assuming all unmonetized good actors (ie not stealing other people's content) will see this ultimatum eventually.
The contract looks like a regular monetization contract, so the cause-effect relationship between blocking and monetization is not made clear.
Why would Google single out Blender for this? Unless they had copyright concerns and needed to revshare with copyright holders, or they want to go "freemium" and make all high-view/quality videos monetized.
It's pretty irritating. I'm a Red subscriber, so whatever bullshit Google has going on with their advertising monetization policy doesn't -- or, rather, shouldn't -- affect me. Yet the MIT OCW videos are blocked from my account the same as they are for everyone else.
Get your act together, Google. This is just stupid.
Did you see this after already taking the 3 months before? I subscribe to Red (now premium, grandfathered price) and they seem to give this popup to every user.
I'm not clear if they want that because of bogus copyright claims, EU legislation etc, or just because they favour making money over not making money?
Edit: Either way looking for alternatives seems like a good idea.