gian @ gian @lemmy.grys.it

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2 yr. ago

The moment they decide to put even a small amount of effort towards shutting down ReVanced or the others, they’re as good as dead.

Possible. Now what it is missing is the part that should convince the ReVanced user to accept the new situation (they must bear the Ads) instead of stopping to use the service. Remember, Google if fighting against people that are already taking active actions against them, not the Average Joe user.

And in all this, Google cannot risk to put too many hops in the path of the Average Joe users as there is the risk that the common user consider that, all in all, the service no more worth the headache to use it.

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.

Only thing is the 5000$ are what you are hoping to get, not what you have. If you sell the cow to another farmer you will get less then 1000 $ (or maybe a little more), only a fool would pay you 5000$. Obviously I know there are some exceptions, but this is the normal situation.

YouTube would exist almost as a hobbyist site that has issues scaling its users and monetizing its activity.

This is because YouTube is something that people can do without. But there is no technical reasons why a paid service should have scaling issues. In the real world there are a lot of paid service that scale pretty well without any issue.

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?

If people would find the service worth enough then people would pay the service. The boom of Netflix is an example: as long as people find it worth the price, they happily pay it. Once the service is not worth anymore (or not seen as worth), people stopped paying.

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.

If a competitor had come out with a better service that was worth it, people would have paid it. Again, Netflix is an example. Only difference is Netflix also had to pay for distribution licenses and to produce shows, which add up other problems. Another example is Patreon: people pay to access things that they value worth the price.

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?

Well, looking to how all the big stock exanges scaldals ends, I would say that there is nothing that make me thing that this is false.

You are more optimistic than I am, and I hope you are right. I am mildly encouraged by some of the backlash we’re seeing in the news against tech bros.

Nah, maybe I am just older and already seen this happening, and not only in tech.

The problem Google has is that they are on the edge: they need to fight adblockers but they cannot hurt too much the average user while the adblock users already shown that they accept to "go to war". And I don't think that Google has more resources than "us".

There is only so much ops a normal user accept to be able to use a service, they cannot take it too far to become an inconvenient to the average users. This way they simply will lose even the normal user.

A good parallel I do looking at myself is with Amazon, my orders hystory shows that when I started to use it I made much more orders, then in time Amazon got worse: cheap chinese clones, amazon ripoffs, query that shows irrelevant products, more and more difficulties to find the right product even if queried with the correct full name, so I simply switched to other online shops when I need to buy a certain brand product and not a cheap ripoff. So Amazon lost about 80% of my orders.

Same for Youtube: if while fighting against the adblockers they make the service worse even for the "average Joe" they will lose users and relevance.

Stock prices are one element of what makes business possible.

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)

Stocks are only a loan that a invenstor make to the company with the understanding that the company will repay it with a earning for the investor, nothing else. (well, it is not that simple but you get the point). Which is the reason a company always need to grow, because I buy your stocks today at 100 and I expect to sell them tomorrow at 101. Someone else buy your stocks tomorrow at 101 and expect to sell them next week at 103. That is indipendent from the fact that you have covered your operating costs in this week.

Youtube would not even exist without this mechanic.

Youtube could exist even without this mechanic. True, it would not be as big as now or had the supposed value it has now.

It’s a core facet of running a business.

It is the easy way to run a businness. A loan without the need to repay it.

This is part of “keeping the lights on”.

The only element that "keep the light on" is that you have less cost than profit.

The assumpion Google is doing is that people install AdBlockes because they want something free. They seems not to be able to understand that they simply gone too far.

Google had the problem that they must show a ever growing revenue and since they cannot add more eyeball (or data to harvest) they simply need to try to get more from what they had. So as you say, the problem is not the single Ad, or the data harvest or any other single thing they do.
The problem is the sum of all of the things they do. They show multiple Ads, harvest your data, make you pay and still harvest your data and show the Ads.

People simply started to think "since Google want to screw me, then why I should not try to screw them ?"

Use Piped I hear you cry. Great idea. But how long is that going to last? I am certain that youtube and their parent company are feverishly pushing their engineers to find ways through, around, over and under any tool that stops them making money.

It will became the usual armed race, until Google would make their services so disfunctional to even the common user that people will simply stop using them since the value they get from the service is not worth the trouble.

That assuming that in some places (the EU for example) Google would not be hit by some law that force them to stop what they are doing and force them to play by the rules everyone else need to follow.

All they have to do is ban a few people from all of Alphabet to set the example, and then 99% of folks will either subscribe or disable their ad blockers.

It can be like you said or, on the other hand, be the trigger to even more people to seek for alternatives.

Because getting banned from all of their services would really, really suck for most people who depend on them.

While true, fighting with your own clients/source of income is not a very brilliant strategy for a company. People that depend on them for serious reasons can simply decide that the risk is becoming too high and simply seek other solutions. All the SCO saga should have taught something...

Unfortunately, big picture is, they will come out on top. Because of the “embrace, extend, and extinguish” model that they are veterans at. IOW, they know how to royally screw people.

Maybe Google can win this battle, but I am not sure about the war. If the data that show that about 42% of the internet users had an AdBlocker installed are true, it remain to be seen how many of them will accept the condition Google set.

At this point is clear that the use of AdBlockers is hurting them in a way or another and while user may find an alternative solution for Google services, Google cannot find an alternative users for its services. In the end Google lose even if they only show a slower grow then predicted.

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.

And who said it is wrong ? I only said that they want to make more money, not that they cannot make money.

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.

Not interested, I leave it to you ;-)

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.

The reason is that this way they would make less money while keeping the service in the black, people would realize that, after all, Youtube is not that important part of their routine, and the total number of users would be lower (by a long shot probably) so even less data to harvest and sell and less return in Ads. After all who would watch 2 minutes of ads in a 2.30 minutes long video ?

Imagine Google doing it and then saying "we restructured out offer and this yeas we are 30% below the last year analysts' forecasts and we think that we will cut the earning by half while keeping the operational costs below the X % of the total profit". The next day the shares would be trash and all the management would be fired.
The reality is that once you are quoted in Wall Street (but it is true in every other place) you always need to grow. The problem is that you need to grow faster than your userbase could grow so no way to add X million new users (eyeball to watch your ads) every year: at some point you would run out of people (or of people who would accept, which is the same)

So the only thing you can do is monetize some more of what you already have. The only reason Youtube want to get rid of the Adblockers is that this way they can say to the advertisers "we increased the number of viewers of X % so you should pay us Y % more" so they can reach what the Wall Street analysts's forecasts were and the stock price increase. Nothing else, no server or bandwidth problems. Only stock prices.

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.

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. 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.

Jim, what are you doing

I am asking a question

Not really. Even in EU the cars are getting bigger even if not as fast as in the US.
Some year ago the small city cars were smaller than the today version.

If I was Microsoft, I’d wanna know too.

It is fine to want to know... it is just a question of how do you ask

You can’t blame them for wanting to know.

I think that the problem here is that Edge inject the poll in a web page, served from a site that is not from Microsoft, not that they asked it.

I would maybe understand that they asked when installing Chrome, or if was from a page from Microsoft. What's next ? Ask because I use bank A instead of bank B ?

It it not unethical what they are doing but how they are doing it. Not to mention against the law.

Fine. But it need to fight by the rules.

It is not up to discussion: Youtube want to serve video to EU user ? They need to follow EU rules. If the rule says that adblocker detection technologies (or attempt) are illegal Youtube has no really a say in it.

I honestly don’t really care if people adblock or not but I think people need to acknowledge that adblock is essentially piracy.

The same way it is piracy to go to the bathroom during the commercials...

Look, the problem at hand is not if people use adblocker or not, the problem here is how Google check if you are using adblocker or not, which seems to be illegal.

Well, the full "check for adblocker" things seems to be illegal in EU, whatever way it is used, given a sentence from 2016

So because they earn money somewhere else they should do something else for free?

Obviously not, but there is nothing to stop Google from making Youtube a paid service and drop that charade about adblockers.

How is it immoral? Is Google morally obligated to provide you with a way to use their service for free? Google wants YouTube to start making money, and I’d guess the alternative is no more YouTube.

Nope, but it is legally required to ask for permission to look into my device for data that it does not need to provide the serice.

Of course Google could make money, it just need to make them without violating the laws.

Whose to say they won’t try to sneak some clause in their TOS that says if you use an ad blocker, they will charge you for Premium

Meanwhile in EU: "Doom music intensifies..."

I like the EUs tech laws but I don’t think they should rule that a computer can’t push ads (assuming the ads are not malicious)

EU techs law don't ban to push ads, they say that you cannot look into my device to check it I (could) see them without asking for my permission for something that you don't need to provide a service.