Some poorly organised thoughts on YouTube re - adblock and monetisation
These aren't so much a coherent argument or conclusion in themselves, but a bunch of axioms that inform my thinking about it.
- We all know video streaming is prohibitively expensive, in a way that scales fairly linearly with bitrate and usage. Storing video is generally expensive, but distributing it is moreso because you have to pay every single time it's viewed.
- bitrate scales very unfavourably with resolution, and successful youtubers have an unhealthy obsession with pushing higher resolutions because (heavy opinion) "video """quality""" " is an easy metric to improve without relying on algorithms to push videos.
- YouTube should never have offered hosting video greater than 1080p for free - they started allowing 4k video in 2010, when their annual revenue was <$1B. They were already the de facto video hosting site.
- An extension of the above - YouTube already has to transcode 4K to its lower resolutions as it stands, this could have easily been integrated into their uploader - "Your video is too high resolution for a free account - we'll still host it at 1080p but if you upgrade you can keep the original quality!" Easy upsell.
- Hell, they could have even offered to trade 4K hosting for a 100% ad-revenue share. We'll host it, but you essentially give up the commercial control of it - if it goes massively viral you lose out, which would probably be enough to stop people posting 4K video where it isn't needed.
- The key point is that they didn't need to do much here, and this is a cost to the user directly associated to the cost to the provider. It's normal commerce.
- YouTube's approach to monetisation has never been to link the user cost to the platform cost. YouTube Premium offers nothing that makes the service more expensive to provide, just basic quality of life things on mobile that other services were able to provide for free before Google sued them.
- Arguably, being able to download videos for offline viewing makes things cheaper for YouTube compared to streaming a video in multiple sessions and potentially duplicating work, and they have people paying for the privilege of reducing a megacorporation's overheads.
- YouTube doesn't need to be directly profitable to be worthwhile to Google, for the same kind of reasons that public transit doesn't need to be profitable - their usage benefits the ecosystem as a whole.
- To that point, if YouTube suddenly made $0 revenue, would google shut it down? I'm not entirely convinced they would, because it's worth too much to them as a brand.