this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
691 points (97.5% liked)

Technology

59666 readers
2626 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Kyle_The_G@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Subsidise it with your other services

[–] Nilz@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Why would they? It's not like it's going to be bringing customers to their other services and Google isn't a charity.

[–] NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago

They’re not a charity, they’re a monopoly. So fuck them I don’t care how people circumvent their increasingly shitty service

[–] BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago

"Just don't worry about revenue at all" is the best kind of secret genius business strategy that I come to Lemmy for.

[–] PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

From a financial standpoint, that doesn’t make any sense though. Why would you continue to run a service that is a net drain on the rest of your business? Unless it can offer some meaningful, tangible benefit to the company, why continue to operate it at all? If a service needs to be subsidized to survive, why does it need to survive?

Google has basically used it to increase their tracking capabilities across the web. They know when you visit any site with an embedded YouTube video. But that’s only possible because they’re already a massive company. And it’s not reasonable to expect them to continue subsidizing it out of the goodness of their hearts. After all, if you’re willing to ask them to subsidize it, why aren’t you willing to help by paying for premium? It’s easy to say “just subsidize it” when it’s not your money.

To be clear, I don’t pay for premium and probably never will. But this thread has a lot of emotionally charged “because I want it” responses, which aren’t really grounded in reality. YouTube has operated at a loss for a decade, and only continued to operate because it had the backing of a tech giant. But if that tech giant wants to stop subsidizing the site and finally make the site profitable, that’s their prerogative. Yes, it’s the final step in the enshittification process. Yes, it means free users will have a worse experience. But ultimately, the company isn’t required to care about the free users.

If YouTube operates at a loss and they decide to ditch their service its their problem, not mine. I'm not here to save google